Site upgrade and an interesting anecdote

Well, I’ve almost worked out all the upgrade bugs and just need to wait for the final version of PivotX 2.1 to be released.  The old RSS and Atom feeds are now working again and all I have left are a few template upgrades which shouldn’t take to much of my time.  

An interesting aside, I must be doing a good impersonation of an MD.  Yesterday, when I was leaving LeBonheur Children’s Hospital I was stopped by a mother walking with her child who asked, “May I ask you a question?”  Naturally, I replied, “Sure.”  I guess I need to start expecting what came next, especially when wearing my white coat out of the hospital when she asked, “What can make my feet feel numb and tingly?”

I was taken back by the question, especially because of the context.  We were on the sidewalk, I was a total stranger and she had just finished smoking a cigarette.  I stopped for a moment with many diagnoses swirling in my head and replied, “There are a lot of things that can cause that, you should talk to your doctor.”

This happened to me one other time, in my 2nd year, when I was walking down Madison Ave. after a SPED (more on that later).  A man stopped me and asked, “Is a temperature of 106 high?”  After a few quick questions I found out his son had been taken to the ED at St. Jude’s Hospital and he received a phone call telling him to come because of the high temperature.  I assured him it was high and made certain to emphasize he should get there as quick as possible because it sounded like he wanted to decide if he had time to make a stop on the way.

I often marvel at  how a white coat garners so much trust from complete strangers.  But that is a topic for another post . . . after I get everything done I need to today.

What a year

Well, it is official. Finished my first year in medical school. We are still considered M1s by the school until end of May but we started our new classes last Monday. I think this year is going to be much better in terms of interesting material. Everything we are learning now is clinically relevant making it much easier to study. The only problem is the quantity of material covered. We started four new classes for this block Pathology (9 hrs), Neurology (7 hrs), Pharmacology (6 hrs) and Microbiology (6 hrs) for a total of 28 credits. When we come back next fall we will add another class Pathophysiology (12 hrs) for a total of 40 credit hours. With all the book work, it is hard sometimes to remember why I came to medical school. It is hard to remember that there are stories of patients on the other end of every question, case and lecture. To not disconnect all the information from the thought that someone is affected by this or that disease. I guess the time will come for connecting and remembering why, right now the task is to learn it.