Still Standing

We just had our physical exam practical today - a 45-minute crucible created solely to determine whether or not anything we've learned thus far is theoretically useful, or actually useful. Remember the last 2? I didn't do so well on the first one, but I rocked the second one - and I think I did pretty well on this one. Nicole and I had put in hours and hours of practice over the past few days, making sure that we not only remembered everything we were supposed to test, but could do it correctly and in a logical sequence, all within that 45 minutes. Now, when I say "correctly", what I mean is not exactly as it's shown in Bates' Guide, but rather as the staff here have deemed correct. For instance, there were a few places where Bates said one thing, but the staff decided that they knew better. There was one tiny little nit-picky detail on which Nicole and I both lost points - instead of testing merely light touch over the trigeminal nerve sensory distribution (the nerve that picks up sensation from your face), we tested light touch and pinprick sensation. I sent an email to the faculty - some of the handouts we'd received said that this way was correct as well - but que sera' sera' I suppose.

We gave our SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, plan) note presentations on Tuesday - not a whole lot to report there. I went in an explained all about why our patient - this little girl Nicole and I interviewed - might have an inherited disorder in how her body breaks down and uses fats (probably hypertriglyceridemia), and how to treat her.

We finished our GI rotation - I don't think I posted anything during then. GI was fun, but I don't know if it's for me.

I thought this news story was incredibly cool - they can grow entire mice from mice skin cells! The ramifications are stunning. I think it says something very odd about me, that, upon reading that they'd successfully developed hundreds of third and fourth generation mice from one batch of skin cells - I immediately thought of a planet full of a million me's - all born from the patch of skin on my arm.