niceprophecies
Also, the lines are done for this!! I’ll be coloring the lines and doing some detailed cel shading to finish it up!
wheresonichedgehogwnt
The good thing about Residency City: It has Derpy Pony in it, and she is a creature of great wisdom and majesty
wheresonichedgehogwnt
My interns gave me this mug in honor of all of the colorful language I’ve taught them this year, including this word
I have peaked as a teacher, I am so proud of all of us
wheresonichedgehogwnt
Tomorrow is my first day of clinical work so I’m Anxiety Surgical Knot Practicing with junk string, because I’m out of suture!
Wish me luck!
wheresonichedgehogwnt
wheresonichedgehogwnt
Y’all, my life is ridiculous.
So I’m out in the apartment common area with my dog as he is doing his important evening dog business, and I turn to see a group of older kids and tweens surrounding something and making excited noises. One or two of the tweens are holding a stick, and I think, Oh, no, not again.
My apartment complex is home to what I suppose is an exceedingly good-natured but not terribly bright armadillo who appears to have developed a taste for the kibble our neighbors leave out for their cats (I say “I suppose” because I’ve only dealt with this armadillo and thus have an n of 1 when it comes to judging armadillo personalities, but I digress). There are a fair number of kids in our complex, and it’s a pretty safe place, so their parents let them wander in groups.
Predictably, every few months they encounter and surround this armadillo, who stands there while one of the older boys pokes it with a stick.
I kid you not. Pokes a live armadillo with a stick.
Needless to say, I think this is not a nice way to treat an armadillo, particularly if this armadillo has been polite enough to tolerate being poked with a stick without biting someone, so every few months, I go over and break it up.
“Y’all, is that the armadillo that lives around here?” I ask wearily as I walk over. “C’mon, let ‘em be, that’s a wild animal, and you shouldn’t bother wild animals.”
“Why?” one of the stick-wielding boys asks.
Being more than a bit of a tree-hugging hippie, I say, “Because they are part of our ecosystem and have lives of their own and deserve our respect.”
“Well, yeah, but why?” the boy retorts with a smirk.
I reply, “That should be reason enough all by itself, but wild animals can also carry diseases, so you should leave them alone.”
“Like what?” the kid demands.
Being a good med student, I blurt, “Like leprosy, that’s what! Armadillos carry it in their paws!”
“What’s leprosy?” one of the other kids asks.
I open my mouth to ask them why they don’t know what leprosy is, haven’t they read or watched….?
This is when I realize that the only time I can recall reading about leprosy was when I was studying for Step 2, possibly in Step Up to Medicine. As I am standing there with my dog, staring down a pack of tweens in the dusky late twilight of our common area, I am quite certain I knew about leprosy before my third year of med school, but all I can think about is leprosy lives in the paws of armadillos, it attacks places like fingers and noses first because it is temperature-sensitive and those areas are relatively cool (presumably this is why it lives in armadillos’ paws, aside from how armadillos seem to be able to carry it and not get sick from it in the first place), the treatment is rifampin and dapsone, and add something else (maybe it starts with a c?) if it’s a drug-resistant strain, and rifampin can turn sweat and tears reddish-orange and also cause liver toxicity so monitor a patient’s LFTs closely.
This is not useful to think about when trying to convince a tween boy to stop poking an armadillo with a stick.
“It’s when you become a leper!” I declare to buy myself some time, and luckily, one of the younger girls comes my rescue.
“Is that one of the people Jesus healed?” she gasps, “Where their fingers and stuff rot off?”
That sounded about right. “Yep, that!” I agree eagerly. “So leave the armadillo alone! You can’t get sick by being around them, but don’t touch them!”
The kids decide that if leprosy is what Jesus healed people of, they want no part in it. The tween boys throw their sticks into the bushes, the kids scatter away from me, and the armadillo, my dog, and I are left staring at each other.
“…Clofazamine,” I tell the armadillo. “Rifampin, dapsone, and clofazamine. Why did I remember that?”
The armadillo did not seem to know why.
Before I could ask the armadillo if leprosy was something Jesus cured, my dog started yodeling (he’s part Basenji and vocalizes like one), presumably to alert me to the presence of the armadillo.
“Yes, thank you, I see the nice armadillo, let’s leave him be,” I tell my dog, and get his attention to start backing away. The yodeling made the armadillo jump, and he turned around to wander good-naturedly off into the lavender remnants of the sunset.
I looked it up when we got inside, and evidently Simon the Leper was cured by Jesus according to the books of Matthew and Mark in the Bible.
Presumably Jesus did not have to monitor Simon’s LFTs afterward.
IT’S BACK
For reference, this happened a bit over 3 years ago.
A lot has changed, mostly that I’m now a board-certified osteopathic family physician doing an OB fellowship (so, y'know, I’ve completed an entire residency). Med school seems forever ago some days, separated from me by three long years of inpatient and outpatient clinical work and many hours on L&D alongside my fellow long-suffering coresidents, other days it feels like I graduated last week and residency was just a quick blur of sleep deprivation and awesome patients and imposter syndrome and learning and now I’m here in Fellowship, technically a faculty member, learning even more and having even more intense imposter syndrome.
It’s weird, but I’m going with it.
I am establishing myself as the local wildlife-protecting crazy lady in my new apartment complex - my dog and I warned some new neighbor kids off a squirrel the other day, and luckily they did not make me threaten them with an infectious disease before listening.
It still takes me a while to remember what you add to treat antibiotic-resistant TB, and despite doing part of my residency in a Catholic institution, I still can’t tell you who Jesus cured of leprosy off the top of my head.
Lots of things change, and some never do.
I hope my armadillo buddy is doing well, and that they’ve finally learned to avoid packs of stick-weilding hooligans.
wheresonichedgehogwnt
My second 24 hour shift included one of the most complicated deliveries I’ve ever done (srsly, it was like an ALSO-course nightmare scenario, but in real life) and also one of the least complicated deliveries I’ve ever done
The juxtaposition was a little unreal
I coped with the weirdness by repleting electrolytes
The surgeons on the labor deck politely did not beat me up or steal my lunch money for being a nerd, for which I am grateful, and now my nerdy soul is soothed by the fact that my patients’ electrolytes are repleated
There are worse ways to start a week than with repleated electrolytes
wheresonichedgehogwnt
dxmedstudent
looking “professional”
i grew up in a very liberal, hip area. my hometown is heavy on the tech industry; nobody bats an eye at young men walking into their 9-5 jobs wearing jeans and a graphic tee.
medicine is, from my impression, much more conservative. i got my hair cut short recently (as a woman) and while i would have loved to try shaving the side of my head, one of the reasons i didn’t was because i didn’t know if i’d be able to get by with it (especially moving to the midwest).
before i cut my hair, i dyed it purple. part of it was “before i cut my hair short,” part of it was “before i start med school.” my sister, the one time she dyed her hair, did it before she started vet school. my friend, who will be applying for health programs next year, has made the decision to cut the last of her dyed hair off before interviewing. i remember interviewing at a med school and specifically asking a student with purple hair if they planned on keeping it when they got to their clinical years. they answered that they would like to, but they would decide when they got there based on the reactions of the doctors they’d be working with (who would also be grading them). when i got into med schools, i started reading their student handbooks and specifically checking if they said anything about dyed hair.
i’m lucky that my school doesn’t say anything, though i’m not sure i want to dye my hair right now anyway. with short hair, everything grows out so quickly and it just seems too annoying. instead, i’ve decided that i want to pierce my ears. the plan is to get a double helix piercing on one ear with rings.
one thing i was definitely concerned about was what kind of impression that would give off. for me, it’s definitely a concern because i no longer have long hair that i can use to hide it in certain settings. i’m not too worried; it’s not that uncommon and i don’t plan on getting ostentatious pieces put in. but it is annoying that my school’s rule in their handbook is that you cannot have three or more piercings per ear. of course, it’s an entirely different matter if/how it is enforced, but it’s annoying that it’s a factor that i have to consider. i have plenty of friends with multiple piercings; i’ve never thought that it looked unprofessional as long as the jewelry pieces were small and tasteful. it just seems like such a small and silly thing to be controlling.
why are we so concerned with appearances? i hope that in the future, we are more relaxed about these things. my career should not affect my ability to express myself as an individual.
Medical schools are very conservative, even more so than non-academic hospitals from my experience. My undergrad health advising office used to give us a research study conducted about the suits worn to interviews. It turns out that pants suit vs skirt suit or the color of your shirt (pastel vs white) and whether or not men have facial hair matters. It’s ridiculous, but the field is notoriously behind the times. I have multiple earrings, classmates have tattoos, and we have some trendy haircuts, but no facial piercings, or extreme hair colors that I can think of among my classmates.
Hopefully you’ll be part of the new generation of doctors who helps usher in a new age. Get that piercing and be proud!
Medicine is notoriously behind the times, but times are changing. Going to a DO school and doing OMM lab with my classmates in gymwear meant I saw that a fair number of my classmates had tattoos, many of the women had multiple ear piercings, and a couple of my classmates had septum piercings that they’d flip around to be less visible. Most of these were easily concealed under white coats, but one of my coresidents almost had full-on sleeve tattoos that were visible in scrubs, and he never got any flack for it, nor was he told to cover up with a white coat.
I’m in Family Med, btw, not EM (EM docs seem to be able to get away with a more “alternative” look than most docs). I’m doing fellowship in a more conservative part of the country than I did my residency, but some of the senior residents have multiple ear piercings, and a couple of attendings have discreet nose piercings. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal.
IME, as a woman you will be scrutinized more closely than men, but I think as mellinials grow into attending-hood and start working as med school and residency faculty, a lot of this is going to change pretty quickly.
Yes, when we’re in the hospital or clinic wearing a white coat, we are Representing Our Profession And Must Be A Credit To Our Teachers And Peers. Probably some old white dudes on some board somewhere at your school think purple hair and ear piercings don’t do that, but they’ll retire soon, and we’ll get to start deciding what does and doesn’t reflect poorly on our profession.
Personally, I think having a peer with purple hair would do nothing but make me seem cooler by association, and I’m much more concerned with how my peer treats their patients and colleagues than what color their hair is.
Welcome to medicine, I’m excited you (and your short hair, and your ear piercings) are going to be practicing medicine and changing dress codes for years to come!
fishyfishyfishtimes
