Many awesome things have happened this week.

1) I befriended a 3rd year med student on her Interventional Radiology (for simplicity’s sake, i’ll just refer to it as IR from now on… everyone else does) rotation. She’s been totally helping me around- where to get scrubs, how to put on the lead-lined suit, how to access CT/X-Ray/MRI images. Always, always befriend someone older and wiser than you. Mental note, to myself, for the future. You’d think, by the way, that scrubs would be easy to come by. They aren’t. Hospitals are actually hardcore about who gets access to scrubs, and when- apparently scrub theft is a big problem. Not surprising, since I’ve already stolen 4 pairs :-) . In my defense, I don’t want to have to change once I get to the hospital… it’s a lot easier to have several clean pairs at home that I can just drive to work in. Once they get dirty, into the hospital laundry bin they go!

2) I’ve seen a ton of IR procedures. They are incredibly cool.

This is as far as I got on this post… I found it in my saved drafts a month later.

I followed my doc (who shall further be referred to as O’Malley to protect everyone involved) around for the most part of today- saw his residents (affectionately referred to as “monkeys”) perform a kidney biopsy and attempt a liver biopsy, only to realize that the nodule was gone. Good news for the patient… he was worried he had cancer. They got to tell him it was just a cyst.

The good news? He let me go at 11:30, told me to take a long lunch and not to come back tomorrow until “at least 9″. He also said that me wearing a tie “made him nervous”, which means I get to dress down / wear scrubs all summer.

Sweet.

The bad news is, I felt completely awkward all day, got in a bunch of people’s ways, and don’t know enough to really understand what’s going on around there. It took me the entire morning to figure out that the “angio suite” is, in fact, the interventional radiology room, which is a subset of the entire department. It’s the small things that get you. That, and the fact that every single procedure is acronymmed. Is acronymmed a word? It is now.

TIPS: Transjugular Intrahepatic Portosystemic Shunt.
TACE: Trans-Arterial Chemoembolization.

‘course, I didn’t get the day totally off- I’ve got a textbook on CT imaging to read (with LOTS of pretty pictures, which is sweet), about 10 articles, and a nagging feeling that I really need to review my anatomy textbooks. It doesn’t help that all they see is path, which means everything is distorted from normal. At one point, O’Malley pulled up an MRI on a guy with a 6cm colon (affectionately referred to as the “big stinker”… quite the jokester, he) and I couldn’t even see the pancreas. The only landmarks I recognised were the aorta and the kidneys. Yikes.

“Post”-finals! Get it? Get it? Humor!

I have not seen a happier group of people in a very long time. Perhaps ever. Smiling, laughing, joking. And, check it out- I’m now Zac, 1/4 M.D.

SWEET!

Here’s to a great year. ‘09ers… we’ve earned it!

So in 3 days we’re done with year 1 of med school. That means we “know” everything about how the body works normally. Riiiiiiight. Come next year, it’s pathology- taking everything we know about how things work right and learning how they go drastically wrong.

Honestly? I’m tired of working- I know we all are. Then, once next year is done we have the boards: studying 12-14 hours a day for 5 weeks to take a test that will literally determine what specialties we can go into. I’m already not looking forward to it.

I’m just tired of performing right now. Maybe I won’t say that once these tests are over, because the pressure will be off, but currently I’m just exhausted. I’m exhausted from studying material that I had to force myself to look at every time. I’m exhausted from getting too little sleep. I’m exhausted from endless quizzing, and studying, and feeling like I should be studying.

I can tell I’m getting a little melodramatic here, but I woke up at 7 this morning, took my SBS final (relaxing, believe it or not… we get roughly 30% of the class worth in extra credit just for showing up, which takes all the stress off), and have been studying ever since. I’m off to bed now… next post is post-Biochem (ha!). I’ll either be elated or crushed. Either way, I’ll likely be drunk.

Oh… and our SBS exam was all about alcohol and drug abuse. ‘least now I know what to look for.

Quick! Everyone type in “bananas in my pants” on Google! I’m the third hit!!!!

* I paused to think whether or not I should be this excited, and realized: yes, yes I should.

*edit* now #2.

*EDIT* Guess who is now the #1 hit in Google? That’s right. Me. Thanks to all you loyal readers. I’ll post a real entry soon, I promise.