Recovery and Orientation

Recovery
I really only had three days to recover before orientation for rotations. While I should have been finishing the Gamma Knife research paper I was writing for a classmate, I couldn't do much of anything medical related.

Playing with my kids and dogs was refreshing. I even read a pleasure book over the weekend and got in some swimming. It just felt so good to never have to worry about Monday and Friday morning finals again. The table in the student lounge that I had lived at for the last few months was now free for the next victim. It had been my favorite study spot for most of the previous two years. And for the last couple of months, most nights I left my garbage and a half dozen books or so on it not so much to claim ownership as to save myself multiple trips to my car.

I also cleaned out the books in my car, three milk crates worth of Boards prep material!

Orientation
Our Clinical Education department is not world class (just trying to be polite). And while the staff works hard for us, orentiation was disorganized and not very beneficial. I skipped several lectures to read Boards & Wards and scope books for rotations. I purchased many from Ebay at steep discounts, but wanted to plan ahead and not end wasting money on bad decisions.

Some lectures on didactics and rotation preparation were pretty good. Especially the ones run by our new Surgery and OB/Gyn dept heads. The ones run by Profs in IM, FM and Peds were generally poor. You'd think that after they've been on the job for 8+ years and had the recent examples set by the newest dept heads they would at least try meet the bar. But no, they seem almost clueless to what students need for rotations.

Moreover, the ClinEd dept has put a bunch of new requirements on us like logging ICD-9 codes of all the patients we see. They don't provide any tools or lists, just a huge new hassle. Ugh!

At least our class gets along very well so we will share rotation objectives, tips, best practices, etc. I've learned far more from classmates and upper classmen than from the oldtime docs in ClinEd.

Finally, it was time to say goodbye to classmates and pack for the drive to first rotation at my mother-in-laws: psychiatry in Lakewood, WA. Becky and I switched driving while the kids slept through the night. We arrived Satuday morning after 24 hours of driving. The Seattle area is so beautiful in the summer!

It's wierd to think that our class won't be back together as a whole until our MSIII finals and MSIV orientation next summer.