My apologies to my faithful readers, (all 2 or 3 of you) but it's been a busy time, so I haven't had time to post. To update you all, I am still at home and will be until January. I have decided to take a leave of absence from medical school for this semester, and I will be resuming my classes next semester. This was not a decision taken lightly, but the only con seems to be that I will have a few months less to study for the USMLE's, but then who can really study for 9 months anyways? I will graduate the same time, as I started in January, and I will avoid the chaos of a hastily put-together semester that's only purpose is get get people done. Having no books, clothes, or other essentials, going somewhere (even if it is in the same state) to study medicine would be tough. I would rather take this time to get everything back together, and go back in January when the full cirriculum is being offered. While the Registrar's Office tried to convince me that they weren't cutting corners, the revised syllabus is starting with endocrine. We were only halfway through hemodynamics and the cardiac cycle. Are these lectures just being skipped? Seems like important stuff to me. As I actually want to learn this stuff for the sake of knowing so that I can help my patients, and not only to pass the test, I want to be exposed to the full syllabus.

Anyways, in the meantime I will be volunteering at an ambulance and working in an Emergency Department, so my readers can look forward to thrilling accounts of emergency medicine in action. I am actually at the ambulance tonight (suprise!), which is the reason I am up at 4:45 am… No interesting calls tonight… just a drug seeking abdominal pain, and a chest pain "rule out MI (heart attack)" from a local doctor's office. Now this patient was having chest pain for several days when they coughed, bringing up sputum. Sounds like the classic MI story to me. However, this doctor was convinced it was a heart attack because off the "S-T depressions" that she saw in the 12-lead electrocardiogram. She even circled them all. Funny thing was though, that they weren't even the S-T segment, they were p waves!

Looks like her med school skipped over cardiac electrophysiology, which is exactly what I don't want to have happen to me.