Mile 24318: Call me Erwin

Above: Graham crackers are in ready supply on the surgery floor.

"ERWIN... JOHNNY...

ALMOST."

- My attending on a fellow medical student calling me by the wrong name.

Last year, during my Internal Medicine Rotation, I found myself eating a horrible breakfast a lot of mornings when arriving at the hospital.   However, it was the most easily accessible: potato chips and cups of juice (that in truth were only 10% juice) stared right at me in the resident's lounge.  It was a terrible combination. Well, during my Anesthesia Rotation, I've gotta say that I worked on it. I'm getting more nutritious by keeping my energy levels high through Graham crackers. These wonderfully available packets (above), kept me going through taking patient histories, inserting LMAs, and following through with patients in the post-op room.  Pretty potent for a small packet, I may say.

And here I am, after a full sixteen weeks of Surgery, currently in a 2 week break before hitting the road to Columbus.  As much as I'm not going to go into Surgery, the folks at St. Anthony have really taught me an appreciation for it (with or without the graham crackers).  I'm not going to forget how the masks and scrub uniforms on the nursing staff made people look completely different than when seeing them outside of the hospital.  That perhaps led to my last nickname, Erwin, when a fellow medical student couldn't come up with my name.

Erwin... It works.

However, my last four weeks in anesthesiology were quite interesting.  Originally, my perception of a day in the specialty consisted of placing some tubes and watching the patient as they fall asleep, then waking them up, and you're pretty much done for the day.  I ended up seeing their jobs are much more important then orignally thought, making me appreciate the rotation much more.  If you think about it, just a couple ounces of anesthesia, if placed into the wrong part of the body or if dosed wrongly could put the patient in danger.

I've talked about the "art of medicine" before from my perspective, as much more of a clinical thinking concept, but the "art of medicine" in Anesthesia I saw was one of procedure.  Many of the procedures, such as spinal or nerve blocks, or even the classic intubation require a lot of muscle memory and hours of practice.  Everything they do needs to be accurate and precise, or a lot of wrong could happen.  But it doesn't.  The doctors and nurses in the anesthesia department at St. Anthony were pros at their jobs.

And with that, I'm entering back into the realm of medicine, and taking a Cardiology elective at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, OH.  This is the start of the last big road trip I will make during my medical school career, and the start of the last three rotations ever.  My journey through medical school has been amazing so far, it can only get better toward the end.