Day 2402: Lunch with my attending

Things that are fantastic:

• Having your attending take you out to lunch to thank you for your work and just shoot the sh!t
• Talking about things you find interesting (race relations, racism in the US, international medical students/doctors, different cultures)
• Feeling like you've learned more about other people (colleagues and superiors alike)

I had a really rewarding lunch with my child psychiatry attending and child psychiatry fellow today. We ate crappy Chinese food, which put me in to a food coma later that day, but we got to talk about a lot of interesting things (see bullet points above).

I don't know if I've said it yet but I am really enjoying my clinical years of learning thus far. It's been wonderful to interact with different people everyday. It's been gratifying to feel like I am actually learning something, little by little, day by day. And, it's really splendid to feel like you have helped (and not hindered) your superiors.

A win for child psychiatry.

Day 2401: On psychosis

While on the phone with a dear pal of mine today, I had an interesting thought on psychiatry. Well, two interesting thoughts.

1) I may not want to do psychiatry, but seeing it has pushed me more toward a possible career in family medicine.

2) Psychosis is one of the most rewarding ailments to treat in psychiatry. I currently have two psychotic patients on my child/adolescent psych service. One is purely psychotic, which doesn't bode well for her future as an adult. She sees things that aren't there, hears voices that no one else hears and is quite paranoid. My second patient had something resembling a first-psychotic break. It may have been substance-induced, but boy was it a doozy of a psychotic episode. Hearing things. Seeing things. "Flipping out," as the patient put it. BUT. When you give these psychotic patients the proper dose of the proper medicine, it is amazing to see how quickly these patients improve. Kid #1 is showing very slow improvement each day, but improvement nonetheless. Kid #2 is looking really good and will most likely go on to lead a fairly normal life.

Psychiatry isn't all mumbo-jumbo and talking about feelings. It's a pretty fine art to differentiate between depression or a medical condition causing depression (like hypothyroidism) and other things of that nature. Psychiatry isn't for me, but it has been an interesting rotation to be a part of.

Day 719: Classes, Shadows and Recognition

Classes...

...are o-v-e-r! I am officially done taking classes for medical school. I could probably keep taking courses (more advanced ones to a) show I still want to learn, and b) further improve/maintain my GPA) but I'm going to pass.

...in medical school.

I partook in a child psychiatry rotation at a medical school. It was actually pretty interesting. Apparently, students take tests all the time (shocker) in med school and clinical rotations aren't any different. The doctor teaching the course is a friend-of-a-friend and he is crazyawesome. We have similar personalities and beliefs so we chat very comfortably. Chatting with him actually got me back in the mindset to re-apply and sell, sell, sell (me)!

Shadows...

...aren't always creepy. I shadowed said-child-psychiatrist at his place of work and that was fascinating. The children there are all sorts of different and behaviorally...unstable. It wasn't a bad thing. It was really interesting to see how the environment was structured (meaning a lot of structure) because of the lack of structure (and stability) in the children's lives.

Recognition...

...comes when you least expect it. Long story short, my boss at my internship (Dr. Z) has not disdained my presence as of late and actually told a researcher to make sure he put my name on a manuscript! What?! Oh I know. That's how I felt.