One Quarter Done with Block One

I am officially 1/4 of the way done with this entire block as of today. It was a good week up until today. I spent the mornings in general IM clinic, which is pretty much like the longitudinal clinics we did last year. The main difference is that this year there is a lot more focus on differentials and treatment instead of physical diagnosis skills. I spent all of the afternoons in the pulm clinics and that was really cool. After two days of lung transplant clinic, I had one day of asthma clinic and then a patient yesterday who was just really cool and interesting. He needs a bronchoscopy on Monday morning, so I am going to go for that. The patient himself asked if I could come, which was a real compliment as far as I am concerned.

Today we had classes in the morning and then our first Block Assessment Team (BAT) meetings in the afternoon. The lecture was on wound healing and it was ok. It was nice not having class in the afternoon, but those BAT meetings are pretty ridiculous. We had to come up with a learning plan based on our evals so far by Wednesday, which seems like a sensible requirement. We were also required to fill out evals on the preceptors and on the rotations we've completed so far, which seems reasonable enough as well. Of course, the stupid eval system locked all of us out and there was a whole to-do for us to get the evals done by noon yesterday like we were supposed to. But in the end, I got them all done in time by working on them during clinic yesterday morning.

Next, some mysterious combination of the order we filled out the evals, where our last name falls in the alphabet, and the alignment of Venus with Mars was used to generate an order for when each of us would meet with the BAT. This order was guarded like Fort Knox and only revealed to us on the morning of the BAT meetings (this morning). The order was also changed at least two or three times during the course of the morning, thus making it impossible to plan anything for the entire afternoon. So basically, what we did all this afternoon is hang around in the library complaining about how stupid this system was while awaiting our turns to meet with the BAT.

The BAT has one family med doc, one internal med doc, and one surgeon on it, although my team's surgeon was in the OR and couldn't come. When you go in to meet with them, they have copies of your evals and your learning plan. The meeting lasts about five minutes, most of which is spent chatting about nothing in particular. Then they told me that it seems like everything is going well so far, and keep up the good work. I went out and told the next student it was his turn, and that was it. So much for my afternoon off.