Back-to-Back Patient Presentations

We started our cardiopulmonary block this week, and so far it's been really good. Not that I'm surprised, because Cleveland Clinic is all about cardio everything. After I took the CBSE last month, I told Dean Franco that I didn't think I had done very well on the cardio path questions. She told me not to worry, because all of the CCLCM students come out of second year knowing cardio very well. Not that I'd ever doubt Dean Franco, but I'm glad to report that I can already see why that would be the case.

There are several things that I really like about cardio block. One, Dr. Stewart is in charge again. He ran our cardio block last year too, and all I can say is that he is a really cool guy. I didn't come here particularly gung ho about cardiology, but he makes it hard not to get excited about it. Next, there is only one seminar per day instead of two. Some of the speakers still go over the page limit for the assigned reading, but one person over-assigning work to us is nowhere near as bad as two of them doing it each day! Plus, we aren't crammed like sardines into the little conference rooms. Finally, the seminars we've had so far have been good, even the pharm one we had this morning. Yesterday's seminar was on hemodynamics, and it started out a little bit confusing, but it got better as it went on.

After seminar this morning, I presented my patient for FCM along with an article related to her disease. Two of us were presenting. I have to say that as annoying and unhelpful as FCM can be sometimes, today was a really terrific experience. I learned a lot by preparing my own presentation, of course, but I also learned a lot from my classmate's presentation. I wish we could do these presentations for FCM all the time.

This afternoon, I didn't have clinic like normal because we had the small group clinical reasoning skills class instead. I lucked out because none of my clinical reasoning group members were in my FCM group, so I presented the same patient a second time. Basically, after I presented the chief complaint, we went around the room coming up with hypotheses for what could be wrong with the patient. Then I presented the rest of the past medical history and the results of the physical exam. After I went, the other three students in my group did the same thing. It was really fun trying to figure out what could be causing the patients' symptoms, and I also felt like I was learning a lot too. I think a lot of my classmates liked it better than longitudinal clinic. I could go either way, but then, I really like my longitudinal clinic.