YOU: The FCM Attendee

Finally, we have reached our last week before break. It felt like this week would never come, but it is a pretty easy week since we have seen most of the material before. We are covering hypertension and vascular disease. Yesterday, we had a seminar on metabolic syndrome that was really funny. We had been asked to read an article about metabolic syndrome that argues against the existence of metabolic syndrome. The doc who led the seminar is one of the endocrinology block leaders. He's really cool. Anyway, I'm not sure if I left this seminar having more understanding of metabolic syndrome or less, but it was an entertaining seminar anyway. The second seminar on hypertension wasn't bad, but there's just no competition with the first one in terms of the entertainment value.

This morning, we had anatomy lab to go over lung embryology and neck anatomy. I really like that we're doing these anatomy labs this year. Even going over all those stupid neck triangles wasn't so bad now that we've seen them once before. We didn't have any small groups for FCM today, just a speaker presenting, so about half of my classmates decided to bail. That was too bad for them, because the speaker was Dr. Roizen, who gave us all free copies of two of his books. Since there were so few of us there, most of us got a copy of both books. He signed them all for us, too. You can never have too many free books as far as I'm concerned. If you're not familiar with Dr. Roizen's "YOU" books, they're really cute cartoon books that explain medical concepts to laypeople. Even though I already know most of the info in them, they're still fun to read.

I had clinic this afternoon, but it was a slow day. I did see one of my regular patients, a diabetic who comes in for checkups every couple of months. The weather still sucks. It's amazing how many days we can go in a row without seeing the sun in Cleveland. I will never understand what made someone decide that this was a good place to build a city.