End of Heme/Onc

Today was the last day of the Heme/Onc block, and I am going to miss it. Even though blood diseases and cancer (and blood cancers) aren't exactly the cheeriest subjects, they're still really interesting. Plus, this block was well-organized and most of the seminars were excellent. The PBL cases were depressing, but they were good also. Speaking of PBL, my group is still doing the discussions instead of formal learning objectives, and it's working really well. I'm glad now that I gave it a chance. We have a really good PBL tutor, too. He's a semi-retired surgeon, and he gives us great clinical pearls here and there. This is the best PBL group that I've had since I started med school. Our group is going to stay together until the end of the year, so I'm glad this group is such a good one.

We had a cultural sensitivity communications class on Wednesday. It was kind of silly. My standardized patient was playing a Jehovah's witness who might need surgery. Of course she didn't want to have a blood transfusion. So I had to tell her that I'd honor and respect her wishes, and that I would speak to the surgeon about it as well. I also asked her to tell me more about what things exactly were forbidden, and she told me about the religion a bit as well. It wasn't a bad class, but I don't think we really needed it at this point in our second year.

Our seminar today was on cancer drugs. The seminar leader was a new pharmacist that hadn't led any of my previous seminars, but he was very good. We were supposed to have a POD research seminar afterward, but it got cancelled. This whole POD course has been pretty haphazard. The fact that last year's POD course was so well-organized only emphasizes how bad it is this year. You know things aren't going well with the class when even the faculty stop showing up for it.