CCF Core I Orientation

Today was technically the first day of my Core I rotation, but it was another orientation day. For some reason, we had to be at the Clinic at 7 AM. First, the faculty who are running Core I told us about each rotation in the block. These include family medicine, outpatient internal medicine (IM), surgery, and inpatient IM. I will be starting my actual rotation (family medicine) in the morning. Then the IT people taught the UP students how to use our portal, and one of the librarians told them about the CCF library resources.

We were finished around 10:30 AM, and then we had to wait until our anatomy session began at 3 PM. I spent the time working on my schedule for the winter block, which will begin in November. It's a good thing that I started planning my schedule this early, because it turns out that the block that runs during Christmas and New Years isn't a four week block for Case. So now I'm going to do my research month in December, after I do my geriatrics rotation in November. Have I mentioned lately how difficult this clinical block system makes scheduling electives and other rotations?

The anatomy session was really good. There were only 14 of us, so we were in really small groups for our prosection stations. This was like a normal anatomy seminar for us, but it was a new experience for the UP students. (They do traditional dissection of embalmed bodies.) The UP students in my group seemed to like the prosections. I had spent some time over the weekend reviewing the anatomy of the neck, thorax, and abdomen, but I still am going to need a lot more review before I'm surgery-ready. We have one more of these anatomy sessions next week to go over the limbs and pelvis.

My schedule for Core I is the following: three weeks of family medicine, then three weeks of outpatient IM, followed by five weeks of surgery, and ending with five weeks of inpatient IM. I will be out at Beachwood for my family medicine rotation. Then I come back to the main campus for my outpatient IM, which consists of general IM clinics in the morning and specialty clinics in the afternoon. My three specialty clinics are a week each of outpatient pulmonary medicine, gastroenterology, and cardiology. My first week of surgery will be outpatient specialty clinics as well, and then I have four weeks of inpatient surgery where I will be assigned to one of the surgery services. For inpatient IM, I will have two or three weeks of general inpatient IM followed by two or three weeks of inpatient cardiology. I'm really looking forward to that last bit, because cardiology at CCF is just awesome.