End of Second Week

I'm done now with my second week of family med, and the time is really flying. I am still having a great time. You never know what you're going to see when you come into the clinic. Yesterday I got to observe and help a bit with a minor outpatient surgery. I also met a really fascinating patient who survived pancreatic cancer. The coolest part of his story is that the cancer was found incidentally when he participated in a research study that involved imaging his abdomen. He was extremely lucky that it was found so early, because pancreatic cancer is often too advanced to be cured by the time it becomes symptomatic.

Today we had classes. Like I said before, there is never clinic on Fridays unless you are unlucky enough to have call Friday night on one of the inpatient services. Again, we had a surgery patient presentation, then an IM patient presentation. For both cases, we went through the differential and talked about what studies to order to figure out how to narrow the differential. We never did figure out what was wrong with the IM patient, but that's ok. None of the docs who were caring for this patient figured it out either. After that we had a clinical rounds session on abdominal pain led by two surgeons. We didn't get through more than about half of the cases, but I can see now why the surgeon said that he likes abdominal pain so much. There is a huge differential, especially if the patient is female and of childbearing age. The surgeons ran over, but we had to stay afterward for a path presentation on appendicitis. I was having a very hard time concentrating by this point, and the UP students were upset because they had to get back to Case by noon for an orientation and it made them late. Somehow, we got this whole afternoon off, so I had plenty of time to run all of the errands that I needed to do.