I passed!!!

Let us all now gather and dance a dance of joy!

Haha, seriously though, I passed the NAVLE. I found out a couple of weeks ago while on my internal medicine rotation. What a relief! Now all I have to do is get through the next few months of clinics and I'll be a real doctor once and for all!

The last few months have been very hectic for me both in my personal and professional life, hence the non-posting. I did get to spend quite a bit of time with my family over the holiday break, which was nice. Well, except for the giant fight we all got in before we even were in the same house together. But thats how my family rolls, we fight and yell but in that really loving sort of way. I also got to see my grandparents which was especially nice. My grandfather is not doing so great and we all are wondering how long it will be until something happens. I will say though, for a man who has two hip replacements, a pacemaker, lumbosacral disease, and blue legs (yes, you heard me, they're actually blue), he's doing pretty well.

My first rotation back on clinics was Orthopedic Surgery with a clinician who is notorious for keeping an insane schedule. On our busiest day (which was not much busier than a regular day) we saw 19 appointments between 9:30am and 12:30pm, 13 of which were new patient evaluations. That day I saw 5 evaluations, 4 of which ended up staying for surgery over the next two days. Yeah, I had 4 inpatients at once. Insane. Over those two weeks I had 8 surgeries that were mine, plus I scrubbed into several more that they needed help on. That's unheard of on this rotation. It was so much fun though. I love being busy and moving fast and I perform best when things are crazy. Plus I had an awesome team, Jimmy and Laura were so much fun and really on top of their game. Oh yeah, there were only 3 of us, no joke. I got to drill some stuff and I was even allowed to do the lateral imbrication on a medial patellar luxation repair. That was pretty neat since most of the time on Ortho you're not allowed to do anything. It was pretty sweet.

I moved onto vacation next. I took this time to travel up to the D.C. region to interview at some hospitals. It went well but I still don't know where I'm going and truthfully the whole story is a topic for another post. I'll just leave it at that for now.

As soon as I got back from interviewing I went straight to NAVC. As usual it was awesome. I stayed with a couple of girls from my class at a hotel provided by our SCAVMA. Apparently I've picked up some new sleep habits. I was sharing a bed with Gretchen and at one point I sat straight up in bed, yelled "I'll lick your face!", and then went back to sleep. I also got up and turned all the lights on at some point in the evening. The next night I got up and tried to get into bed with the other two girls in the room. I woke up as I was doing this and was totally freaked out. My nighttime antics have now become a running joke.

The conference itself was good though. I got to go to some good talks, saw my friend Stic, and had a great time at the evening activities. One of our soft tissue surgeons made me slap him in the face at our alumni reception. He made fun of me then told me he was bad and grabbed my hand to slap him in the face. It was weird. But hilarious.

Murray and Lexy stayed with my parents through most of January. And of course my mother left tons of stuff out for Murray to eat. He destroyed a sweater, sweatshirt, towel, blanket, gloves, and other items. The towel blocked him up for a while and my mom was so worried she would hover over the litter box waiting for him to poop. I knew he was going to be fine because he wasn't vomiting but my mother was sure it was going to be surgery #4.

The last two weeks have been spent on internal medicine. Which has been awesome. We were pretty busy and I took as many emergencies as I could get. I had a lot of interesting cases and my clinicians were amazing. I totally rocked out hardcore while on medicine and it didn't go unnoticed. Our clinician pulled me aside at the end of the rotation to tell me what a great job I did and how he expects to hear great things about me in the future. This particular clinician is the one who introduced me to Ettinger and one of the "godfathers" of internal medicine. He was part of the crew at AMC back in the '70's who went on to write all the books we know and love today. So to hear from him that he thought I was ready for practice really meant a lot.

Now I move on to dermatology. So I will have much more time to relax, post entries, and work on job stuff. I need to post some of the cases from my medicine rotation since they were so interesting. I know I'm a posting slacker, I hope you all will forgive me!