This thing I refer to as My Life

Sunday, February 03, 2008

A month of pathology sprinkled with a family trip is (depressingly) behind me. My pathology elective was in stark contrast to the “kick-my-butt” month of internal medicine. Everyone kept asking me, “don’t you miss working with patients?” “Don’t you miss really helping people?”

I think the answer everyone is looking for is, “No!” “What has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap? This Guy! Hi, I’m Bob Kelso.”

Of course I love taking care of patients, making them feel better, helping them to understand their disease and love the notion that I seem to do really well at all of those things. However, the amount of one’s life that has to be given up for the system to allow you that type of interaction…Hi, I’m Bob Kelso! I thought we met.

I think the best part was the last day rounding with my main attending. My senior and I walked up to our first patient’s room and the attending turned to me and said, “So, it’s our last day rounding together. Have we managed to help you realize that you want to be and belong in internal medicine?” There was a slight pause as I contemplated my options of lying, crying, and punching my attending in the gut or doing what I did. With a complete dead-pan faced, I looked at my attending in the eyes and said, “This is our 72 year old woman with a history significant for congestive heart failure and diabetes now on day four treatment for pneumonia and CHF exacerbation due to non-compliance.” Actually, I only made it through about half of that before the attending and senior broke out in laughter for my subtle way of telling them, “Hell no!”

Thus we come to Pathology! My sister field to radiology. In both, you are the doctors’ doctor. You help those poor internal medicine and surgical schmoes actually diagnose that is wrong with their patients. And just as important as being a critical cog in the healthcare machine, since it is an elective for me, I got the weekends off! That actually gave me the opportunity to do a great thing…for the first time in about 32 years, all of the Floridian-Kirks’ got together for a family reunion! You’ll see some of the great pictures below! However, the weekend that worked best for the family was on ML’s birthday and thus did not get celebrated properly, I have decided to extend her birthday (much like I do with mine) and it is continuing even today. Well, that is in part since what she wanted for her birthday was a Nintendo DS and the entire country has been OUT of them since the holidays.

There is a little more to add about pathology: 1) Autopsies are absolutely disgusting and none of the pathologists I worked with liked doing it. 2) Making slides of hotdogs from the cafeteria is fun and all of the techs enjoyed helping. 3) Making slides of my own blood smears is even MORE fun! Those pictures are below, too. 4) Making a 45 minute slide presentation is substantially less fun and takes a lot of time.

Oh, and to add to the multimedia fun, I’ve finally put up the movies of driving to work in the snow and Halloween!