IM: Doing OMM?

This morning I found that we only had seven patients left on our service, so instead of our usual three, Annie and I only saw two patients each today. Dr. M wondered why we didn't see all seven and asked Sherif how many patients we were supposed to see. Sherif's response: "Start with 3 or 4, have 5 to 6 by the end of the month." Good to know. Sometime before rounding, Annie and I were in the library when she said she felt like her sacrum was out of whack. The conference room was empty, so I treated her shear with a leg tug and fixed an anteriorly-rotated innominate before it was time to start rounds. When we left the room, an anesthesiology intern asked us what we were doing, "Massages?" Annie said, "She was fixing my sacrum" and I said it was manipulative medicine, which we learn at osteopathic medical schools. I don't think he really knew what to think of it, but one of the other anesthesiology interns here went to our school so I figure if he really wanted to know what OMM was, he could ask his classmate. Annie and I tried explaining what we were doing to Chris but he said that sort of anatomy was beyond him.

We got lunch at the cafeteria today b/c there was no lunch conference, and while their food selection is nothing like Plaza, it still beats JPS. Then Elizabeth, Annie, and I had lunch in the library, where Elizabeth and Annie talked about specialties. Annie's still undecided, so Elizabeth was telling her about pathology and what it had to offer. My team got to go to the pathology lab today to see a patient's blood smear after seeing "1+ schistocytes" on his lab report (in reality he only had one or two negligible schistocytes, hardly 1+), and that got Annie thinking about pathology. Sherif had told us that he wanted to be a pathologist until he did a rotation at UTSW and learned that you spend 3 months doing nothing but autopsies during the training. "I couldn't even handle it for a few days," he said, giving gory details about men who blew a hole in their heads or cutting into bloated, decomposing bodies found 3 weeks postmortem to find a swarm of maggots in the body. "The smell was so bad it went all the way up to the sixth floor," he said. As much as I love CSI, maggots and rotting flesh are enough to keep me away from pathology. Elizabeth has a lot of passion about pathology, so I know she'll be great at it, but it makes me wonder when I will find something that I can be passionate about, too, in the same way.

Later Sherif sat down with Annie and me and asked if we were having any problems with Dr. M, the interns, or anything about the rotation in general. "Dr. M's nicer to you than he was to the guys (preceding us), and he hasn't said anything bad," he said. Sherif also said that Dr. M loves gunners (which Annie and I are not) and wants us to be interested, engaging students, so I'll have to up my "engage-o-meter" somewhat =P Speaking of things that bother us, there's this one general surgery intern I keep running into that some of us don't like too much. He thinks he's all that even though he's only an intern and talks to us like we're lowlifes, not even letting me use the phone to page my intern b/c his call was more important. *sigh* Someone made an excuse for him saying he was trained at UTSW and has that sort of ego, but Chris trained there too and he's pretty down to earth. Whatever...