Pulm: The Last Group

I've been assigned to inpatient medicine with Dr. "Ozzie," a pulmonology/critical care specialist, and he seemed happy when I told him I was specializing in medicine. He told me that sometimes he doesn't think pulmonology is a worthwhile rotation if the student in question is specializing in something like pathology, but since I'm going into medicine, there's lots he can teach me. And teach he did: he has me look at patients' CXRs and CT scans and pimped me on those. "What do you see?" he'd ask. One patient had a chronically elevated right hemidiaphragm secondary to scoliosis, but if I hadn't read the CT report I would have thought that hemidiaphragm was an infiltrate. I even got a sharp poke to the shoulder for saying (wrongly) that the left hemidiaphragm is usually higher. Clearly, since I'm a future medicine resident, he expects me to be at the top of my game. But that's fine.

This morning we had a TB conference at 8:30 a.m.. Dr. Ozzie had told me to finish rounding on my patients sometime between 9 and 10 a.m., and I was worried that I'd never get around to rounding on them. I gave him a call at 8:45 to let him know about the conference, and his reply: "Is there a conference today?" It turns out he was supposed to be at the conference to present one of his TB patients, so after my call he immediately hurried down to the conference room. Guess it was a good thing I decided to call him after all. I got to round on my patients after the conference; one of the COPDers went home and the other was in the hospital only because he had unexplained abdominal pain. His breathing was otherwise fine. My 19-year-old patient's lungs still sounded like crap, but at least he was out of the ICU.

At noon, while we were getting lunch, one of the residents said, "So, I heard you guys are the last ones to come here?" My classmates and I were confused, so he said that he heard that after this month, 4th year students will no longer be going to Tyler for rotations. "It's not because of dissatisfaction," he said, since students have been coming to Tyler for years, but because our school president was apparently getting rid of our off-site rotations or something weird like that. *sigh* I've given up trying to understand the things going on at our school. First the whole MD-DO "study group," and now AOA and TOMA have stopped funding the ORC, and now this. In a way I'm kind of relieved that I'm graduating this year; things at school are going downhill and I don't want to be around to see what happens.