Injury, interviews, and surveys.

It happens when you work with scalpels all the time that you might cut yourself, and I did while I was at the medical examiner's office. It was the first time I was doing a full evisceration by myself and resulted in two stitches and a visit with the exposure folks at Duke who talked to me about infection rates, blood draws, and side effects of anti-retroviral drugs. If I was going to cut myself during my clinical rotations I would have preferred doing it on formalin fixed tissue or on a case where I had the full clinical history. Of course if I could have chosen, I probably would have opted not to cut myself at all but these things happen.

Anyway, the time at the medical examiner's office was busy and instructional. It was so much evisceration, and really good exposure. It did make me realize that I missed being involved in the prosection part of the autopsy! Two weeks of doing no organ dissection at all felt like a long time, so I'll be glad to be heading back to surg path at Duke this coming week.

And being back means that I'll get to meet some of the interviewees for the class of 2015! I missed the first week or so of them, but I trust my classmate's opinions on the folks that I wasn't able to meet. Good luck to everyone and I hope that people are having a good experience throughout this application season.

In other news, I'm still job hunting. It is getting more into the time period where most people tend of find jobs. I've been applying here and there as there have been openings that interest me, but nothing too seriously. I had an interview on Friday that went really well, but I withdrew myself from the running because of salary. As an AAPA member I have access to its member surveys which are broken down by state and include things like salary, so going into an interview I have an idea of what typical salaries are for a given area (in addition to using cost of living calculators online for specific cities since some places are cheaper to live than others). It was unfortunate, but it would have been a waste of their time and mine to continue on given how large the disparity was between their salary range and the range typical for the state. Still, it was good interview practice!