12.5 miles down the road

UNC

Duke and UNC are 12.5 miles away from each other. There are a lot of connections between the two schools... academic collaborations, love of NC barbeque, medical residents from one school who go on to fellowships at the other, basketball (okay, so that's a rivalry, but both schools like basketball, that has to count for something right?), etc.

And the staff PAs at UNC are either Duke graduates, worked at Duke, or both. That doesn't mean that being at UNC is like being at Duke. The grossing stations are set up around the periphery of the room in little nooks. I'm in the front of the room and I've felt relatively on my own all week. The person I'm working with this week is available when I have a question or I want him to check out my blocks but otherwise it is just me and my specimens.

I've been on GI large, which has involved a lot of searching for lymph nodes in mesenteric fat and a lot of cleaning out colons. I like the templates they have, which seem fairly comprehensive. And I like that all of their specimens have bar codes. I'm a fan of scanning a bar code and having the blocks print for the case based on that bar code. I know Duke is in the process of upgrading to Cerner Millennium and with moving to the new gross room will be adding new printers and technology. I can only assume that bar codes will be a part of that. It really reduces the incidence of mislabeled blocks to basically nothing.

Tomorrow things change and I will be assigned to some other service. We'll have to wait to see what that is!

In completely unrelated news, house closing was today! Three weeks until the kids are out of school and everyone else moves into our new house! My husband will move there this weekend, but he won't have much furniture for a while. Still, it will be nicer for him there than our old house which is mid-kitchen remodel. I hope the dog adjusts, he's a little neurotic about certain things.