Seminar and the reality of change

The last thing we do as students is present a case study or disease process at a seminar with all of our classmates, some family, and various staff (attendings, course director, some staff PAs, etc). I spent my memorial day immersed in patient history and looking up things in pubmed. The Duke library system is really good about emailing electronic copies of articles not otherwise available, which means I have more reading to do tonight. Ha! I thought I could buy myself a day off with that.

I have a general outline and a meeting with the attending that is advising me so we can go over the outline to see if I'm on track. This week will be spent fleshing out the outline and doing my slides. The class has a preliminary meeting next Monday to go over everyone's rough draft, which will be good. I don't want to go too far with the work if I'm going in the wrong direction all together.

Meanwhile, I looked over past year's presentations over the past few weeks and I've decided autopsy cases are so handy because you have so many more things you can take gross photos of. Unfortunately, there weren't any cases I had that stood out to me as seminar-worthy. There was a very interesting case a few weeks back but I wasn't on it and only heard about it after the fact, which was disappointing. Surgical pathology offers up a lot of good cases and fairly rare conditions to choose from but you only get the specimen for photos. I do have a lot of slides though...so I have a lot of different things I can use for microscopic photos (and I do like the microscopic photo set up). I just have to meet with the attending and figure out what exactly I'm looking for in all of those slides and special stains.

My husband came up this weekend and drove off with my dining room table and boxes of assorted non-essentials. We have about ten days before the kids are done with school and we do the big shuffle. Most of the things in the apartment will go to our new house, but a few things will go a hundred miles west to my parents' house and we'll pick some things up from my parents' for the new house (since they're selling it, they are kindly handing down some furniture. Great timing!). Not having a dining room table and having the boxes around the apartment make the move seem more concrete. It is almost scary how quickly time has been passing! Still so much to do and learn! No time to slack off now.

My autopsy rotation has been productive. We're faster than we were at the beginning of rotations by a lot. No where close to the staff PAs, but not doing too badly I think.