Category: Medical School

How should one prepare for a week of nights on surgery? Class president: “I drank a pot of coffee, and stayed up as late I could on Friday.” Adrenaline Andrew: “I went out to bars on Friday. Kept me up later than if I had stayed in. Worked quite well in fact. If you’re trying to stay up as late as possible come out with us.” I elect to go out with several classmates to a few bars, get to bed at 2:00 am and sleep until 10:00 am. In retrospect, bar hopping was a mistake…

We start on Saturday at 5:30 pm in the surgeon’s lounge for handoff from the day teams, which include separate groups for colon, liver, plastics, urology, orthopaedics, cardiothoracic, ENT (maxillofacial), etc.. All of these groups’ patients will become the responsibility of the night team, which can decide to call a specialist back in for anything urgent. The night team also consults as necessary with the ED and other units, such as oncology.

Our team consists of a critical care fellowship-trained attending (“trauma surgeon”), a senior resident (PGY4-5), a mid-level (PGY2-3), an intern, my classmate Surgeon Sara and myself. The senior resident is a calm 31-year-old aspiring to follow in his father’s footsteps providing medicine in developing countries. Navy Nate, the PGY2 mid-level, is a snarky, brilliant 36-year-old who steered a desk for 9 years. “I should’ve probably should’ve stayed for another 11 years to retire with a pension. But medicine was my calling. I just couldn’t think of doing anything else except surgery. It’s the thrill.” His wife is a family medicine resident. Pregnant Patricia is the intern who immediately speeds off after handoff to run the “floor,” i.e., every floor in hospital with postoperative patients. The chief and I head down to the ED trauma room to wait for consults, while the attending, a 46-year-old tall pensive former philosophy major with a unkempt beard, slips away to his call room.

Our first ED consult is at 6:00 pm. Navy Nate sends Sara and me to interview the patient: “Hey, you have ten minutes to report back. Don’t look at the chart. What is the problem? Is this surgical or not? Ten minutes.”

Surgeon Sara and I struggle to navigate the packed ED, looking for “Bed 4”. The rooms have filled up and patients are on beds in the hallways. A 27-year-old nulliparous female is lying on a hallway bed curled up with her boyfriend, whose family is in the hospital for an MI (myocardial infarction). The energetic female presented for worsening abdominal pain over the past 5 days. She has a family history of Crohn disease (named for gastroenterologist Burrill Bernard Crohn). On physical exam she has significant tenderness on light touch in the lower abdominal quadrants.

After a discussion while walking back to the trauma bay, we present our findings. Sara does the HPI (history of present illness) and PMH (past medical history), while I present the physical exam and A/P (assessment and plan). “It’s unlikely to be appendicitis or ovarian torsion. The timeline does not fit. It could be PID or inflammatory bowel disease although she has no diarrhea.” The ED had ordered a CT, which Navy Nate studies. The radiologist report is in Epic: “Cannot rule out appendicitis” given the mild edema around the appendix. Nate: “Radiologists can be so useless sometimes, but this is a pretty unimpressive appendix. I agree the timeline does not fit with appendicitis.” As we look through her CT we begin to see other involvement of the gut, including striations in the rectum and small bowel. We admitted her for serial exams to see if she worsens, and put in inflammatory labs for IBD. 

(Appendicitis usually presents over 48 hours. Umbilical or epigastric abdominal pain transitions to nausea and vomiting followed by localized pain over “McBurney’s Point” (halfway between the umbilicus and the anterior superior iliac spine of the hip. The key is that after 48 hours, the patient becomes acute (fever, peritonitis) with either a free rupture or abscess formation.)

Trauma Alerts text messages pop up on our personal phones starting around 8:00 pm. First a 23-year-old MVA (motor vehicle accident). He is talking and does not appear to have any significant injuries, but 10 hospital workers will do a complete trauma evaluation nonetheless. There is a primary survey for airway, breathing, cardiac activity, active bleeding, then a secondary survey for spine fractures, and finally a trip to the CT scanner for a “Panscan”. 

Trauma Alert at 11 pm: 20-year-old African-American with multiple gunshot wounds and a tourniquet placed by the EMTs. He is having trouble breathing and blood pressure is dropping. A CXR shows a massive hemothorax (collection of blood in the space between the chest wall and the lung) in the right side. The intern places a chest tube guided by the attending. Immediately the patient improves, and we consult plastics for reconstruction of the median nerve.

The chief and I see a patient stabilized in a rural hospital and then flown to us for treatment of septic shock from decubitus ulcer. The 22-year-old was in a MVA three years ago resulting in a T10 transection. He cannot feel anything below his belly button. He is cared for by his aunt.  The senior resident and I help him rotate to his left side so we can see the pressure sore. I shine an iPhone light onto the wound. Pus oozes out of the necrotic tissue. I see spongy red bone of the ischial tuberosity. The wound grows every kind of bad bug: KPC, MRSA, VRE. We begin stabilization. “This how paraplegics die. It’s a slow nasty death. We’ll probably clear this episode up but we’ll never get ride of the underlying deep infection. And he’ll just develop another one. It’s sad to say, but this is what eventually happens to most paraplegics.”

Surgeon Sara and I all head to a consult for an 45-year-old 250 lb. male with RUQ (right upper quadrant) pain, tachycardia (rapid heart beat) with stable BP and O2 saturations.  When we report back, the Chief, midlevel, and attending are poring over the patient’s CT scan and labs. “How’s he doing?” “Bad, he has rebound tenderness, intense pain.” Labs showed slightly elevated bilirubin, but normal liver enzymes and Alk phosphate. We quickly got hooked on cholangitis even though the liver enzymes were not elevated. The attending arrives from his call room. The chief asks the attending, “See that inflammation around the entire duodenum, not just the gallbladder.” “Yep, that’s why I came down. Let’s get him to surgery.” (We still don’t know what is wrong with this buy, but it is time to explore.)

Sara: “I am surprised how much the surgeons use imaging before the radiologist gives the final report.”

We learn he is a habitual cocaine user and, in fact, had used cocaine just a few hours earlier. He has an acute angioedema attack requiring rapid intubation in the ED and a 10-minute trip upstairs to the OR. The resident opens him up. The belly is a mess, with damage that was not visible on the CT. The gastric juices was eroding away at the tissue in the belly. The attending and resident pass the bowel back forth (“running the mesentery”) to look for any perforations in the bowel blood supply. This all happens so fast, I have no idea what is happening. They then identify maybe a five millimeter hole in the stomach from a gastric ulcer perforation. Attending: “Probably from the cocaine. Not his lucky day. Angioedema and a perfed ulcer.”

Navy Nate: “I need you do a med reconciliation on this patient [a 35-year-old female who came in for a rule-out on appendicitis]. Her chart says she takes 30 medicines.” Sara and I have to hold back laughing as we go through each medication. I ask if she takes X dose for X medicaition X times a day and Sara would write down the answer. It takes us at least 35 minutes because she wouldn’t stop about her experience in nursing school.  By the time we finish, it’s time for morning handoff. We leave the hospital around 7:00 am.

Wednesday night is memorable. Around 9:00 pm, we get consulted for a 73-year-old Army combat (Vietnam) veteran with a six-month history of worsening fatigue, melanotic stools, anemia and a 15 lb weight loss . He presents to the ED this evening because of an acute abdomen. The ED places him on two pressors for unstable vitals and fentanyl.  When we arrive he appears quite comfortable, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Sara asks, “Have you gotten a colonoscopy.” He responds: “No I never thought it worth it to get colonoscopies. I am so active.” We get a CT that reveals a large mass in the colon with distal metastases to the liver and lung. 

I call the VA to request his medical records. The attending instructs me to request only H&Ps, labs and imaging, “No progress notes.” 100 pages come out of the fax machine. We find that he has gotten a “CT ab” (abdominal CT scan) with follow-up needle biopsies of the mass about two weeks ago, pathology results still pending. Our patient doesn’t know why he got the biopsy and is unaware that colon cancer was the most likely diagnosis.

We go into his alcove in the ED and meet his wife, daughter, and 12-year-old granddaughter. The attending explains that the cancer has grown large enough that it is obstructing the small bowel. The recent onset of pain is most likely from a small perforation in the bowel. The attending explains there are two options. We could take him back to the OR and try to repair the perforation. “It’s unlikely that will work because the bowel around it is also invaded with cancer. It will be difficult to find good bowel to close.” He emphasizes that this is not a long-term treatment. “You are going to die from this cancer. The other option is palliative care.” We tell them to think about the options and go back to the OR lounge to look more carefully at the imaging.

“There is no way we can operate on him,” the attending tells us. “He is unstable and the chance of success is so low. Everyone says they are a fighter. Well if you were a fighter you would have gotten a colonoscopy. No one is a fighter. It’s the disease. I had an uncle who died suddenly, my whole family was so shocked but I see this every day. No one knows what they would do if given three months to live. No one knows what they find meaningful in their life until life runs out.”

Surgeon Sara: “I am calling my parents first thing in the morning to tell my parents to get a colonoscopy. My mom has been hesitant, saying she eats a good diet.” I also call my parents to encourage them to get their colonoscopy. Sara and I still have an hour before a required lecture on postoperative management at 8:00 am. We visit the 73-year-old veteran. “We’re here not to answer questions, but to give you some questions to ask the colon specialist on the day team.”

He confides in us: “I’ve done everything on my own. I didn’t depend on anyone. What’s the word… Pride, that’s the word. Pride. I wont have no pride if I am a vegetable. Just last year I was building a foundation in my backyard, lifting 50 lb bags of concrete. I was so active less than a year ago. How can this be?”

Jane and I are two ships in the night. I get home around 9:00 am and she is already gone for her psychiatry clerkship at the state mental asylum. I call her as I walk back to the car. She’s had a rough week. She walks around with a massive keychain.. Every door, to hallways, stairs, etc. is locked

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“The first week was pure adrenaline. I never felt tired. This week I’m crashing hard,” comments Surgeon Sara, a classmate on the emergency surgery service, as we head up in our scrubs to the PCU at 4:45 am. I’ve learned that I need more time so I wake up 15 minutes earlier at 3:45 am. We both reminisce how we should have studied basic postoperative recovery timeline (e.g., Enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) protocol, pain medication regimens, anxiety meds, etc.). 

Several of the attendings are on vacation so we have a light caseload for elective (non-orthopedic) surgery with the exception of the surgical oncologist’s cases. The Chief is very excited about “her Whipple” on Thursday. I let my classmate Charlie scrub in on some more melanoma cases while I try to get in on some cases on other services. There are always ample orthopedic cases going on all hours of the day (including Saturdays), so my goal is to find a joint replacement.

The first step is to check Epic for the “Status Board” of scheduled surgeries. There are no private desks or offices. Using a personal device is challenging due to VPN requirements for accessing the hospital’s Epic system. I take a rolling cart containing a Windows PC, which will connect via WiFi and Citrix, to the end of a deserted hallway. I find a shoulder replacement that looks interesting and watch a couple of videos in prep while consuming Cheez-Its and granola bars at 10:00 am.

Second step is locating the attending to ask if I can scrub in. Epic shows his name, but not a photo. His university profile page contains a photo, but these images are usually 10-20 years old. There are six attendings in the OR lounge, identified by badges, and I find him on my third attempt. “Of course, I’ll see you there in ten minutes.”

We’re doing a total shoulder replacement. I help retract as the surgeon hammers in the prosthetic joint parts. When finished, the surgeon steps out to begin another scheduled case and the PA allows me to close the incision sites under her guidance. I ask where I can get trauma shears, the most coveted item for medical students hoping to be useful during rounds and trauma alerts. They can be used for cutting clothes off a trauma patient, during dressing changes, and for chest tube removal.”Stay here” She disappears for 30 seconds and returns with a brand new pair.

I get out of this case and a follow-on shoulder arthroscopy (minimally invasive procedure using endoscopy to evaluate and clean out a joint) at 12:30 pm and find my team in the OR lounge. The cases are finished, and they are planning to check in with the intern before the Chief heads out for the day. I check the status board and notice an organ procurement procedure is posted. I ask my Chief if I can see that. “Yeah, they might already be finished.” As we are in the elevator, Christian Charlie mentions, “That’s awesome you’ll be watching an organ harvest. Good luck!” The Chief responds: “We don’t use the term harvest; it’s ‘organ procurement’. But yeah, they are surprisingly quick, in and out in 30 minutes, but you can’t beat the anatomy experience.” I head down to OR 10.

When I arrive, there are 10 people sitting on the floor outside the OR. The donor is 35 years old, suffered a car crash a week earlier, was declared brain-dead yesterday and had care withdrawn, thus initiating the donation cycle. Three different transplant programs have arrived — a heart, a lung, and a liver/kidney team. They’re waiting for final approval from the hospital’s legal department while the donor is kept perfused by the anesthesiologist, the one remaining member of our hospital’s team. The patient checked the organ donor box for his driver’s license years earlier, but the organ donor program (typically a contracted company for the state) also sought and received written consent from his wife, which initiated the transplant program (the care team never brings up the possibility of organ donation with a family). Two hours, the wife withdrew her consent and requested a delay for reasons that are unknown to us.

The heart team includes an attending, a cardiothoracic surgery fellow, and resident. I take them to the cardiology reading room so they can review the TEE (transesophageal echocardiogram) images to confirm an acceptable heart. Everyone agrees it is a strong heart. When we return, there is no resolution on the consent issue. I check back in with my team still in the OR lounge. Christian Charlie went home around 2:00 pm, and the Chief is packing up. I head back to the OR and take a seat with the transplant teams.

The surg tech explains that he is on call for blocks up to 72 hours, and has to be at his local airport within one hour of a call to board a business jet.

[Editor: Our Boston-area organ program has a Cessna CJ4 and the pilots work week-on/week-off shifts.]

The state-authorized transplant coordinator finally gets an update. The wife wants to cancel the donation. This ignites a tense discussion among teams and four institutions legal teams (our hospital’s, plus lawyers from each of the three hospitals that have sent transplant teams). The attending from the lung team wants to go ahead; the other two are leaning towards declining. A life-or-death situation calls for people to drawn on all of their philosophy, moral background, and legal training: “I’ll decline, if you’ll decline,” says the liver/kidney attending to the heart surgeon.

The lung team calls home to see if they can use the other organs, but the transplant coordinator begins calling further down the list. “We have to continue going down the list as long as my program and legal say its a go.”

“My responsibility is to my patients and their families back home,” says the lung surgeon in an Old World accent and a tone that would earn him a role in the next sequel to Silence of the Lambs. The heart attending: “If the wife starts talking to the press, this will set back transplant medicine a decade. I know we might have legal ground, but as a doctor if you are not comfortable with something you always have the right to decline.” The perfusionist on the lung team: “This doesn’t seem right.”

I leave at 7:00 pm and learn the next day that the organ procurement occurred at 3:00 am. Hannibal Lecter got his lung and two new teams jetted in overnight for the two two. Ultimately the widow had agreed to the procurement.

Thursday is the big day. The Whipple, a 6-11-hour procedure to remove a bile duct tumor (see Week 1). We are the first and only case scheduled for our OR. Only one student can be officially scrubbed in at once, so Christian Charlie and I agree to alternating two-hour shifts. We finish rounding at 6:45 am and head down to Pre-op to introduce ourselves to the patient. We help move the patient from her stretcher onto the OR bed, and the CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist) lets me intubate the patient!

Charlie scrubs in first. I’m not officially scrubbed in, but watch from a stack of three step stools behind the drapes at the head of the bed.

The chief begins with a large midline incision from one inch below the xiphoid  to one inch above the pubis. Christian Charlie helps suction and retract. Once the parietal peritoneum is opened, the Chief uses clips and the Bovie to dissect the lesser omentum of the stomach. The attending questions Charlie: “What vessels are we cutting?” (short gastrics) and “What space are going into when we cut this omentum?” (lesser sac). Charlie won’t admit ignorance: “It’s something in the abdomen.” From my perch I ask, “Why don’t we have to remove the fundus if we take the short gastrics [that are supplying the fundus with blood]?” The attending explains, “The stomach is one of the most collateralized organs in the body. You can take a few vessel groups and it will still be happy.”

After about 30 minutes, they’ve gone too deep for me to see anything so I head off to my secret alcove and find the computer still there on its rolling cart. I watch YouTube videos of the Whipple procedure and read UpToDate as I eat Cheez-Its.

Charlie and I swap for the rest of the day. The most exciting part was when we were dissecting the common bile duct off from the portal vein. The tumor had spread into the adventitia of the portal vein requiring extreme care. “Careful, careful!” exclaimed the attending as he takes control from the Chief. The team will work until 11:30 pm, but Charlie and I have to leave for a required “learning environment” session at the medical school hosted by the Chief Diversity Officer. Charlie is unhappy about missing the rest of the operation and as we walk over, we encounter Ambitious Al, who had to scrub out of an exciting rib plating on a car accident victim (“MVC” for “motor vehicle crash”). “They might have let me do the chest tube.”

We are 10 minutes late, but people are still filing in. We watch the same PowerPoint that we’ve seen four times previously in two years about types of reportable mistreatment. The Chief Diversity Office maintained an excited high-energy tone through slides defining harassment and avenues for reporting it, but many students took advantage of this break to check Facebook and Amazon from their laptops. Those on surgery rotations whispered about what they were missing. Last year’s 45-minute lecture has been extended to 2 hours and 15 minutes total, including a 1.5-hour block for 8 students to go through scenarios with a dean.

We get a one-paragraph description of a case and each student is required to say something before we move on to the next one. A sample of the 11 cases…

Case 1: A surgeon hits a student’s hand that is holding an instrument and yells, “Don’t do that.” The student begins to cry. Our Chief Diversity Officer opens: “The attending should never hit a student. Period.” Lanky Luke: “We don’t know the full story. Maybe the student was about to do something really bad on the patient, and it was a light tap, saying don’t do that.” Canadian Camy: “That is still inappropriate. It makes you feel very uncomfortable, especially if it is a male hitting a female.”

Case 2: The chair of the department notices a female medical student studying in the library. The chair begins asking questions about the subject, which she can’t answer. He continues to press, until she begins to cry. Class President: “There is a clear distinction between teaching versus emotional distress. There is no reason to push someone until embarrassment and mental distress.” Type-A Anita: “Sounds like a douchebag old white male getting off on a powertrip.” Chief Diversity Officer: “I love that! I’ll have to use that with next year’s group.”

Case 3: Two males and two females are on an away rotation. The two males become good friends with the residents while playing basketball after work. They start to go on “boys night out”. The two female feel like they are getting less OR time and less teaching time. Is this inappropriate? Type-A Anita: “Everyone should be given the same opportunities.” Chief Diversity Officer: “I think there is a win-win scenario here. The women should ask to meet up with the team for drinks after basketball so everyone gets to know each other.” [Editor: What if the two females are Muslim and don’t drink?]

We get out at 7:30 pm and start at 4:30 am Friday morning for more of the same.

Christian Charlie and I begin a 24-hour call shift at 6:00 am on Saturday. We join the Chief, Quiet Quincy (PGY 3), and Prego Patricia (an intern

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Eight of us arrive Monday at 6:00 am for surgery rotation orientation in a small conference room tucked away in the basement of the hospital. The surgery clerkship director introduces himself, and demonstrates suturing, hand ties, and laparotomy technique using a neat simulator device for 45 minutes.

He then leads a 45-minute discussion on postoperative care and complications. “Everyday the attending wants to hear the vitals, labs, and I/O [input/output].” The first two or three days after a surgery, the stressed body will hold onto water. Beginning Day 3 or 4, the body will begin to mobilize fluid. If you don’t see this happen, you should start to worry.” Does anyone know when is the highest risk for postoperative MI? [blank stares.] “It’s day 3 or 4 if the patient does not mobilize fluid. The fluid overload basically causes congestive heart failure.” We learn about the five most common causes of postoperative fever [5 W’s pneumonic]: Wind (pneumonia/atelectasis), Water (UTI), Wound (infection), Walking (DVT), and Wonder Drugs.

General Surgery at our hospital is organized into four different services: (1) elective, (2) emergency, (3) trauma, and (4) pediatric. The speciality services, for example, cardiothoracic, urology, otolaryngology, orthopedics and vascular are seperate teams. If a trauma alert comes in from, e.g., a car accident, the trauma service responds by meeting EMS and patient in the trauma bay. If someone comes into the ED for an appendicitis, emergency will go to the consult and determine if they need emergent surgery or if they can wait for an elective surgery later in the week. Each team has one attending, one chief resident (PGY4 or PGY 5, postgraduate year 4, i.e., 4 years into residency), one mid-level (PGY 3 or 4), an intern with 1-3 medical students. The interns started only a month before us so they are also learning the ropes.

For the next three weeks I am assigned to the elective general surgery service along with classmate Christian Charlie. His fame among classmates was assured during the first year mock breast exam when he exclaimed, “Is this what breasts feel like?!?” During anatomy lab, he asked, “Is this where the clitoris is located?” (He was engaged when these questions were asked, then married at the end of Year 1.)

Orientation wraps up around 7:20 am for us to meet our team for a few minutes before the first case of the day. I meet my Chief as she downs one of her favorite La Colombe coffee cans in the Surgeons’ Lounge. The PGY3, Quiet Quincy, and intern, Bumbling Brad, walk in shortly after me. Quincy is pretty open about his situation. He originally wanted to do orthopedic surgery, but did not get into a residency program. Having failed to match, he did two preliminary years in general surgery at two different institutions before finally getting a “categorical match” in general surgery (starting as a third year) at our institution. The intern couple matched with his girlfriend who is doing plastic surgery.

[I asked Brad about the couple match process. “It was terrible. We didn’t get any of our top choices for her to do plastics while I did general surgery. Two spots makes up a large percentage of a residency’s slots.” He didn’t have to be married to his match partner? “You can couple match with anyone. You don’t even have to match to the same institution. You can couple match as friends, as same sex.” He joked that if you really detest someone, you could couple match and rank hospitals at opposite sides of the country.]

Charlie and I are assigned by the Chief Resident to one of the two attendings operating today. The Chief joins one attending while the PGY3 and intern manage the floor of post-operative patients. The PGY3 may occasionally scrub in if the chief declines the case, if the attending requests him/her or if the PGY3 has been following the patient for a takeback (additional surgery following a complication). The intern never scrubs in. Brad explains: “They want you to be begging for the OR.” The intern, PGY3, and I head off to the floor to manage post-operative patients while the chief and Charlie head to the OR for the first case, a lap sig col (laparoscopic sigmoid colectomy).

Around 9:00 am, I head down for my first case, a melanoma (skin cancer) excision from the left thigh. I introduce myself to the patient in the pre-op with the chief. I then go through the “OR tunnel,” turning around once to grab a hairnet after a nurse yelled, “Where’s your hair coverage?”. I walk in and the four individuals in the room look up briefly as they continue their preparation. Fortunately, Quiet Quincy told me to always introduce myself when walking in: “Hi, I am a third-year medical student who will be scrubbing in.” The circulator nurse responds, “Get your gloves.” I don’t know where they keep the gloves… I look around and see the cabinet. The goal to pick up two layers of gloves and get them on without anything non-sterile touching the outside of a glove. The packaging of the gloves is considered contaminated. Only what’s inside the package is guaranteed to be sterile.

I grab “8.5 under, 8 over” gloves (two pair) and walk over to the sterile field. With my contaminated hands, I peel back the glove pack so that Loudmouth Lilly, the surgical technologist (surg tech, aka scrub tech) can grab the gloves without touching the outside contaminated plastic covering.  

Lilly enjoys poking fun at my surgical oncologist attending and, especially, medical students. She grins and asks, “So how many gowns will we need with you?” (Assuming that I will “break the field” and have to re-scrub.) I nervously smile, “Just in case, I’ll grab another one.”

The patient is rolled in by a nurse and the anesthesiologist begins propofol [Editor: Michael Jackson’s first choice] and the inhaled anesthesia. I ask the circulator nurse to help me place the “foley” (foley catheter, a plastic tube placed into the urethra to empty the bladder). We both grab another pair of sterile gloves, just for this procedure, so that she can guide me through it. There are subtle tricks to make it easier, for example, pulling the plunger out of the lube syringe so you can anchor the foley tip. This stabilizes the foley so it stays in the sterile field until you are ready to insert it into the urethra. “Make sure you grasp the shaft firmly, once you place your hand down, it needs to stay there because it is no longer sterile.” I advance it until I see the flash of urine, retract it a little bit and blow up the balloon to anchor it in the bladder.

Quincy and I then go to scrub in just as the attending arrives. He is a new attending in his 40s who completed a surgical oncology fellowship after completing a general surgery residency. I take the chlorhexidine sponge and scrub for 10 minutes. After I rinse off, I struggle for a few seconds to push the OR doors open (a practiced butt maneuver; everything below the elbows must remain sterile), upon which the circulator nurse opens them for me.

The surg tech hands me a towel to dry my dripping hands. Lilly then opens the gown as I spread my arms into it. “Keep you hands inside.” The circulator nurse ties the gown from behind. I struggle to dip into my gloves as the surg tech opens them up. My fingers are in the wrong glove holes, but this can’t be fixed with a non-gloved hand so I need to wait until the other hand is gloved to try to fix the situation. “These gloves are way too big. Get 7.5/7.5”. Once the circulator nurse hands the new gloves to the surg tech, we reglove again. The surg tech whispers, “You’ll get better.” My second glove dive goes much more smoothly. I start walking towards the OR table. Lilly: “Hey, your card!” Oops. I need to finish gowning by wrapping the belt around. I hand the tech a card attached to one end of the belt. She holds it while I spin around thereby wrapping the belt around me. I then yank the belt end, detaching it from the card, and tie it in front. The nurses hoard these little cards. Why? “We write notes down on them. It’s kind of a bragging right if you get a bunch of them.” I take my place next to the PGY3 on the patient’s right with the attending, surgical tech, and her Mayo stand (stand over patient with accessible instruments) on the opposite side.

The pimping starts immediately. What are the different types of melanoma? Easy. Sarcastic Samantha gave me her copy of Surgical Recall. I keep this book in my white coat and reviewed the section and also UpToDate before the case. He realizes this, and changes the subject to soft tissue tumors. What is a sarcoma? I respond: “A neoplasm derived from mesoderm.” What kind of animals are they classically found in? I’m stumped, and take a wild guess. “I’m going to guess dogs.” He scolds me: “You need to answer confidently. It’s okay to be wrong, but be confident. You know more than you think, and you must be confident with patients. I would rather you be confident and wrong than be right and timid. Now is the time to be wrong when you have attendings and residents to correct you… And by the way, dog is the right answer. We’ve learned most of what we know about sarcomas from studying them in dogs.”

[Editor: A peek into the often-in-error-but-never-in-doubt factory!]

The pimping continues as we sterilize and drape the patient’s left thigh and inguinal (groin) region. I am tasked with taping the scrotum up to prevent contamination. How large an incision do we want on this melanoma? I respond, “Margins are based on the depth of the lesion. His lesion is under 1 mm and not ulcerated, so we need 1 cm margins.” He respond, “Okay, that’s not answering the question. Quincy, how will you make your incision?” He turns his attention to Quincy but summarizes every step in a confirmation of my presence. Quincy uses a sterile ruler to draw a 1 cm margin around the 1 cm circular lesion. He then creates a 9:3 cm ellipse to get good closure.” The attending asks me: “Do you know why we drew this ellipse?” “Is it easier to close? I mean, to make it easier to close.” He responds, “Yes, but why?” I don’t have a good explanation. “You need to stop us if you do not understand something. I assume you know it if you say nothing.” He moves on to continue the case. The questions cease once he watches the PGY3 make the incision and inject “Local” (lidocaine with .25% epi mixture in a syringe). Once they removed the entire ellipse down to the rectus femoris fascia, the attending marks the superior and lateral margin of the specimen with a long and short suture that I get to cut with a suture scissors. I use Army/Navy retractors to retract the skin as they mobilize the skin around the thigh. The attending asks Quincy, “How would you close this?” The PGY3 responds, “I would do a deep dermal with 2-0 vicryl, then a running subcutaneous with 4-0 vicryl and dermabond.” “Okay do that.” He turns his attention to me while he watches Quincy’s shaking hands at work.

He asks me, “How do we determine what lymph nodes to remove?” I respond, “We injected contrast for the PET/CT scan, and we inject dye that flows down the lymph node [I’m not sure when we injected the dye, perhaps with the local?]. “Yes, you must do a sentinel lymph node for any melanoma that is not in situ. Clearly this had 1 mm depth so we know it spread beyond the basement

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Students return for Year 3 of medical school. We’ve had a 2-4 week break depending on when we took our Step 1 exam. Most students, including me, are still waiting on their Step 1 scores. Lanky Luke surmises that we took a new test, which required aggregation of a few weeks of tests to normalize the scores to previous versions. Five classmates met up in Seattle for a road trip through San Francisco, San Diego, and the Grand Canyon. I visited family, and relaxed with Jane before she departed for boot camp. She returns next week.

“I am ready to learn some real skills,” exclaims Lanky Luke. “When friends and family ask about their various medical issues, I realize how little I know.” Hard Working Harold: “Give me a multiple choice question and I’ll answer the shit out of it. Send me into a patient room, and I’ll have no idea where to start.”

Orientation begins at 7:00 am with an introduction from the clerkship director, a practicing psychiatrist. “When I went to medical school, we used to call you clerks. You are no longer a student. You no longer shadow.” She lays out some basic principles for success:

1. “If you meet with me, it’s because you’re in trouble. I will be following your progress from afar. I hope I never see you in my office until you apply for residency.”
2. “The focus is no longer on you. This can be hard for young people. If someone does not smile back at you or yells an expletive because they just lost a patient on the OR table, do not take it personally.”
3. Become part of the team. “The team will function with or without you. Don’t get in the way. If there is a trauma that needs urgent resuscitation, this might not the best time to be asking questions or trying out new skills. You can impact patient care. Every block we get a report that a medical student discovered a complication. You will be able to know your patients at a much greater detail than residents or attendings because you have more time per patient.”
4. Duty hours. “Know your Duty Hours. It’s your responsibility to not violate them. You cannot work more than 80 hours per week, averaged over four weeks. It is extremely hard to violate this. I’ve had students in the past complain to me that they are being forced to work more than duty ours when they are getting of at 5:30 pm when they just had radiology rotation last week. Come on… Also, don’t complain on evaluations when you get out at 5:30 when they told you would get out at 5:00 pm. Things change. to get out to avoid this, I’ve stopped telling my students when I expect us.”
5. Be curious about everything. “Even if you are not interested in psychiatry, you need these skills for any specialty. We had a student deliver a baby on the psychiatry floor.”
6. “Check your email, not instagram. I make an effort to answer email until about 11:00 pm. That means if you believe it is necessary to send me an email at 10:30 pm and I respond, DON’T reply back in 5 days.”
7. Scrubs are not to pick up ladies. “Don’t steal scrubs. We watch. Scrubs Out must equal Scrubs In. An OR employee took a video that was sent to my desk showing a few medical students wearing their bloody scrubs at a local bar hitting on some women. I laugh when I get video of students walking out with scrubs on.” [Gigolo Giorgio: “How do they catch us? They must be surveillance cameras on the exits!”]
8. “Take evaluations seriously, especially learning environment violations [e.g., physical or mental harassment by attendings, inappropriate conduct towards students]. For God’s sake, read the question. I have so many examples of someone checking “Yes” and putting “N/A” on the learning environment violation. If you have a reportable offense write it, but spend enough time reading it to know what you are answering. It matters. The LCME scrutinizes our reported rate. They are like the Supreme Court.  Five people came from LCME a few years ago. They analyze every detail. For example, they ask how many residents we have here. They then asked to see every resident’s signature attesting they receive training about the learning environment. I know they cross referenced every one.”

Our next presentation is by the Dean of Student Diversity. Her new assistant, the Inclusion Coordinator, joins her and helps pull up her PowerPoint. Title slide: “In pursuit of cultural sensitivity and awareness.” 

She begins by explaining her own implicit biases and insensitivities. “I want everyone to go home and take Harvard’s implicit bias test. I learned a lot about myself. For example, I have an implicit bias that males are better leaders than females. I apparently have a bias that women are not as good at science. I didn’t even know that about myself.”

The talk concluded with a request that students share microaggressions that they had suffered personally. Fashionable Fiona shared that one of her relatives told her, “You should go to nursing school instead of medical school. It’s too hard. I was pleased to say, ‘I already got into medical school.'” [She got an award for her year 2 block exam performance.] Several women shared that patients mistake them for nurses instead of medical students. One student shared an experience in pediatrics when a nurse asked who the mother for the name of the child’s father. She replied that the kid has two mothers. The nurse replied, ‘But who is the dad? I need to fill this in on Epic.'” 

The Dean of Student Diversity concluded: “I hope everyone goes home and reflects about their own implicit biases. We each should strive to learn about a new community everyday. I will admit that I am ignorant about much of the transgender community. I am trying to learn about their language and customs. I don’t know much about them.”

The next day we begin with a presentation from a Department of Health official about vaccination. “As you begin your rotations, you are going to interact with patients that do not believe in vaccines. As a healthcare worker you need to know about the misconceptions that are out there.”

The biggest misconception is that vaccines cause Autism. She explained that this movement originated in Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study that found eight children who got MMR around the same time autism symptoms presented. This caused havoc in the UK. MMR vaccine rates plummeted, yet Autism rates persisted. The UK now has 80 percent MMR rates, well below the 95 percent required for herd immunity. Measles is now endemic in the UK.

“We find that physicians are a key communicator in the community to get vaccine rates up. Most of the time, the parents will change their mind if you delve into their thought process. That takes time that most physicians unfortunately don’t have anymore.” 

Orientation concludes with a presentation on social media pitfalls and patient privacy. The Privacy Officer: “Long story short: don’t snapchat or instagram. Talk about patients in the resident lounge not on elevators.” [This advice was not heeded as Pinterest Penelope decided to snapchat a drug-screen result testing positive for benzos, cocaine, meth, heroin, and thc for a patient with the caption, “Must have been a crazy party.”

Friday afternoon, I volunteer at the free clinic associated with our university. I interview the patient first, and then present the findings to an M4. We then interview the patient together and give a final report to the attending, typically an internist, family medicine physician or emergency medicine physician. The first patient: 56-year-old female with a history of depression and type 2 diabetes presents for a diabetes check up. She has been doing fantastic, losing 50 in one year while keeping her A1Cs in the 6 percent range. However, last year, she has gained 40 pounds and her A1C this visit has jumped to 7.5. As I do a medication overview, she says she has been taking depakote (valproic acid), a mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder. Why? She explains she was prescribed it when she was brought to the ED while using heroin. She lied to the physician who took her symptoms as a manic episode. She has not seen the prescription physician since her ED visit. I ask, “Do you have a history of bipolar disorder?” She responds, “No.” She began the depakote around the time she began gaining weight. I speak with the M4 who recalls that depakote can cause a metabolic syndrome. We both go in an complete the exam. He quickly goes through a focused diabetes physical exam, complete with assessment of peripheral neuropathy and retinal exam. He fluidly asks questions focused on diabetes symptoms, e.g., polyuria, visual changes, numbness/tingling in the feet, shortness of breath. We propose our plan to the attending who decides to decrease her dose by half and have her follow up in a few weeks. Overall, I realize how out of practice I am with patient interview and physical exam skills. I recognize that I need to be able to do a diabetes exam, including retinal exam, peripheral neuropathy exam, like the back of my hand. It was exciting to see the M4 perform the exam with such fluidity. 

Statistics for the week… Study: 0 hours. Sleep: 8 hours/night; Fun: 1 night. Example fun: Jane and I attend our class’ July 4th BBQ on the weekend at a classmate’s house. We had an excessive amount of food and beer featuring ribs, burgers, chicken thighs, and local craft beer for a cost of $4 per person paid via Venmo. We eight, including me, who are starting on surgery on Monday are the butt of jokes. Mischievous Mary: “Throwing you to the wolves.” I talked with a refugee-status immigrant from Lebanon who attends the same church as a classmate. Straight-Shooter Sally overhears this and adds, “Oh, have you talked with Geezer George? His family is from Lebanon and he visits there regularly and is always talking about how great it is and encouraging us to come with him.”

The rest of the book: http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020

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Our hero has graduated. Coronavirus is almost done (thanks to President Biden’s scientific rule, the virus began to decline weeks before he took office). It is time to resume publication of Medical School 2020, the book that explains what it is like to be a medical student in the U.S.

We previously published Year 1 and Year 2 (refresh your memory regarding these weekly diary entries on the book web site). So we’ll start with Year 3 tomorrow.

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