I appreciate weekends more than ever.

The boyfriend and I are sitting at Panera Bread after getting booted from a cute little coffee shop, Coffeeworks, which closes at 3pm. All of my favorite places in this city are only open for a few hours on the weekends or not open at all. Anyway, I'm drinking plain old coffee and Myron ordered this. Always has to one up me.

I feel like there's so much to write that I'm not really sure where to begin. I haven't been able to post all week due to the unreliability of "borrowing" the neighbors unsecured internet connection. Some days it works great, and some days I can't connect at all. I suppose it's about time to fork over some cash to the internet company and purchase my own connection. I just wish we could all be friends and share like we did when we were kids. Why can't we outsmart the internet providers by networking with  neighbors, share passwords, whatever works, and all spend a lot less than we need to each month to get online. Myron would like to add that the world will not be able to function without city wide WiFi soon, and we'll all be able to get online for free. He's probably right, however, it would be nice if that would occur right now while I'm working full time without pay and not when I'm making bank. Right..


So enough with that spiel, onto my cardiac nutrition therapy experience. There was definitely a lot to learn this past week. It included my first time interviewing and counseling patients and charting independently. Last week I shadowed each of the dietitians and was able to observe each of their their own unique styles of counseling. They all make it look easy as pie. It's definitely one of those things though, that you get better at with practice. The very first time I spoke with a patient, I got very nervous. Probably because they just had a life or death moment in the form of heart failure, and here I was telling them how they  needed to change their lifestyle to lower their risk for a subsequent episode. Of course they hung to every word I said. That moment was very powerful, and at the same time had me questioning everything I was saying. Am I making sense to them, are they understanding what I'm saying, am I even giving them good advice, do they understand the impact their choices have on their health, etc. And then I learned that there are many patients who "duck" when they see the dietitian coming. When I notice this, I announce "Hi, it's the diet police!", which usually lightens the mood.




One of the questions I had to answer in a Professional Reflection to my instructor at ISU was, "What made you feel competent this week?". That I had to laugh at because I realized that that is about as good as it's going to get at this point in the internship. I perceived the question as, "What didn't make you feel dumb this week?". The good news is, I actually had an answer to that question. The thing that stuck out to the most to me was noticing a folic acid deficiency in a man who was anemic. He was being supplemented with iron due to the anemia, but was not receiving a folic acid supplement, which is also another deficiency that leads to anemia. My preceptor had me talk to the patients nurse, who talked to the patients doctor, and the man got his folic acid. It's those moments that put a little pep in my step and leave people wondering, "Why is that intern walking funny?". 




I attended something called "Grand Rounds", something that many hospitals have routinely. It's a presentation given over lunch by a medical professional on their latest research. I went to one on "Limb Salvage" by a doc from Chicago. He's traveling the country trying to spread the word on new advances in wound care. The presentation was a bit over my head, but from what I gathered, he believes that serious wounds should be treated, not amputated. And there are new forms of treatment he believes all hospitals should be implementing.  




Since it was my cardiac rotation last week, I was able to observe a couple of cardiac catheterization procedures. It is a procedure used to check out how well the blood is flowing to the heart as well as how well the heart is pumping. A catheter is inserted into the patients femoral artery in the groin area and travels all the way up to the heart. It seemed odd to me that they only used local anaesthetic. I would probably have a panic attack knowing that a  wire is in my heart. The procedure only took about 15 minutes and the patients went home the next morning. 




Alright, it's getting late and I still have lots of reading to do for Diabetes rotation next week..

"Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented towards healing rather than disease where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention over treatment. In such a world doctors and patients would be partners working towards the same end."

Andrew Weil, MD