Rainy October Sunday

So today has been a wet Sunday. We got up early to get everyone ready for church and then hurried over to set up chairs and practice our choir song before performing today. I think the song turned out really well – it was “Guide Us O Thou Great Jehovah!” to a beautiful organ accompaniment that was arranged by our choir director. I ended up coming home early with Kolby and Camden because Kolby had a temp of 102 degrees F and he wasn’t too happy. With some Ibuprofen and rest hopefully he will be feeling better. He first got a fever Friday and had it Saturday morning, but then he was ok the rest of Saturday and today until we got to church. I hope he feels better soon.

Last Sunday night after watching General Conference, I drove down to Chicago to stay the night in a hotel for a test on Monday. I went down Sunday because I had to be at the place at 8am Monday morning. This was for my Step 2 clinical skills test, which is a required pass/fail test to graduate from medical school and is given at only 5 locations around the country – thank goodness for us that one of those places is Chicago. For the test you see 12 standardized patients. With each one, you read a sign outside the door with some general info of why that person is here, then you have 15 minutes to get a history and do a focused physical exam pertaining to their complaint, as well as explain to them what you think is going on and your next steps. Then you exit the room and sit down at a computer (or you can write on paper if you want), where you have 10 minutes to write a note of your encounter, with a section on what the patient told you, one on what you found on exam, one on your up to 5 top thoughts of what is going on, and one for up to 5 things that you would do next (x-ray, blood test, ultrasound, other exams, etc.). There were a couple breaks throughout the day, so the test ended up taking until 4pm and then I had the drive home. I feel really good about the test, so hopefully it turned out well.

When I got home we went out to dinner at Pedro’s to celebrate since we had a 2 for 1 coupon. Kolby told us that he could eat the chips and the tortillas, but not the salsa, because that would make his fishies sick. We asked where his fishies were, and he said in his tummy. When we asked him how they got there, he said they were there since before he was born. And since then he has been telling us that he needs water for his fishies every time he is thirsty. He is so silly – I don’t know where he came up with that idea, but it is pretty cute.

This month I am doing a rotation called Promoting Health in an Urban Underserved Community through the department of family medicine and the center for healthy communities. I work with another medical student, Lindsay Haus, and we are in charge of putting together several different health presentations for some underserved housing communities. This week we have been working on one for Pain Management and another on Arthritis since we are presenting these topics this next week. We also have to prepare one on Healthy Aging and another on Bipolar disease. Throughout the rotation we also attend some of the meetings with these communities to hear about the different projects that are going on to help improve the health of the community members.

Tuesday night we took the boys to JC Penney for Halloween pictures. Kolby dressed up as Tigger, Eli as a dinosaur, and Camden as a lion. We took photos of each of them separately and they turned out so cute – we can’t wait to show you all when we get them.

Friday night I went to an elders quorum activity – it was a Nintendo Wii golf tournament over at the school. I was so excited because I hadn’t yet played a Wii but had heard they are really fun. One of the guys who is a manager for Chipotle provided the food. About 30 people showed up. Three people brought their Wiis and 3 projectors as well to have different games going on at once. We played 4 at a time, and the top 2 in each group moved on in the tournament. Out of the 16 that played, I ended up in 3rd place – pretty good for never having played before. The Wii is so much fun and such an ingenious idea – you have to swing the controller to hit the golf ball. There are other games that we played that night as well – bowling, tennis, and boxing, and they were so much fun.

Saturday I volunteered at the Saturday Clinic for the Uninsured. I hadn’t been back since my 2nd year of school, so it was interesting to be the senior student there. Basically, a 1st year student gets the patient and finds out why they are at the clinic and get their vitals (temperature, blood pressure, height, weight). Then they meet up with a 2nd year who goes back in with them and gets a more detailed history of what is going on. Then they get a 3rd or 4th year (me) and we go back in to do the physical exam. And finally we get the doctor who listens to what we have done, adds any other insight, and then teaches. The ideas behind the clinic are to help the underserved and to teach and learn. It was so much fun to be the senior student and spend time teaching my first and second year students. It was also neat to see how much I’ve learned since I have started medical school.

While I was at the clinic Steph took the boys to a farmers market to get some pumpkins for us and for some ladies at the Meta House. The girls in the ward a doing an activity with the women of the Meta House, a place for women who are recovering from alcohol and drug addiction, where they will be carving pumpkins. Several of the women there have never carved a pumpkin before - how sad. Anyways, Steph got 3 pumpkins for us and 3 to donate to that activity. Kolby and Eli were so excited to show me the pumpkins they had picked when I got home.

Last night we had a dinner and choir practice over at the church to get ready for today’s performance. We did a potato bar that was really good and then had a fun time practicing together. Then we had the Kearls and Wells over for games last night. We played an old game that Steph got from her grandma called National Geographic. The point is to identify different pictures from around the world to fill your portfolio with the required items. Steph just thinks it is so funny that we are playing this game from her childhood, especially since it was made in 1990 so the map is totally different from how things look today. But we still had a lot of fun.

Well, I am going to try and take a break and relax now before we have to start getting things ready for dinner. We are going to have the Wells over so that should be fun.