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.
Showing posts with label Pedros. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pedros. Show all posts
14 October 2007
09 October 2007
Random Unrelated Topics
So, I’m wondering if I started to feel Braxton Hicks contractions yesterday. You would think that by the fourth kid I would know for sure, but each one is different. It felt like the pain of contractions, and they were spaced out like Braxton Hicks, but instead of being a pain down low like with cramps, it was painful all over my belly. And they happened every once in a while all day yesterday. So, we’ll see. It’s interesting that I haven’t felt anything up until now – except with my first pregnancy, I felt the Braxton Hicks contractions much earlier on in the other pregnancies.
On a different subject, I think there is something seriously wrong with our VCR. We have a nice VCR-DVD player combination machine that we got when we were married, and we have really liked having the ability to play both types of movies. The DVD part of the machine is working fine, but the VCR has started having problems the last couple of days. A couple days ago I taped a show from tv and when I went back to watch it, every time I tried to fast forward through a commercial, the tape paused and wouldn’t let me hit play. If I stopped the tape it would let me rewind or fast forward, but even if I only hit the button for a couple of seconds it would quickly jump through most of the tape all at once. I figured that the tape was done for – we must have just taped shows on it over and over so many times that we needed to use a fresh tape. We tried that last night, but found that the machine had the same problem with a different tape. After messing around with it for a while, we finally found that the tape would only play correctly if Michael sat on the floor a foot in front of the VCR – if he would get up or even shift his weight a little, the tape paused. So, he sat on the hard wood floor last night for an hour while we watched our show that we had taped. It was actually rather comical to watch, although I’m sure it was less than comfortable for him. We have never heard of a problem like this before – any suggestions?
And on an entirely different topic, I had to mention something that happened to me yesterday. The other day I wrote a lengthy post about always getting negative comments from strangers about having all boys. So, I was getting all the boys out of the van yesterday morning to take Kolby into his preschool class at the YMCA, and a middle-aged man walked by and very jovially announced, “Three boys – you are so lucky! And probably another boy on the way. That is great!” I smiled and he just kept on walking by, and I felt like that nice comment from a stranger maybe (in some small way) redeemed all the other strangers who have said such thoughtless things when they saw how many boys we have.
Oh, and I just wanted to mention a cute thing Eli said last night. We went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant last night to celebrate Michael finishing one of his Step 2 Board exams, (Pedros is quickly becoming one of our ‘favorite’ restaurants. Not so much because of the amazing cuisine – we like the food fine – but more because they keep sending us buy-one-get-one-free dinner coupons. They serve tortillas and chips and salsa and we usually take sandwiches and some snacks for the boys, and then Michael and I each order a meal and one of them is free with the coupon, so it ends up being a pretty cheep dinner for our family. No, we have no shame, we are not to proud to take sandwiches to a restaurant for our kids – but kids can be picky sometimes and not eat the restaurant food anyway, so why waste the money? We are just wondering how old our kids will get before they start demanding ‘real food,’ I guess when it gets to that point, we will just have to stop eating out altogether). :)
Well, I was going to tell about the funny thing that Eli said. We were at the restaurant and at one point in the meal the boys noticed a painting of a rooster hanging on the wall behind them. I said something about the rooster, and Eli said, “No, it’s not a rooster.” (I just assumed that he thought it was a chicken, and that maybe he wasn’t familiar with the word ‘rooster.’) Kolby told him that it was a rooster, and he said, “No, a moose.” I smiled and Kolby corrected him and told him it was a rooster again, and Eli said, “No, a mooster.” I thought that was pretty cute.
Ok, last thing. While I was writing this, Michael just called and said that he got another interview for a transition year program here in Milwaukee. It is at St. Luke’s Hospital, which is supposed to have a nice transition year. He set it up for November 16th. It has been nice to get a few invitations already. We’re just waiting until next month to start hearing back about dermatology residency interviews. Hey, here’s a question for any of our fellow medical students, residents, or fellows that may happen to be reading this: As you may know, most of the interview invitations are done by e-mail, and with many of the programs it seems that if you don’t respond to the e-mail invitation immediately, all the interview dates may already be full by the time you call. We heard of another student setting it up so that she receives a message on her pager when she gets a new e-mail (so she doesn’t have to worry about checking her e-mail every 20 minutes each day). Does anyone know how to do this? Is this something you do through your e-mail settings, or something extra that you have to pay for through your pager service (or both?) If anyone knows about how to set that up, that would be great, thanks!
On a different subject, I think there is something seriously wrong with our VCR. We have a nice VCR-DVD player combination machine that we got when we were married, and we have really liked having the ability to play both types of movies. The DVD part of the machine is working fine, but the VCR has started having problems the last couple of days. A couple days ago I taped a show from tv and when I went back to watch it, every time I tried to fast forward through a commercial, the tape paused and wouldn’t let me hit play. If I stopped the tape it would let me rewind or fast forward, but even if I only hit the button for a couple of seconds it would quickly jump through most of the tape all at once. I figured that the tape was done for – we must have just taped shows on it over and over so many times that we needed to use a fresh tape. We tried that last night, but found that the machine had the same problem with a different tape. After messing around with it for a while, we finally found that the tape would only play correctly if Michael sat on the floor a foot in front of the VCR – if he would get up or even shift his weight a little, the tape paused. So, he sat on the hard wood floor last night for an hour while we watched our show that we had taped. It was actually rather comical to watch, although I’m sure it was less than comfortable for him. We have never heard of a problem like this before – any suggestions?
And on an entirely different topic, I had to mention something that happened to me yesterday. The other day I wrote a lengthy post about always getting negative comments from strangers about having all boys. So, I was getting all the boys out of the van yesterday morning to take Kolby into his preschool class at the YMCA, and a middle-aged man walked by and very jovially announced, “Three boys – you are so lucky! And probably another boy on the way. That is great!” I smiled and he just kept on walking by, and I felt like that nice comment from a stranger maybe (in some small way) redeemed all the other strangers who have said such thoughtless things when they saw how many boys we have.
Oh, and I just wanted to mention a cute thing Eli said last night. We went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant last night to celebrate Michael finishing one of his Step 2 Board exams, (Pedros is quickly becoming one of our ‘favorite’ restaurants. Not so much because of the amazing cuisine – we like the food fine – but more because they keep sending us buy-one-get-one-free dinner coupons. They serve tortillas and chips and salsa and we usually take sandwiches and some snacks for the boys, and then Michael and I each order a meal and one of them is free with the coupon, so it ends up being a pretty cheep dinner for our family. No, we have no shame, we are not to proud to take sandwiches to a restaurant for our kids – but kids can be picky sometimes and not eat the restaurant food anyway, so why waste the money? We are just wondering how old our kids will get before they start demanding ‘real food,’ I guess when it gets to that point, we will just have to stop eating out altogether). :)
Well, I was going to tell about the funny thing that Eli said. We were at the restaurant and at one point in the meal the boys noticed a painting of a rooster hanging on the wall behind them. I said something about the rooster, and Eli said, “No, it’s not a rooster.” (I just assumed that he thought it was a chicken, and that maybe he wasn’t familiar with the word ‘rooster.’) Kolby told him that it was a rooster, and he said, “No, a moose.” I smiled and Kolby corrected him and told him it was a rooster again, and Eli said, “No, a mooster.” I thought that was pretty cute.
Ok, last thing. While I was writing this, Michael just called and said that he got another interview for a transition year program here in Milwaukee. It is at St. Luke’s Hospital, which is supposed to have a nice transition year. He set it up for November 16th. It has been nice to get a few invitations already. We’re just waiting until next month to start hearing back about dermatology residency interviews. Hey, here’s a question for any of our fellow medical students, residents, or fellows that may happen to be reading this: As you may know, most of the interview invitations are done by e-mail, and with many of the programs it seems that if you don’t respond to the e-mail invitation immediately, all the interview dates may already be full by the time you call. We heard of another student setting it up so that she receives a message on her pager when she gets a new e-mail (so she doesn’t have to worry about checking her e-mail every 20 minutes each day). Does anyone know how to do this? Is this something you do through your e-mail settings, or something extra that you have to pay for through your pager service (or both?) If anyone knows about how to set that up, that would be great, thanks!
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