Life Updates

- I have roughly one month left of classes until I enter clinic! It's going to be the last month I set foot in a classroom in my life... after twenty years of classes. Crazy.
- I start learning vitamin B12 injections tomorrow.
- I've made this pizza twice now. Awesome!
- I have my official clinic schedule for next year! I'm super happy with the shifts I have AND the supervisors who I'll be working under. I'll talk more about my shifts, satellites, and supervisors in a later post.
- I had my OSCE 3 on Friday. Here is how it runs: enter clinic room, greet patient, take their history (i.e. ask them a ton of questions about their health complaint), rule out emergent conditions and red flags, perform physical exams, diagnose the patient, recommend further testing/labs, and recommend a treatment for their condition ...all in 18 minutes ...all the while being marked/evaluated by a clinic supervisor who is sitting in the corner of the room ...then repeat this whole process two more times with two new patients. It was an adrenalin-packed hour that's for sure!
- I celebrated completed OSCE 3 by checking out this place with friends. Fun times.
- I think my OSCE 3 went very well. I was proud of performance(s). I have to pass OSCE 3 in order to enter clinic. Here's hoping the evaluators thought I was competent!

Caramel Apple Timbits

- I made these donuts yesterday (but since I didn't have a donut pan, I made "timbits" using a mini muffin tin).  They are pictured above.
- Anyone have nice Spring weather yet? While it's sunny out here, it is still cold.
- I walked into Bulk Barn this weekend: holy Easter candy overload! I forgot how sugar-laden this holiday is. However, seeing them all (an entire row of Eater candy only, by the way) brought make nostalgic memories. Malt chocolate eggs, foil wrapped chocolate eggs, jelly beans, gummy bunnies, mini eggs, caramel filled chocolate eggs... Om nom nom!
- I selected my clinic office for next year. I'm going to be sharing a room with two of my CCNM best buds. 

Pack Years.

When working with patients with smoke, it is important to calculate their age in 'pack years'.  How to calculate pack years: 

Pack years = number of packs smoked per day × number of years as a smoker

Or, if you don't know how many packs but you do know how many cigarettes, then you calculate it using the number of cigarettes smoked per day × number of years smoked... all divided by 20 (this is assuming that one pack contains 20 cigarettes).

Also... if you are a fan of living forever (aren't we all?) or the book The Blue Zones, then check out this article (thanks M for letting me know about it!): How to Live Forever.

Monday Highlights.

Image source here.

Today was a brain-bursting kind of day.  Lots of cool info all packed into one (typically) boring Monday! Some highlights:

- How to determine if a seed is still fresh (e.g. cumin seeds, mustard seeds, anise seeds, parsley seeds, etc): chew on one! If it tastes woody and not flavorful, then the seed is old and the medicinal volatile oils have evaporated or degraded.
- Classmate says to professor: "How do you reduce male pattern baldness?" Professor's response: "If I knew the answer to that question, I'd been lounging on an island right now".
- People with kidney stones are often dehydrated and deficient in vitamin B6 and magnesium. Supplement these nutrients or eat foods rich in them.
- Apitherapy (apis = bee) is a technique used by some (not NDs! We just learned about it for fun) to treat rheumatism arthritis. It involves stinging a patient's rheumatic/flared-up joint with a live honey bee!  Apparently the bee sting is enough for the immune system to stop attacking the body's own joint and focus on the bee sting instead.  Repeated stinging yields best results.
- Another reason to supplement vitamin D this Winter: new research reveals that vitamin D is precursor in the tumor fighting pathway of the body.
- When blood sugar levels reach 9-10 mmol/L, the sugar (glucose) spills into the urine, giving urine a sweet smell and taste... yes, taste. Before the invention of urinalysis, doctors used to taste their patient's urine to assess for sweetness and thus diabetes.
- Lastly, I got to play doctor and interview a patient today during Primary Care. In addition to asking a million questions, I also had to chart my findings (aka complete a medical record) and perform relevant physical exams on the patient. It was a great experience and I was proud of my performance (not sure what the prof thought, doesn't matter though, I'll see my evaluation in two weeks).  Anywho, the point of this story: I think I've picked the right profession when I find taking a case to be "fun" :)

Year 3, Semester 1, Class Review, Part 1.

It's about time that I reviewed my Year 3, Semester 1, classes! This is part 1 (five classes today, five classes tomorrow). Here we go:

Botanical Medicine 3 - Same old, same old. We're learning about 250 herbs this semester (yikes!) in the same we we've always learned about herbs (by reading monographs).  It's pretty boring.  On Wednesdays, however (we have the class twice a week), we do cases and come up with herbal formulas.  I quite like the cases because they seem so REAL. In less than a year I'll be coming up with herbal formulas for a whole variety of health concerns, so these case exercises seem really practical. (Oh, but I will soon HATE Bot Med 3 because apparently the midterm is brutal...).

Primary Care - Also known as, 'let's play doctor' class!  I find this class fascinating. We take turns being doctor, by interviewing a patient, and then performing the relevant physical exams.  Then as a group we have to diagnose the patient, do research on the diagnosis and treatment options, then write-up a full treatment plan. It's a lot of work, but fun work! This, like the Bot Med cases, is also very practical.

Men's and Women's Health - I may never meet a patient in my life who has a Chronic Bronchitis or who has Generalized Anxiety Disorder (i.e. specific conditions), but I most definitely WILL meet a male and a female patient :P  The point I am trying to make: this class is very applicable! Everyone in the class will benefit at least from 50% of the class teachings in regards to their own personal health. We have to do a research paper in this class too and my topic is a good one, so it's been enjoyable to work on.

Health Psychology 3 - We got shafted in our first and second year psychology classes. Seriously: I want my money back!  What a joke... Anywho, I am finally learning this year!  We have new-to-the-school professors and we're learning about relevant stuff, like how to assess someone with a mental disorder and the diagnostic criteria for all kinds of mental disturbances (e.g. Major Depression, Panic Attacks, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, etc).

Practice Management - Also known as business class.  Lots of number crunching and market discussions. We have a lot of guest speakers in this class too, which keeps things interesting. We have a big group project in this class that requires us to create a full business plan, which is excellent practice for when we have to make a real business plan in a very short period of time!

Third year is shaping up to be very, very different from my second-year experience.  Second-year was very depressing (pathology, microbiology, disease, etc, etc) as we learned how to diagnose, but this year is so-far quite uplifting as we learn how to treat! We're finally learning how to make people feel better and that is a wonderful feeling.  As of right now, I'm loving school again, including all of the silly assignments and group work that comes with third-year, because it's all making me very feel very excited for the real world which is just around the corner!  Day-after-day, and little-by-little, I'm feeling more like a doctor-to-be :)