Review: Sawbones (A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine) the Podcast

Something that I've very recently discovered are Podcasts.  I realize this is about a decade late but I never quite understood the concept of podcasting.  To be honest the reason I started to explore is because we could subscribe to our course podcasts and have them automatically be downloaded when they were ready.

After clerkships began I had to spent a considerable chunk of time in the car and after a while the same four songs on the radio start to be more of a headache than any kind of enjoyment.  Some of my favorites include Radio Lab, 99 Percent Invisible, Stuff You Missed In History Class and of course Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine.

I only happened to find this podcast more recently when a fellow medical student mentioned it in passing.  Sawbones takes a casual and comedic approach to some very serious medical history.  The hosts are a husband and wife pair Dr. Syndnee McElroy and her husband Justin  The two of them have amazing chemistry and their episodes are always well researched. . The topics they choose are essentially well intentioned but wholly incorrect, understanding and treatment of disease from back in the day.

One of my favorites episodes thus far has been one entitled Self Surgery that discussed some historic instances of people taking a knife to themselves, essentially performing self surgery.  Other topics have included: bloodletting, lobotomy and weight loss.

Overall I give it five stars for being both entertaining and intellectually stimulating simultaneously.If you're a semi-history buff and have any inclination towards medical history definitely check this out.

Now that my surgical rotation is over I just gained about 6 hours a day back into my life and am hoping to get back to my reading list which includes a fair handful of medically oriented texts including Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis and Complications by Atul Gawande.

Any other recommendations for this pseudo-Medical history buff?

Surgery: 4 AM Wake Up Calls, The List and other Assorted Drudgery Pt. I

Im sorry. I really want to keep up with this blog, I have so many things I want to say but sometimes it just falls off my list of things to do.

The past few months I have been dealing with some significant family health concerns coupled with my surgery rotation I've had little to no time for anything extra.

But the show must go on! Just as with everything else on this blog these are my personal thoughts and opinions--not meant to offend but merely to inform and present one naive young person's perspective.

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Surgery.  Those of you who are not in medical school probably don't know but the moment this rotation comes up in conversation it strikes fear into the heard of 98% of us.  There is that bizarre little group of people who are giddy with excitement and actually electively choose to spend the rest of their lives doing this.

To be honest before I started this rotation I thought it was what I wanted.  I love working with my hands.  I've always been a tinkerer and I thought surgery would be the perfect way to merge my personal passion and strengths with my career.

I was wrong.  Lets first discuss how awful the hours are.  For the last 8 weeks I've been waking up at 4 am everyday, barring the one day a week we get off.  I arrived at the hospital between 4:45 and 5 and am expected to see my patients and have my notes completed before 6 when the team will round with the senior resident.

That wouldn't be all that horrible except for another menial task that is assigned to students: The List. What is the list you may be asking yourselves?  Let me tell you.  It is a print out of the list of patients the team is responsible for that day it includes the name and age of the patient in a grid like format.  You would think with the electronic medical records (EMR) that we use (the hospital I was at had the cadillac of EMRs, EPIC) there would be the option to say right click all the things you wanted for the patients and have them come out in list format. WRONG.  Every morning myself and the other two students on our team would by hand have to fill in for every patient in the 1 cm row like space the following information: reason for admission, overnight events, vitals [temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure], total intake, total output, urine output by shift, medications, diet status ([NPO (if they can't eat anything], clear liquid diet, full liquid diet, pureed diet, heart healthy, general, etc).  That is completely absurd.  It would take between 30 and 40 minutes every morning to make this list and to be honestly most of the time nobody even used it.

After pre-rounds with the residents were completed we were expected to split up the surgeries on the board for that day and scrub into those and keep an eye out for when attending rounds would happen.  Thats another disaster.  As students nobody really ever remembers us and attending rounds occurred on a pretty haphazard basis so we had to rely on our interns to let us know when and where they were happening.  This led to one too many occasions where we would run into one of our team members somewhere only to have them let us know that rounds had just finished.

Frustratingly enough there was a second list we were asked to make during the day too.  Sometime between pre rounds finishing at 7 am and attending rounds occurring whenever the attending decided to show up we were expected to record the labs values for every patient.  This entailed printing out another blank list and filling it with hemoglobin, hematocrit, platelets, WBC, sodium, potassium, Cl, bicarb, BUN, creatinine, glucose, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium and any other assorted values that were recorded such as PTT, PT, INR, CEA, etc.  The worst is when we would scramble to finish the labs only to find out we missed rounds.

Although there was a lot of busy work involved with it being in the OR was quite a unique experience. The excitement of holding the camera during laproscopic procedures did start to wear off but I can definitely appreciate the fact that surgical interventions are kind of mind boggling.  More on the woes of scrubbing in and accidentally touching your face and other comedic moments during my surgical clerkship.

Medical Jargon Demystified II: Pecking Order

Something that I have always found incredibly confusing until I became a part of this structure myself was the hierarchy of medical education. I thought it may be useful to just clarify who is who and how far along in their educational journey in a post.

• Attending (This person is definitely a doctor, they are what we usually think of when we say doctor. Undergrad + Med School + Residency (depending on the field, fellowship))
• Resident (All of these people are technically doctors, they have an MD or DO after their name)
• PGY (INSERT #) (post graduate year) depending on how long their residency training program is this could be PGY 1 - 10)
• PGY 1 (these guys are the interns, they are the lowest of the low in the MD totem pole.  They are first years that were medical students between 2 and 10 months ago and act fairly clueless for the better portion of the year)
• Medical Student (These people are not doctors yet, they DO NOT have MD or DO after their name)
• M4 (4th year student, operates at a similar level to a PGY1)
• M3 (3rd year medical student, fairly clueless but depending on how far along in their 3rd year are closer in performance to an M4)
• M2 (2nd year medical student.  Still in the didactic learning years with minimal clinical exposure, have net to no idea what they're doing)
• M1 (1st year medical student.  In their first year of didactic learning, little to no clinical exposure, has absolutely no idea what is happening ever)

I hope that little snippet helps give a better understanding of what all these weird letters and titles really mean.