A good quote

"PAs are to healthcare like stem cells are to the human body"

It's true if you think about it. Stem cells are the pluripotent cells of the human body...meaning they start unspecialized and then turn into a cell that is particularly needed at the time (such as a muscle cell, a neural cell, a heart cell, a skin cell...anything!). PAs are pretty much like that too. We start as basic practitioners but when the healthcare system needs more "hands on deck" for a particular area, we specialize to whatever needs us. If primary care needs us, we go there; if surgery needs us, we go there; if OBGYN needs us, we go there. That's what I love about the PA profession. You go where you are needed and you can switch around as much as you want! The choices are endless! MDs/NPs even nurses sometimes are usually stuck in a particular speciality or field once they dedicate themselves to a particular practice. PAs are like play doh. We're moldable and flexible. You can make anything out of us...just use your imagination. Oh, and who doesn't love play doh?

Fall semester...a good start overall

Hey folks - sorry for the lack of updates. I have already started my fall semester after having a wonderful 3 weeks off for summer break and things are back in full swing again.

My vacation was VERY relaxing and fun....two essentials I sorely needed after that first semester. I got to catch up with a lot of friends; from high school, BU, and QU. I did miss out on my trip to Bermuda because of Hurricane Bill, but we made up for it with trips to Rockport, the Boston Harbor Islands, and Cape Cod where I did a lot of shopping and boating/water skiing which I hadn't done for a long time. I also ate lots of delicious food while home. Home cooking and going out for some fine dining with friends and family...yum! I was trying to gain some weight since I lost nearly 10 lbs over the summer semester from pure stress and long days where I wasn't consuming enough calories for what I was burning from using both my brain and body (standing for 6 hours and dissecting a cadaver was probably the biggest culprit for the calorie burnage.) Alas, I didn't gain the weight back, so I'm trying to do my best not to lose anymore this semester. Probably the most memorable moment of the summer was Siegelman Family bonding time when an elderly man tripped and fell on the boardwalk outside our condo. Mom (PT), Dad (DPT), and me (PA-S) assessed and treated the man who was hemorrhaging profusely from his nasal cavities and knee. We patched and cleaned him up and sent him on his way. He was very thankful that he fell right near us. My summer break concluded with Mom having a total knee replacement surgery. That I can't say was very fun for any of us (mostly Mom). I unforunately had to go back to school while she was still in the hospital, but I checked in with her everyday. She is doing extremely well despite only taking acetominophen and NSAIDs for pain (no opiates!) I am visiting home for the long weekend for Labor Day and helping around the house along with Dad and my lovely aunt who is visiting from Florida.

So only week one of fall semester has passed but I feel like I've learned a whole semester's worth of information already. This is going to be a tough one, like those 2nd and 3rd year students said. I'm taking 17 credits again: Principles of Medicine (it's a 6 credit course with many sub-sections - such as taking dermatology in one week, pulmonology for 3 weeks, rheumatic disease for 2 weeks, etc.), Pharmacology (online...ugh), Medical Mircobiology, Diagnostics (right now we're doing radiology...I learned to read a chest X-Ray in one class), and Physical Diagnosis. In Phys Dx (pronounced Fizz Dizz), we're are learning how to do a complete physical. Our final exam is to do a complete physical exam on a patient in 45 minutes in front of our professors. We're talking a physical like you've never had before. I mean really, have you ever had your cranial nerves tested at a your doctor's office before? Please move your tongue in all directions so I can see if your Hypoglossal Nerve (CN XII) is damaged? Yea, I don't think so. Literally I have to look the patient up and down, inside and out. Best part of this semester though is that we have a brand new, state of the art, graduate campus! It's quite a nice break from the old smelly shack the PA program used to call home. We have enormous classrooms with advanced teaching techology, incredible mock examination rooms, a CAFETERIA (sorry I get excited when there are other dining options other than peanut butter and jelly), and beautiful grounds (lakes, hiking trails, trees). I thouroughly enjoyed studying outside by the lake watching graceful white herons and ducks flying and swimming around. City girl has become nature girl? Who woulda thunk?
So far, I've eased into this semester well, and I'm becoming friendlier with more of my classmates. Kawal and I had about 20 people over to our apartment on Friday for a wine and cheese party and we got a lot of positive responses from my classmates. We all agreed we need to stop being as "clique-y" as we were this summer and start making better friendships with one another. That started my weekend on a very positive note and while this semester may seem overwhelming and scary (what in PA school isn't overwhelming and scary?), I feel like it's a brand new start to things with the new campus, more clinically applicable course-load, and better friendships with classmates. Well, that is all I have for now. Off to study macules, papules, and vesicles and every skin disease known to mankind. By the way, I'm NOT by any circumstances going to specialize in derm. Skin = gross. Thought I'd share that intelligent thought with you.

Over and Out.

1 Down....

Well if you haven't figured it out by now either by my announcements on facebook or AIM, or whatever mode of communication I am using, I have finished my first semester of PA school. I have 2 academic semesters to go before clinical rotations begin. Not that I'm looking forward to being done with my academic semesters....or anything.....

This summer was a summer of ups and downs....a roller coaster ride if you will. I cannot believe how much knowledge and personal growth I have achieved over the past 2 1/2 months. I was able to put both my knowledge and interpersonal skills to use today in a program QU remains close with called KEEP (Kidney Early Evaluation Program). Health fairs are set up in areas of greater New Haven or Hartford where many people live without health insurance or access to a doctor. PA, med, and dental students set up stations where we can screen for things such as weight, height, blood pressure, blood glucose levels, urinalysis (checking for blood cells, creatine levels to see how well the kidneys are filtering), blood draws, etc. I was mostly in charge of taking blood glucose levels. The actual measuring of blood glucose is very simple (a small finger prick and a drop of blood put into a glucometer). I also found it beneficial to educate these very gracious people about diet modification, family histories of diabetes, and for those who had diabetes, how to remember to manage a schedule about taking medications regularly. Overall, it was a very rewarding experience, one I hope to be able to repeat over time.

Speaking of time however, I was oriented to my Fall Semester schedule. They weren't kidding when they said the fall was insane. I am in class on average 8 hours a day, 12 hours on Tues and Thurs, with 3-4 exams per week. Woohoo!

So, hello 3 weeks of vacation. R + R is simply an understatement for my state of mind. :-)

Ode to A Cadaver

Hey people reading Jodi's blog. I have so many updates but I will do one major one in August when this is all done I think. Can't find enough time to write everything I want to write. Exams, research projects, seminars, professional interviews, and case studies are consuming my life. Just wanted to write a quick "thank you" to a cadaver I worked with today.

I came into lab with a classmate today and examined her cadaver's body because we have an approaching practical on Wednesday. We are covering lots of material (therefore lots of structures in the body...you know all those arteries that run everywhere? I have to be able to name all of them. Whew.) Anyway, the cadaver she works with was a man who died at the very young age of 53 from metastatic melanoma. His entire body is covered in tumors. We're talking tumors on the skin, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, muscle, fatty tissues...everywhere. I have been so busy dissecting and examining body parts, that I have been slowly dehumanizing these people as the weeks pass. When I looked at this cadaver, I almost began to cry. Here was a man, who out of pure devotion to science and indirectly, my future, decided to donate his body fully knowing what we would be doing to it. Meanwhile, he spent the last weeks of his life most likely suffering the worst death imaginable. The pain from all those metastatic tumors invading his organs, he has large bowel obstructions from the tumors that caused his small bowel to look like the large descending colon, he has an enormous tumor in his stomach that probably caused him lots of nausea and vomiting...he was mostly likely NPO (couldn't eat anything by mouth) in the last months of his life. He has pain patches all over his external body; probably delivering large doses of morphine as a means of palliative care before he died. From seeing all of this, I got so sad...knowing he may still have a mourning wife, children, relatives, friends still out there, being as young as he was. I just wanted to thank this man and his family for allowing me to examine his body so I can learn from him, and attain my ultimate goal of becoming a PA. I hope that his family/friends, and maybe his soul, can be comforted by the fact that by donating his body, despite his and their suffering, he can teach future clinicians basic anatomy and ultimately become clinicians that treat, and hopefully cure, patients just like him.
Thanks.

A typical Friday in 7 hours of anatomy class....

So anatomy class is infamous for being long, super fast paced, and way over one's head...here are some intelligent things the QU PA Class of 2011 said either outloud or as status updates on facebook today (reminder, we will all evolve to be bright clinicians one day....):
"it's 3:35...where are your gonads?"
"who's that...epididymis"
"our professor draws really scary looking penises"
"there's a mouse in my colon"
"thank god i learned where the mouse would travel if dropped in my abdomen"
"so...all embryonic organs have some curly whirlies in them?" - that was mine thank you
"so is everyones pockets invaginated yet? make sure to do your self exams!!!"
"i've heard the phrase 'anal canal' too many times today. i also don't like the word sac"
"did she just say that a mouse could squat on my liver?"
"gubernaculum and mobile wad could be good rock band names"

this list goes on, but you get the idea....

One month down, 26 to go

So, here I am one month into my PA education. All I can say is, the next 26 months better go by fast. While I am enjoying learning to do a lot of the hands on work (venipunctures, glucose monitoring, hemotocrit, and of course those smelly cadavers), it's hard to appreciate school because we need to learn so much so fast. There's no time to soak it up and get into it. Hear it in lecture, memorize it, test it, move on. I am constantly on the go and I've been working hard to build up my stamina. How do I have time to write this blog you ask? Well so far on this today I: woke up at 6:30 AM to pick up some classmates and drive to Yale to review for my cadaver lab practical this week, spent 2 hours there, drove back, ate a quick lunch, drove to the libraray and studied for pathology there from 12-4, went grocery shopping, came back home, called my mom and practiced doing a mock interview and oral presentation so I am ready for the real thing on Tuesay (she was a superb patient), studied more patho, cooked dinner for myself and my roomates, read for my interviewing class, studied more patho, and here i am now, in a state of exhaustion, stress, and fear for the approaching week ahead and badly needing to vent....hence the blog update.

This all sounds very negative, and while I can't say I've fallen in love with school, I am somehow coping. I have found my little niche of friends within the program and we enjoy Friday night dinners out or wine nights at various apartments. Friday nights are the one night off from studying. We often talk about things such as "how many days until August break" or "I can't wait for clinical rotations". My feelings about school pretty much sum up how everyone else feels. I am missing a lot of the aspects of undergrad such as being able to be friends with people outside your major, having time to do extracurricular activities (i miss chorus), and in general having time to just shut off every once in a while.

"One day at a time, one day at a time" is often what i hear from classmates, family, friends. It's true so I wrote it here to remind myself.

Until the next time when I'm burnt out....ta ta. Oh and by the way, don't ever smoke...it's turns respiratory pseudostratified squamous epithelium into simple squamous epithelium through the process of metaplasia therefore causing infectious agents and foreign particules to invade leading to increased risk of bronchogenic carcinomas. Next time you see someone smoking, tell them that exact sentence...good lord that sentence alone would freak me out enough to quit cold turkey.

In over my head?

Well...I had heard the word circulating for some time that PA school would be hard, but I guess I never wrapped my head around just how hard they meant. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown after the first week of classes/orientation after realizing just how difficult this program would be. I am in class 8+ hours a day on some days, balancing 6 classes, 4 labs, an online course, mandatory community service, and studying as soon as I come home. I allow myself maybe a half hour of free time a day. My classes are as follows: Human Anatomy, Human Physiology, Clinical Pathology, Diagnostic Methods, Principles of Medical Interviewing, and Electrocardiography. Diagnostic Methods and Cadaver Lab for anatomy will probably be my favorite of these. In DM, we learned how to read urinalysis tests (our first homework assignment was to pee into a cup and study the contents of our own pee...although they had to be refrigerated for the day so you can just imagine a bunch of innocent, brand new grad students walking down the hall, cups of pee in hand following a sign to a lab room saying "PA PPs this way --->"). Next week we are already jumping into venipunctures. My poor partner will probably walk away very bruised as I have never had experience with needle sticks. The other redeeming lab is Cadaver Lab. I had my first one yesterday and for 6 hours straight at Yale, 6 other classmates and I dissected a man's back and performed a laminectomy (removal of his spinal column to study his spinal cord/nerves). I have a lot of respect for these people who donate their bodies to science like this. It was in this lab where I felt I was actively learning something and not having information thrown at me as I often feel like this is happening in other classes. Although, I have to say, I won't be able to eat scrambled eggs again for quite some time. I don't know if you know what fat looks like, but it's gross. Won't go into details I promise.

So, basically this is going to be the hardest 2 1/2 years of my life. I may make it, I may not, but I'm giving it an honest shot. While anxiety and a feeling of homesickness make it harder for me, a good friend of mine reminded me that this is very much outside my comfort zone and a challenge. If I can make it through this, I can make it through anything.