Back to Tox

The match is over - long since over - and the reality is setting in for me and most of my colleagues. It is incredibly anticlimactic, though, because once you open that envelope you basically start living in the future instead of the present. Emotionally, that is your last day of medical school, and you spend much of your time from that instant on planning your cross-country drive to Minnesota in the car you have yet to buy and fantasizing about your new apartment in Uptown Minneapolis which will ideally have a balcony and be in walking distance from the Bryant Lake Bowl. However, technically you are not done with medical school. You are in the middle of a rotation (Radiology at the time) and you have return to the hospital the next day to learn and study and attend conferences and work on your final presentation. You may have a couple rotations to go before you finish. This would indeed suck.

Fortunately, my spring schedule has worked out to my advantage.

A few months ago I was perusing my schedule for winter and spring quarters, and noticed that I was scheduled for things that, even though I had signed up for, I in no way wanted to do. For example. We are all required to do a sub-internship rotation during our 4th year. It is so titled because your responsibility level in this rotation is supposed to be similar to being an intern - ie, a first year resident. You are required to do it in a field of hospital medicine such as internal medicine, surgery, or pediatrics (nothing froofy like Emergency Medicine - of course that doesn’t count - how silly to even suggest it! Just because you have already done two demanding, responsibility-laden rotations in that, your field of choice, doesn’t mean they should count as anything more than the electives that they are).

Anyway, I found that, on a very odd whim last March, I had gotten myself signed up for a surgery sub-I at St. Vincent’s. Now, while I thoroughly enjoy the process of cutting through skin and messing around with people’s internal organs, I do not enjoy other aspects of the surgery rotation lifestyle. Namely, awaking at 4 am everyday, spending literally 15 hours each day at the hospital, holding retractors in uncomfortable positions for hours on end while attempting to field questions such as “describe the lymphatic drainage of the distal third of the pancreas.” Also, this rotation would have had me riding my scooter in the dark over the West Hills, a line of cars forming grudgingly behind me.

So what did I do? Like any other 4th year medical student who was getting used to the whole evenings and weekends off thing, I panicked. At the last possible moment, I dropped the course and signed up for one that proved to be much easier, much awesomer, and much less dependent on awakening before dawn (although I did have to get up at 6 am - a small sacrifice). It was a very fortunate occurrence.

As part of this schedule reorganization it came out that, due to the incredible amount of electives I took as a first and second year (like the Art of Healing where we literally sat on the floor the first day and drew pictures of our emotions), I only needed 1 credit during spring term - and that just to collect financial aid. So what did I do? I immediately dropped the month-long 6 credit rotation in Infectious Disease. I mean, really. How important is that?

Now, to my credit, I was attempting to schedule another emergency rotation abroad and I needed the time. Also, it appears that I am incredibly lazy and am trying to get away with the minimal amount of work possible. In all fairness, I have worked very hard in the past few years, and will soon be working even harder when I start my residency. Plus, dropping Infectious Disease has given me the opportunity to do what I am doing now:

A week-long “reading elective” in Toxicology! The nice folks at the Poison Center were kind enough to let me come back and hang around again for a short period, in exchange for a single credit. But while most people take their “reading elective” at home or at their friendly neighborhood bar, or perhaps on the beach in Cancun (the emphasis in these cases being on the quotation marks instead of what they surround), I am actually doing reading. And lots of it. I am currently spending the majority of my day at the Poison Center, scouring the literature for reports of colchicine toxicity. On Monday I went to the library and dug up old copies of JAMA and Spine from 1988 with funny old medical ads in them. I spent all day yesterday helping to write a “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” on two recent cases of fatal colchicine toxicity that we are going to submit later this week to the CDC.

Then later I will be able to say, “Oh yeah, that was the time when I submitted that MMWR report to the CDC” and people will say “Wow, you must be really motivated and not at all lazy” and I will reply “My point exactly.”

Later this week I might just do some research on pediatric Visine ingestions. Why? Because that’s just the kind of person I am. (And because they told me to).