Sobriety, a dish best served in med school...

Last May, while getting my immunizations and screenings to enroll in med school, I came back with a positive PPD test - I've been exposed to tuberculosis... In case you don't know much about TB, you can wikipedia it if you want to know what it's all about (side note: I recently donated 5 dollars to wikipedia, mostly because I appreciate how almost all of my questions during 1st year of med school can be answered on the site. ANYWAY, I was exposed to Tb, mostly likely in Venezuela two years ago. After testing positive I was immediately sent to get a chest x-ray, which came back clear. Good news, for the most part - It's not an acute problem, and I can't give TB to anyone else.

Normally nothing happens after this, and the patient with latent TB is just routinely checked to make sure they dont start to develop active TB, which can be spread to others, and must be treated with a ridiculous amount of powerful antibiotics. However, I am involved in health care so it is important for my safety and the safety of others that I rid my body of this obnoxious bacteria, meaning I take 9 months of a drug called Isoniazid (you can wiki that too if you like). This is an antibiotic I take daily, along with a vitamin B supplement to limit the chance I get nasty side-effects like neuropathy.
Now that I'm taking this powerful antibiotic I have to get my liver enzymes checked every month to make sure my liver is functioning alright and not being damaged, which also means I should avoid anything that can lead to liver damage like alcohol or the active ingredient in tylenol (acetaminophen).

This littles story of mine leads me to the original inspiration to write this: As I sit in the Boston airport, ready to head back to Seattle, I really want something I can't have - a beer from the stupid airport sports bar 20 yards to my left. This is the first true craving I've had since starting my antibiotics almost a month ago. I recognize the reason for this is probably because I haven't been bored in the last month - school, constant exams, studying, cutting up cadavers, having a girlfriend, studying, studying, cooking a meal here and there... this all adds up to almost no free time and hence no real opportunity to enjoy a drink. With that I'm pretty happy that now is the time I'm doing this treatment. The only major downside is that the holidays are starting up, which means family, good food and great wine, the latter I will be abstaining from... because I don't want liver failure.

Cheers!

The Sharewood Project

Here is a link for a segment that nbc news aired on the Sharewood Project - a free clinic run by tufts med students that I've been volunteering at since I arrived this summer. Yep, a lot of people in the video are people I know pretty well. How neat is that!?!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/40182965#40182965

I'm no expert, and I don't get pregnant! - Medical Student Panel

Today was my first experience on a "medical student panel" for a conference that was being held at Tufts. I can remember being on the other side as an undergrad and wondering how the med students were so relaxed, settled with their life - I assumed that they must be so hard working, accomplished and at the top of their class. Now I'm on the other side of the panel, telling a group of undergrads about what I did to get to medical school, why I made the decision to take a year off of school after graduating, why I decided to take this route, how I'm adapting to life in Boston, and why I chose Tufts. I was not the top of my class, I wasn't some crazy smart kid who set the curve in my science courses, and I didn't know that I wanted to go into medicine until after entering college (I wasn't absolutely sure until my third year in school).

I have to admit, it felt pretty good to be viewed as an "expert" in the medical school application process, and it felt great to look back and realize that I've actually accomplished some pretty neat things. This is easily forgotten, with major exams every 2-3 weeks, and feeling like I'm just plugging away, constantly studying, with my head down, pushing through the hard science courses.

One of the undergrads, asked a question about family planning. She originally focussed the question on the women, but I felt that it also pertains to men, including myself (No, men don't get pregnant - I should know, I'm a medical student!). As med students, we all plan. It's no mystery to us that some specialties make it more difficult to be an active parent (surgery), and for that reason I have a couple friends who know when they want to get married, pregnant and how they will handle family life with residency. It's nuts - in the last 3 months I've had more conversations about family planning than I have in the last 3 years (I actually don't know if thats true, but it feels that way!). Whenever this question comes up I usually see myself in a specialty that allows me to be involved with my future family (whoever they end up being). That is one of the benefits to Emergency Medicine, you can work part time, set your hours, and when you leave the hospital you are not on call. That freedom, I feel, would decrease stress and allow my life to be more flexible... so we'll see if this is what I actually end up doing.

Time to put my head back down and hit the books!

(Photo is from my halloween weekend in SF - view from my friend's apartment that he recently moved out of)