i heart julio

Hello! Here I am again.
The semester is at last winding down...which means we still have 3 weeks left. I must admit I am mildly sad to not be on campus anymore, because I love SLC and I like the U campus. Last week I rode tracks and I felt like such a city gal--with all the 13 year olds and homeless people who were riding along. But it's so nice here in summer! 100 degrees is so perfect (if you're in the shade), and I haven't noticed the haze being too awful lately.
So the past few fridays have consisted of a few Head Start physical days, which is ALL children, ALL spanish, ALL day. It's kind of fun...when the kids don't start screaming and crying. But I usually win them over with my sweetness pretty easily. Didn't really find anything too exciting on any of them, but we are at least performig a service that is needed and appreciated.
I haven't been in my regular clinic much lately due to holiday, preceptor being in Mexico, and head start, but I'm finally starting to feel really comfortable in clinic! I've been more aggressive about doing my own patients, speaking spanish, and doing more than just URIs and sinus infections. In fact, my guy was busy at one point so I just went and did an entire H&P on a spanish-speaking female, felt comfortable with my history, physical findings, diagnosis, and treatment plan (en espanol!). I went to find him to present, and asked him to auscultate her lungs to be sure I didn't miss anything there (sometimes it's so subtle I have a hard time catching anything) and as I was finishing charting on the computer he said "well you heard that murmur right? That's a pretty obvious one". Um, no I did not! That has been my goal all year is to catch a sweet murmur that he missed!!! Bummer. So I listened again, and sho 'nough, there it were. She was ~30s and hadn't ever been told she had one before! Que milagro but que pena. It was totally benign and nothing that needed follow up, so she wasn't upset, but---I maybe was a little.
I have in fact done other things lately other than school as well. My buddy from class got me to run a 10K, then a 10 mile, and another 10k tomorrow, and then a few 1/2's this fall. It would be fine other than I haven't trained...at all. I pretty much didn't run in between any of the last 3 races, so probably not super smart, but they are fun races and hey, who doesn't need more white T shirts that will never be worn?
We have an emergency medicine mid-term wednesday, followed by an oncology exam next monday, followed by a clinical skills-type test, followed by getiarics, then EM final...then done! Today was my first clinical exam test. We are given a one-line pt complaint about a week ahead, then we go in to the clinical skills area at the med school (which are a bunch of rooms set up like an exam room in a clinic), our patient is a student from the class after us, and we are videoed performing our history and physical, then one of the faculty members who is watching it comes in and asks us our differential diagnosis and treatment plan. Today was headache (woohoo), which could have been really tricky (so I was of course totally prepared for that), but they made it quite straight forward, and I think my faculty person evaluating me was a little suprised that I didn't leave anything out an in fact did an extra-amazing exam (maybe that was just my opinion...) Actually I was suprised at how well I did, so that's slightly reassuring before we go out into rotations. I also found out today that I will (most likely, it's still not ABSOLUTELY for sure, but it's a bigger probably now than it has been) be starting at the community health center in Provo, which is what I wanted. I'll be there 8 weeks instead of 4 because it will count for peds too which is good, because who wants to do a full-blown, all peds all the time rotation? As far as I know it's pretty much ALL hispanic patients so that's also what I wanted. AND, I found out yesterday, that I will likely get a grant from SEARCH, which has funding for underserved rotations (like alaska and indian reservations as well). So that would be cool.
More to come about the rotations fiasco; it has been a horrible hot-mess of drama, and very very frustrating. I have been feeling lately that I should have just gone to medical school because the program has not been handling rotations well at all and it's a little ridiculous for how long this program has been around, the ranking they have, etc. It will all work out though I guess, but long story short, I can no longer do the Thailand rotation or the trauma rotation which are the ONLY TWO rotations I was dead set on since last year and the only 2 I was not flexible on. So that's great.
Anyway, I have to watch "so you think you can dance" because I missed it last night! Oh, I mean study.
Happy independence day!