Ear-Nose-Throat (ENT, or Otorhinolaryngology)
January 23, 1999 Saturday Hi all I This journal deals with natural holes in the head, as opposed to those created by surgeons. I just finished a 2-week rotation in ENT (ear-nose-throat), formally known as otorhinolaryngology – wonder why the specialty is not called ORL? ENT used to be EENT (eye-ear-nose-throat) until some people decided […]
Surgery: Code White, Part 2
January 6, 1999 Wednesday As I mentioned in part 1, the Departments of Surgery, Orthopedics and Anesthesia were on Code White last December 31-January 1. All residents and interns in these departments were on duty, no exceptions. Roll calls were done every 8 hours to check if we were still around (and still alive). Actually, […]
Surgery: Trauma Team, and Code White, Part 1
January 5, 1999 Wednesday Hello all and happy 1999! This is quite a belated greeting as I spent New Year’s Eve on duty and New Year’s Day trying to get enough ZZZZs to pay my sleep debt. But I’m getting ahead of my story. For the week of December 25 to 31, I was with […]
Finally Out of Surgery Wards
December 26, 1998 Saturday Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year! I had my last duty as a Surgery ward intern on Christmas Eve. No more PACU monitoring, at least for now! (PACU – post-anesthesia care unit; monitoring – checking vital signs). The best times of the past rotation at the surgery wards was when I got pulled out of duty to go Christmas caroling… wait a […]
Of Antacids and the Crazy Year of 2020
The article may be behind a paywall, but it offers commentary for the mental health issues as a secondary effect of the pandemic. TL, DR: There’s an increase in stomach acid when your body is stressed. The increase in stomach acid causes heartburn and reflux symptoms. A spike in heartburn and reflux cases at doctors’ […]
Surgery: Emergency Room and Outpatient Department
November 28, 1998 Saturday This is the journal for the first two weeks of Surgery. Surgery is gory and bloody and everything you’ve imagined – the most prevalent color here is blood-red. The Surgery-ER/OPD (Emergency Room/Outpatient Department) rotation consists of the first 2 weeks of Surgery (8 weeks). Interns are on duty at the ER […]
Training to be a Physiatrist (and Beyond)
I wrote some basic information about Rehabilitation Medicine in the first post for this category. You can read that here to refresh your memory. Specialty training in Rehabilitation Medicine occurs in residency (side note: it’s called “residency” because in the past, graduate medical education required the trainees to live in the hospital – thus they […]
How does a spinal cord injury affect your body? Part 1 of 4.
There really is no short answer to this question, but I’ll try my best to present this clearly, in bite-sized pieces and an organized manner. Mobility This is the most obvious clinical problem. Any part of the body above the spinal cord injury remains normal, while parts below the injury have no movement or altered […]
FAQ for SCI: Some Frequently Asked Questions about Spinal Cord Injury
BruceBlaus, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons We briefly tackled what an SCI is on the Resources for SCI page, but here’s a bit more in-depth information. To recap: the spinal cord can be thought of as an extension of your brain – it is made of nerve tissue that runs from the base of […]