Five Years

Dear Journal Subscribers, I was cleaning out my e-mail files and found the following essay, which I had written sometime in March [1999] I think it serves as a fitting postscript to the journal – “closure”, as they would say. For the past five years of medical school I’ve walked to morning mass at the […]

The Last Issue

May 6, 1999 Thursday Dear On-Line Journal of Internship Subscribers, HELLO EVERYBODY!!! I had meant to send you an earlier journal issue (sometime during the last week of April) but unfortunately our computer monitor decided it was overworked and short-circuited. Mom put a sign on the computer: “Computer out of order, do not use.” And […]

Pediatrics and Community Medicine: 19 Days to Go

April 1, 1999 Sunday Dear On-Line Journal of Internship Subscribers, Hi everybody! Long time no write. Because there’s nothing much to write about 😀 and the server was down for a week sometime in the beginning of April. My last issue was 30 days ago and about the Pediatrics Emergency Room. Since then, I’ve gone […]

Pediatrics: The Nursery

March 2, 1999 Tuesday Nursery rotation is divided into two: the delivery room duty and the nursery (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, as it is technically called). Delivery room duty is 24 hours, in which one does not see the light of day. The intern is just cooped up in the small “transition nursery” near the […]

Pediatrics: Wards and All

March 6, 1999 Saturday Dear everyone, This is the long-overdue journal issue on my 2-week stay in the Pediatrics wards. I’m so glad it’s only 2 weeks. In the past years, the ward rotation was 3 weeks You see, a new curriculum was implemented for our class, which is why the ward rotation (and Pediatrics […]

Pediatrics: The Emergency Room

March 13, 1999 Saturday Hello everyone, and welcome to the journal issue about the Pediatric Emergency Room. It used to be called the PAS, or Pediatric Admitting Section. But since the Department or Emergency Medical Services (DEMS) changed the whole ER (emergency room) set-up, it’s now called the Pediatric Emergency Room. Not much difference besides […]

Ophthalmology (I’ve Got My Eyes on You?)

February 7, 1999 Sunday Dear On-Line Journal of Internship Subscribers, Hi! This is the entry for Ophthalmology, which I don’t particularly like. Eyesight is important for most activities of daily living, and it is amazing how super-specialized eye doctors are, but it’s so… small. All that attention to a small part of the body. Besides, […]

An ENT Postscript

January 23, 1999 Saturday This is a postscript to the Ear-Nose-Throat blog entry. P.S.: Jan. 22 was the sort of our informal countdown for the end of internship, as it was “’99 days for class ‘99″. I made computer-generated stickers and posters for the occasion, and have been wondering if I could do this for […]

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, […]