Remember remember the month of December?

Because I certainly don't.  November... clinical chemistry.  The day after November.  Work.  8 AM on December 31.  No longer work.  Party downtown for NYE and then burn rubber for New Orleans before anyone else can page me.

I'll back up.  As I've mentioned previously, now that I'm a high and mighty second year (though since it's a four year residency, still a junior resident), I can take call.

I probably explained this in a previous post, but I'm too lazy to look back, so quick recap.  Most pathology residencies have people take call a week at a time.  You are on call starting at 5 PM on Monday night until 8 AM the next morning and that's the pattern.  You then take call from Friday at 5 PM straight through until Monday at 8 AM.  If there's a holiday during the week (like Christmas), it's like the weekend, you're on for that entire time.

There are two types of pathology call: AP (anatomic pathology) and CP (clinical pathology).  AP is the headache that frequently requires you to come into the hospital.  Surgery is running late or got scheduled on the weekend and they need tumor margins?  AP.  LifePoint has a potential donor kidney but needs to evaluate whether it's viable for transplant at 2 AM?  AP.  Medical autopsy between Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon?  AP.  Patient is immunocompromised and may have a necrotizing fungus in their lungs?  AP.

CP is all the lab stuff.  Authorize nonstandard or nonindicated blood transfusion?  CP.  Transfusion reaction?  CP.  Stool cultures?  CP.  Oops, someone forgot to label a specimen may I pretty please oh please I swear I know it's the right patient, PLEASE let me come down and relabel it?  CP.  CP is far more likely to roust you from sleep at 3 in the morning, but typically requires a series of exhausted phone calls rather than rushing out the door with wet hair pulling your sneakers on.

For our first year of call, we are supposed to take AP and CP weeks separately so we don't get overwhelmed.  The thing is... you can have a call week with virtually nothing... maybe three phone calls for the entire week and one frozen section that keeps you at the hospital until 6 PM.  OR you can have your pager go off constantly, fill your weekend with complicated autopsies that you're forced to pause to deal with other calls.

For December, I was on my old friend surgical pathology, which really heats up at the end of the year as everyone attempts to get in their surgeries before they have to pay a new insurance deductible.  People also may also have a week off around Thanksgiving or Christmas or have it easier to arrange so they can put their surgeries then (making a depressing holiday, I'm sure).  So December was beating me to death in general.  Just to get to our own office Christmas party required two other residents tag teaming to get all my specimens handled by 6:30 P.M., which was a job that otherwise would have taken me until 10.  Boyfriend was cooking for me a great deal of the time.

But then Christmas week... that was my call week, as the second years tend to get the holidays.  We lost a resident to family stuff who was my co-call person, which meant either take both calls or cost someone their Christmas.  I figured how hard could it be, and had several reassurances that Christmas is a slow week which turns out to not be entirely true.

Here's the thing... the most junior people are the ones stuck on Christmas, present company included, which means the hospital runs at half staff with the lowest people on the totem pole, who are the most likely ones to be calling me with weird questions, a lack of justification for why they're calling me, and reasons for procedures like "My chief wants the values to be X".

So during the week of Christmas, my pager went off 41 times.  I had autopsies and frozen sections and SO many mislabeled specimens and bizarre requests.  As the week progressed and my grinchitude grew dire, I was pretty much saying no to anything that couldn't be considered irretrievable (like lumbar puncture specimens or brain biopsies).  I did the longest autopsy in the history of autopsies just because the darn pager kept going off.  I took to referring to it as "the wife" because it kept frigging nagging me.

My mom also got to be in town for Christmas, which unfortunately didn't leave me much time with her due to the above.  Unfortunately she got to see the absolutely least exciting/sciencey part of my job "What do you mean you didn't label a random urine catch?  No, you can't relabel it.  Yes, you do have to call the patient back." and not the good stuff.  She also saw me swear at my computer a lot since the apps you need to access really like to bug up when you're on a deadline.

During this time, keep in mind that except for the actual holiday, when you're taking call from home, you're still doing your normal duty hours, and except for Christmas Eve, it was kind of a nasty week.

So when I got off call at 8 AM on New Year's Eve and did the official hand off of my cases, I actually said "If anyone has any difficulty with anything I did last week, I don't want to hear it.  My first week of dual call... I am officially above criticism."  And to everyone's credit, I haven't heard a word about it.

But I handled it.  Gone is all the panicky nonsense from last year, replaced by an aggravation by heavy workloads and unrelenting paging, but I overall like my job and feel like I'm getting better at it, which is awesome.

NYE was pretty fun.  Ended up going to a party at a bowling alley/bar/arcade/silent disco (?), had a hotel downtown, and avoided getting completely ridiculous like I did last year (though in my defense, that was a few days after the house went).  But I knew I needed to be unhungover for the drive to Nola via Jacksonville because hooray.  Replaced my hurricane glasses that got torched last year, got some great cajun food up in Baton Rouge, where it's 15 dollars cheaper, and bummed around Frenchmen street listening to great live music that involved songs that were not hacked up covers of Play that Funky Music.

Came back to cytopathology, which I'm loving far more than I expected.  So in surgical pathology, they deal with larger specimens, at least biopsies, so you are not just getting a cell that may look cancerous, but it is in the context of the surrounding tissue architecture.  For instance, your body frequently gets violently pissed off about getting invaded by cancer, so even when you don't initially see the actual tumor cell, you see the surrounding reaction to it.

Cytopathology deals with single cells, either from aspirates from suspicious tissue so that if it's nothing, the patient is only subjected to a deep needle stick and not a full surgery, or fluids that aren't blood (hematopathology's territory).  For instance, urine is supposed to be relatively cell-free.  People with bladder cancer; however, may shed those cells into the urine where we see them and go "AHH  Bad Nucleus!".  Any fluid that's accumulating around the lungs or in the abdomen, we check for cancer or bacteria.

It's teaching me about problems at a cellular level so I'm getting to know the features to look for, which will help me for surgical pathology particularly for sneaky cancers like melanomas, which the surrounding tissue may ignore.

We also see patients when we go on aspirates.  Granted, we barely speak to them and we *definitely* don't tell them what we see other than "this specimen is adequate" since the last thing a patient wants to hear is a positive cancer diagnosis by way of a complete stranger looking into a microscope near your feet and going "Holy crap".  Rapport fail.  The process is important though.  We literally influence the number of times a clinical has to stick a needle into someone's neck.  And they get frustrated with us for it.

What else.. we had a sudden warm snap, which was awesome.  It coincided with a visiting Jersey friend, which led to a beach day, a failed surfing attempt (on my part; not on her part; that crap is harder than it looks), so she finished off the surfing day while I drank beach juice (tm) with Boyfriend and Friends.

So that's what I've been up to.  Another call week is heading up on me, so I'm throwing myself into restaurant week to go out with a bang.  Unfortunately, holiday baking + stressful month + no exercise due to workload + New Orleans + Restaurant Week = the next three months of broccoli and treadmills.

Another month of surg path down

Why are there so many Christmas trees around?

Oh right, the holidays... so today was the last day of work; I raced home, swinging by Charleston Beer Exchange to buy my roommate a "thank you for ferrying me to the airport at the break of day" six pack hand picked by a man with a moustache that said he was up to the job, then home to do the *absolute* worst packing job I've ever done in my life, and now, en route to bed as I wash my last shirt.

Warning to cousins: I may end up wearing bathing suit bottoms and a winter jacket. Not a good packing day for me.

This month has been an interesting one. As I've mentioned, I'm feeling more "getting the hang of it" in surg path. This is partially related to learning how all the systems work and what's supposed to go to what, which is a far greater contributor to competence than... you know... knowing what's under the microscope.

There's a certain logic that's emerging that seems absolutely obvious now most of the time but just wasn't when I started. Example...

My first month on, I had a uterus with potential endometrial cancer. I asked for help and was told to submit as much of the endometrium as possible, since obviously, that's where the cancer is.

So I proudly scraped every bit I could find off to make sure there was no spot unsampled. Bring on sign out... "Do you have any sections showing the depth of penetration into the myometrium?"

"Huh?"

"The most important prognostic criterion?"

"Uh... I scraped it off."

"You SCRAPED it OFF?"

(Puppy frown)

Fortunately, the beleaguered attending was able to salvage some unmutilated sample from the specimen, but not a proud day for me. Looking back, I have no idea what possessed me to think that would be a good idea. I wrote some of it down in my notebook so that I never go fully butt wild on a noob because I'm already realizing how much of an idiot I was a whole three months ago. By the time I'm in fourth year, it's going to be insane.

Part of my increasing, let's say "comfort", with my current lot in life is only now realizing that other people are going through *exactly* the same thing I went through.

Ishie, having mastered the art of "track down the screwed up slides" is charging through the halls between the resident on yesterday and the histo lab, is stopped by colleague who looks close to tears.

Colleague: "Um... do you know anything about... um... pancreas?"

Ishie: "Ah... my archnemesis. Not really. Sucks macro; sucks micro, gotta go".

Ishie sees colleague later, who is on hour 4 of read out or what I like to call "staring impotently into a scope until someone either helps you or you panic and then stop caring".

Ishie: "How'd it go?"

Colleague: "I hate pancreas."

Ishie peers in scope... "Breast, eh?"

Colleague: "I have four more... is it bad... I feel like I just don't care."

Ishie: "Diagnostic inertia."

Colleague: "This isn't cancer. What is that?"

Ishie: "I'd probably hedge my bets and call it sclerosing adenosis. It's probably wrong, but shows you were paying attention."

Female voice from dictaphone: "...Goodbye."

Colleague: "No!! You bitch!"

--------------------

While grossing placentas, which is tedious.

Ishie: "Dammit."

Different colleague: "What?"

Ishie: "This umbilical cord inserts but then, it's membrane bound all the way to the edge, and I don't remember what that's called."

Different colleage: "Where's the actual insertion point?"

Ishie: "Central. What should I call it?"

Different colleague: "Central."

--------------

Other colleague: "This is case SP-76-7872, patient's name is Jane Doe. Preop diagnosis of missed abortion. Specimen A is received in formalin in a container labeled with the patient's name, medical record number, and... wait a minute" (presses rewind)

Dictaphone: "Please scan the bar code."

Other colleague scans bar code: "beep"

Other colleague: "GODS. This is case SP-76-7872, patient's name is Jane Doe." (presses rewind)

Dictaphone: "Please scan the bar code."

Other colleague: "I'm going to break this phone."

I have done every single one of these things. It makes me feel peaceful. It also makes me feel good to be the go to girl among first years for prostate. It's a weird source of pride but there you have it. I'm good at prostates. I looked at so many at Brooklyn Hospital that it just stuck, so now I can scan away on forty slides feeling downright zen despite getting twisted into indecisive convulsions at trying to phrase "This guy has a giant icky infected boil in his arm" into pathology speech.

But enough with that! No more surge path this month or this year, and I'm off to see my family! I haven't seen any of them since I took my step 2 CS and my uncle ironed my white coat for me while my aunt took me shopping and my cousins took me drinking. I'm full of awesome sauce for it.

Happy Holidays everyone!!! May your ovaries all stay manageable sizes!!!!

That time of year

Merry Xmas or Winter Holiday of Choosing everyone!

Here in New Bern, it has gone from being "holy crap, I finally acclimatized to the Caribbean and now this" cold to being "holy crap, I didn't acclimatize enough to the Caribbean" warm, so I broke down and briefly turned on the AC.

I grabbed my tree today, and late in it (thank you, Walmart, and your willingness to torture your staff), so now the apartment proudly sports a fake tree made entirely out of green tinsel both because I didn't read the box carefully enough, and because the only other tree they had that didn't involve the words "fiber optic" or "red" in the title was 200 dollars. Nooooo.

Surprisingly, despite my initial scoff of disdain upon opening the box, it came out looking fairly decent, particularly once I covered it with ornaments. I thought I'd ended up with something that was on the sliding scale between "pastel glowing nativity" and "singing plastic fish".

So the presents are all carefully wrapped; the stockings are not exactly hung by a chimney nor with any care, since no chimney due to no fireplace due to fireplace being obsolete when it's 70 degrees.

Woot! Holidays! Double woot! No studying until January 5th-ish, at which point I delve back into my books to torture myself for the Step 1. Maybe Santa will bring me a smart kid to take it for me.