MedObsession on Twitter March 7, 2009

During the election I was pretty hooked to CNN for the political commentary.  The broadcasters used to always talk about Twitter.  They would post questions and then read the comments live on air.  I had forgotten about it until recently.  My intern has a crackberry like me and was on “TwitterBerry” one day.  He instructed me on the ins and outs of Twitter.  Basically, it’s like constant facebook status updates.  People can become “followers” of your page to stay up to date with your posts.  You can also reply to other posters’ updates as well.

My first reaction was that this seems way too invasive!  I heard that there was a celebrity “twittering” during the delivery of her baby.  So I immediately deactivated my personal twitter.  I decided that only my close friends and family need to know what I’m doing moment-to-moment, and they can get all the updates they need by calling and texting me.

However, I thought about my readers.  My blog has had increasing numbers of readers, with 4800 views alone last month!  I know that my time during Ob/Gyn residency will be limited, and thought this could be a good way to still stay in touch with my readers.  I created a Twitter page for my blog: http://twitter.com/MedObsession, this link is also post on my blog roll.  I’ve also subscribed to my own RSS Feed and displayed it in the right-hand panel under “twitter updates.”  For those of you that don’t have twitter you can read the updates on my own blog.  For those that do, you can click on each of the status updates and it’ll take you to the page to favorite it or to reply!

We’ll see how long I keep this up…

Back in the Lab January 13, 2009

Between my junior and senior year of college I did a summer program with Tulane University SOM: SPRITE – Summer Pipeline Research Iniative: the Tulane Experience.  This was an introduction to laboratory science and I loved it!  I ended up actually staying on with my lab for the rest of my senior year, and even did an oral presentation at ABRCMS.  Since starting medical school I’ve been part of 2 research projects that were clinical in nature.  While I enjoyed it, it’s definitely alot more hands off in nature. 

In March 2008, I contacted the chair of my department to see if there were any new research projects  in Ob/Gyn going on.  Turns out there was a project that was basic science in nature that was ready to move over to getting human samples.  I met up with one of his fellows and we started from scratch.  I did background research and wrote the IRB (Institutional Review Board), which the fellow then reviewed for me.  It was great to get involved with a project from this stage and learn about the IRB and the revision process first hand.  After submitting 2 revisions so far, we are in the final stage of approval.  In order to prepare for the project I’ve gone into the lab.  Another feature of this project is that I will get paged to go to Labor & Delivery to consent people for the research project and then attend their deliveries, where I will collect placental samples and amniotic fluid.  This is the perfect balance of basic science and clinical research!

Yesterday, we had a lab meeting and I think that I was lost for about 1.5 hours of the 2 hour meeting!  As much basic science as we learn in medical school, it’s just not to the degree that these PhDs know it.  I mean they are the ones that do all of this work on obscure things, and only when it has some clinical relevance do we really have to study it in medical school.  Today I went into the lab  to review DNA extraction protocols.  We did a DNA extraction from a mouse tail and it was pretty straight forward. 

The researcher that I am working with has been in research for 13 years, including 4 years in this lab in particular.  Despite the fact that his knowledge base is so much grander than mind, he’s great with teaching and answering my questions without making me feel like a dummy.  Being around all of these chemicals, centrifuges, and pipettes reminded me so much of my time in the lab at Tulane.  What’s missing is my old lab buddies!  I used to have countless hours of conversation with the grad students at my old lab.  I mean I really grew close to these guys like big brothers.  In fact, I went to one of their beautiful weddings a few years ago.  I’m not sure if I’ll develop that same relationship with my current researcher, since I’ll only be in the city until June (depending on where I end up for residency).  Nonetheless, I’m excited to be back in the lab and to see what types of results well get!

2 Year Blog Anniversary December 3, 2008

I can’t believe that another year of blogging has passed!  My blog has definitely grown over the year, as have I.  This post will be full of links to posts with the most hits over the past year, and to some of the ones that were important to me.  I first saw my monthly readership triple when I became syndicated in March 2008: I’m syndicated!.  My main topics included the transition from being a nervous third year medical student: Hmm…Excellent?, to a confident third year medical student earning honors in several rotations (Ambu Med, Psych, Medicine) and my proud moment of being selected for the medical honor society: Alpha Omega Alpha.  I also talked about my personal life and experiences with relationships: Long Distance Coming to an End, Valentine’s Day, Cooking for His Parents, and A Surprise Concert.  In addition, I polled the readers for opinions about things I don’t understand: Diamonds Are Forever, Right?, Insight into the Cheating Mind.  I even went on a game show, Deal or No Deal Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, which I now realize I never did a “Part 6″ post for.  I guess I owe you one.  My monthly readership then more than doubled again in July 2008 when I became a 4th year (MSIV, Finally) and started talking about applying for residency: Advice for Applying to Residency, ERAS Submission, MyERAS, taking boards: Step 2 Preparation, The Numbers, Step 2 and interviewing: Ob/Gyn Interviews.

Over my 2nd year here are some of the stats for those of you that are curious.  Check out the post from my 1st year: 1 Year of Blogging.  I put the total for each category with the amount from each year alone in parentheses to compare the years:

256 Posts (Year 2: 143, Year 1: 113)

470 Comments (Year 2: 325, Year 1: 145)

3144 Spam Comments (Year 2: 1983, Year 1: 1161)

21084 Visits/Page Views (Year 2: 17439, Year 1: 3645)

—-Best day ever: Year 2 – 376 (November 19, 2008); Year 1 – 85 (July 1, 2007)

—-Best month ever: Year 2 – 3316 (November 2008); Year 1 – 479 (June 2007)

To date, the top three pages are: “Ob/Gyn Interviews“, “About Me“, and “Step 1 Books & Advice“.

The top three posts are: “MyERAS“, “BRS vs Goljan Pathology“, and “Done with USMLE Step 2“.

As you can see I have quadrupled my annual readership, and my best month this year has 7 times more readers than my best month the prior year!  It is very exciting to have new readers and new people commenting on the posts as well.  I hope that you keep coming back to read!  Please pass on the link to your friends: www.medobsession.com.  That’s right, for those of you that may not have noticed, I bought my own domain!

Winning at the AAP October 13, 2008

This past weekend I was granted a weekend off from the ICU in order to fly out to Boston for the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting.  As I may have mentioned before, I came to medical school interested in Orthopaedic Surgery.  Even though I have since changed my mind about Ortho, I did want to finish up with the research that I’d done.  I posted a while back about my paper being accepted for an oral presentation for the AAP Section on Orthopaedics.

I arrived on Saturday evening and went to this event at the Boston Public Library.  Most importantly, they had free food, but they also had Irish dancers, people in Colonial clothes playing music and entertaining the kids, and they even had a room to enter your birthdate and get a printout of all of the historical events that occured on the birthday!  Then I went back to my room to go over my presentation and try to anticipate the questions that they’d be asking me.

I woke up at 6 am and then headed over to the hotel where my presentation would be to submit my presentation.  I was the third presentation of the morning (second medical student).  I got up there and barely had to look at my slides… I guess I’d inadvertently memorized them since I’d reviewed it so many times (my mind just works like that).  I was pretty nervous, clicking my nails behind the podium.  Then at the end I was asked 2 questions by attendings and 1 by a resident.  I was able to answer all 3 without my attending having to chime in!! I was so excited, considering my last oral presentation at a big meeting (in college), I ended up in tears since I was asked some pretty advanced questions.  At the end I walked away forgetting to unclip the mic from my lapel… what a klutz!  Anyhow, I decided to stick around for the remaining presentations (q10 minutes for the next 2.5 hours).  It was all worth it though!

The time came for the presentation of “Resident Awards.”  The moderator came up and started talking about how they usually only do resident awards, but this year they wanted to create an award for a medical student because the medical student representation and presentations were so strong.  He proceeded to say that the winner of the award gave an excellent presentation, and that he wouldn’t have known they were a student except because it was mentioned.  Guess who it was… me!  It was funny because since they did not anticipate giving an award to a medical student, they didn’t even have a folder for me.  Instead we took a picture of us with the resident’s folder and my name scrawled on binder paper.  Afterwards, he informed me that they would provide me with $250!!  On top of it all, my mentor/PI was there and told me to he’d post my certificate at the Shriner’s Hospital for Children where we did the research!  The moderator then told me that my research was excellent, and if that wasn’t enough, it was my presentation that did it because I was “smooth.”  I feel so honored to have earned this award.  I feel that my life is going so well right now.  I couldn’t be more thankful to my parents, friends, family, faculty, residents, and God.  I hope this continues through to Match Day .

Abstract Accepted! June 25, 2008

When I first started medical school I was interested in Orthopedics and ended up getting paired up with a Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon as a mentor through the AAOS Mentorship Program. I ended up doing a chart review and had sufficient data to write a manuscript. I submitted my abstract to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) annual meetings since it is relevant to both fields.

Anyhow, today I got this email:
We are pleased to advise you that your abstract has been selected for a Podium presentation at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2008 National Conference and Exhibition (NCE), October 11-14, 2008 in Boston, MA. Session details are as follows:

Orthopaedics
Date: Sunday, 10/12/2008
Session Time: 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM

I’m going to be doing alot of traveling this upcoming year between away sub-Is, residency interviews, a research conference, SNMA board of directors meeting x3/regional meeting/regional conference/national conference, and 2 weddings!

AAP Abstract Submission April 13, 2008

As you may remember, I was originally interested in Ortho.   I was working on this research project with my Peds Ortho mentor during the first part of my third year.  Over the winter break I finished the manuscript to submit for publication.  My mentor looked at it and said that I needed to make some revisions.  Once I decided that I was going to go forward with OB/GYN, I put the project on the back burner.  Yeah… 4 months later and I hadn’t done them since I was consumed with my boyfriend moving to town, rotations, and SNMA stuff.

So on Monday, I was talking to my mom about a meeting I had with an OB/GYN faculty member at my school and told her that he thought I needed more research.  Of course, he wanted me to help him with his upcoming project.  I was definitely feeling overwhelmed at the idea of starting yet another research endeavor!  She suggested I just finish up the Peds Ortho stuff.  So I looked online to see when the abstracts were due for the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting.  Turns out it was Friday, meaning I had 4 days to get it done!  I’m so happy that I talked to my mom, because that was the motivation I needed to look online for the due date and to complete what I had started.  I emailed the revisions to my mentor and he thought that they were great and gave me the go ahead. 

Announcements will be made as to whether or not my abstract was accepted in about a month or two.  I hope that this one turns out!

I’m syndicated! March 15, 2008

 So a friend of mine checked out my blog and wanted to know how to subscribe.  That made me realize, I didn’t even know what that meant!  So I called my tech-savvy friend who helped me set up this blog for some advice.  Basically, most sites (not just blogs) have this little orange icon on it or in the address bar.  When you click on the icon it will allow you to subscribe to that site.  I set up my personal RSS (really simple syndication) through Google Reader when prompted.  Now, instead of checking all these sites individually, I can just go to my Google Reader page and it pulls up all of my subscribed sites and I can sort it by which ones have been recently updated.

To help any of you that want to subscribe to my site, I put the little orange icon on my page next to the “recent posts” heading.  Now you can be in the loop, and updated whenever I update!

Check out this Wiki posting for what it all means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

New Research Project March 2, 2008

So up until this point, I was pretty sure that I wanted to do Ortho and so my research has been in both Ortho and Phys. Medicine and Rehab.  Now that I am changing to OB/GYN, I decided that I would reach out to the OB/GYN department to get involved with a research project.  It’s great, because one of the MFM fellows responded within 1 day!

So, we met a little over a week ago and she told me about 2 projects.  One was a really simple project that I’m sure that I could make a poster about, but it really just didn’t interest me and seemed too “fluffy” and cute, so to speak.  So since I told her that I wanted something more scientific, she told me about another project.  It deals with IUGR babies and the role of the GLUT-3 transporter.  The background paper I read was very remniscent of my days in the Micro/Immuno lab with Southern blots, gene sequencing, and my specialty: PCR, lol! 

The project is a go, and I’m so excited because I am involved in the project from the start.  I am actually writing this before I start writing the IRB for permission to work with human subjects.  The other great thing about this is that we are allowed to take 6 weeks for research during our 4th year.  This will offer me the chance to get into the lab and do some of the experiments on the samples that we obtain from clinic!

MySpace Blog Post #8 November 19, 2006

My Life… AAMS, Part 8
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Life

Wow… it’s really been 4 months since I’ve had a blog. I guess that’s what med school will do to you. Well clearly, I could write for days to fill in the space, but that would even be boring to me! And I’ve learned after last night, nobody really wants to know your whole life story.

So yeah, speaking of last night I was at this retreat for the Assoc. of Black Women Physicians (ABWP) in Newport Beach. It was nice to network and share experiences with the other med students and physicians. Along that same line, I have realized that my life is only at it’s beginning. I mean some of the things that these women have endured is amazing! But, shoot at the same time, some of it was down right depressing . I know that I have my down times, but I realize that now is the time to take control of my life and prioritize. I don’t wanna end up being the Chief of Surgery in some empty house with no kids and no man, or even worse with only a triflin man around. This weekend has definitely inspired me to sort out what I want in life and to be okay with not just what others think and say about me, but what I think about myself! At the end of the day I have to be true to myself.

Yeah, it’s hard to balance life when all of your best friends and boyfriend are on different schedules and different parts of the country. I found out that I got accepted to present my research at this Meeting, but of course it is the same time as 1 of my only 2 breaks from for the rest of second year. It’s always career vs. personal life!

Just some venting, and stuff to think about… off to studying Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Hopefully there will be another edition soon of “My Life As a Med Student.”