Vignettes of my greatest adventure.

Vi. "The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still." (Exodus 14:14) 23 years old. Second year allopathic medical student in the southwest. Currently raising a shiba inu while surviving med school.

[lithiumfrost-blog]

Friday, July 17, 2015

I helped deliver a baby while on-call with my preceptor. The experience was terrifying and beautiful. I could not tell whether it was I that was shaking or the woman giving birth. Perhaps it was the both of us. 

It is truly extraordinary what women can do. Having never even thought about having kids, I cannot begin to imagine the strength and love needed to endure the trials of pregnancy, child-bearing, and then child-rearing.

I watched as a hand emerge, and then a fuzzy head, an arm, and a finally, a small, gasping face and little feet as the infant experienced the world beyond the womb for the first time. And then he was crying against his mother’s chest. In that moment, as she held her son and looked into his face, I understood what is mother’s love.

[lithiumfrost-blog]

So I keep forgetting I'm a second year now.

"Hi, I'm Vi, I'm a first-year med--no, wait, I mean second year medical student. What brings you in here today?" *shudders*

[md-admissions]

Today, I declared someone dead. 

It wasn’t complicated like the brain death exam I remember learning in neurology as a fourth year med student. No, it was simple. Make sure they are not hypothermic. Listen for heart and lung sounds. Feel for a pulse. Check for pupillary and corneal reflexes. Call the time. Fill out the paperwork. The nurses helped me gather contact information; they were so gentle and graceful as family members filtered into the small room to grieve. 

I didn’t have the patient for more than three hours before she passed away. She was DNR/DNI; admitted to my team to pass away quietly and peacefully. She did just that. 

It wasn’t the death itself, or the sadness of the family members that will haunt me for the next few days. If anything, those are the things that made me feel better. This was the best scenario that could have happened for the patient and her family.

What I will remember will be the silence underneath my stethoscope when I pressed it to her chest. Knowing that I would hear nothing, but still hoping and wishing that I could hear the faint sound of a heartbeat, the whisper of a breath. 

The hollow, roaring sound of nothing. 

[newblogbye-deactivated20160111]

So You Want To Be a Surgeon

(For: Domonique Nichols)

Every surgeon has to learn how to hold scissors without nervous hands, how to break open skin and wound a body just to fix it. How can we mend a broken heart if we’re too afraid of getting its blood on our hands? There will be blood on your hands. If you are going to be something, then you have to learn to kill for it. Every surgeon has the power to kill, however life exists at the cusp of that incision. Look at your hands. There is blood running through your fingers and every line in your palms lead somewhere. Where? to your destiny, where the light shines like a fire burning down forest. 

Be scared, but do not fear. The nervous pounds in your blood are natural stimuli just as the rain that feeds the seeds in the ground that cause the herbs to grow. Fear is created from the voices of question, of failure–waiting for rain. But voices can be silenced like the way a wave rushes in and drowns a ship. Rain will come.  I hope your insides tremble when you whisper your dreams and you awake at midnight hours gasping for air. there is a call for you I hope you answer in passion. So you want to be a surgeon? Your first surgery starts here. Here, in the quiet hours where the world sleeps and darkness swallows you with anxiety…  Make an incision while you are awake. bleed, feel, ache, heal. Begin to remove and sew whatever it is that is holding you back. Release yourself from self arrest; because walls are only walls, they are built with the same hands you have to cut away. Get away, pull apart the jail bars, diseased parts and set yourself free. Look at what your hands can do.

Your hands can sew and mended a heart, remove cysts that grow in the mind of emotional hurt bodies, cut away fears and tumors of the past. You can leave a body working like an unbreakable machine.  Your hands can bring life. Your hands can fight back, your hands can love better, Hold tighter, and let go easier. So you want to be a surgeon? Have faith. Kiss your hands with belief, and hold your dreams like a trophy you haven’t seen yet. Hold on to your hope, cradle dreams, sew wounds, and love is always a scar on the body like a piece of art. So love like a heart beat at the will of your hands on an open operating table.  Throbbing, breathing, beating.

Your hands they are warm and loving as the sun even when winter digs up goose bumps on the skin. You’ll spend time planting gardens just to see its beauty. Loving like petals but I hope you love like a rose thorn and pierce someone’s side so much they wail out in pain but are still strong enough to kiss you like a ticking time bomb just went off. Every surgery you will ever have to perform begins now. It begins with you. And if you’re too afraid to cut off people like snapped branches or too in love to let go as the leaves leave the trees in winter then you will never be able to save a life. Spring will never come. So walk with your hands wide open, walk ready to give. Give, give yourself. Surgery begins with saving your own life. Your life lived is a fountain of beauty awed by the eyes of another. You keep giving and they live from your waters.

You are herbs in a bush, a twinkle in the sky and one day someone’s body will pray for your hands. Somebody’s body will thank your hands. You are beauty in flaw and an ocean that refuses to stop waving even in winter when no one visits the beach. Your smile is a candle in a cave, your laughter a soothing anodyne in the moment of pain. Breathe and let be. Your hands can move an orchestra so beautifully tears fall without notice. And when the song is done, the score keeps singing in the soprano whisper of hope. So you want to be a surgeon… make an incision down the middle of your own heart and carry it in your hands. Give it away. So you want to be a surgeon… cut the world in half and let the light in. Die for this, breathe for this, shine for this, live for this. And your very hands that cut the world open will sew the world back up. 

[lithiumfrost-blog]

Dear doctors, be kind to each other.

I met a young doctor who used to work under me recently. I had just completed my night rounds in the hospital and I was leaving for home. And then I saw him. He was unkempt, exhausted and appeared ...

“As I continue to mature and evolve in clinical practice I have encountered a variety of doctors. And most of them share a common trait.  They live under a grand delusion that their speciality is the only one that matters and worth doing. They have strong negative feelings about doctors who have chosen a different career path and have a deep seated urge to insult them at every opportunity they get.

This has to stop. Every facet of medicine is equally important.

As a clinical cardiologist I depend on the primary care physicians to detect and refer their patients to me early for cardiac interventions. It would be near impossible for me to screen all the patients with coronary artery disease in the population. I lean heavily on the cardiac surgeons for cases not amenable to minimally invasive interventions. The endocrinologists help us manage the difficult diabetics who need expert fine tuning of their insulin regimes. The emergency physicians are crucial front liners in diagnosing acute cases and stabilizing them prior to sending them to the cardiac care unit. The intensive care specialists help us manage the ventilated patients and are crucial to the running of our cardiology services.

Every single doctor provides an important aspect of patient care which complements the work of the other. We work like a grand complex machine where every part is imperative to the running of sound and safe clinical practice.  We are all equally important. And that is the often forgotten ‘stereotype’.”

[lithiumfrost-blog]

Recently finished first year.

I haven’t forgotten about this blog. Just been extremely busy, so I put it on the back burner for a bit... Also, I’m finding it difficult to find interesting things to write about other than long days of studying and doing research. Not sure what people would be interested in hearing about.

Updates since forever ago:

Got a puppy during the last block of first year.

Struggling to remember I’m a second year now.

Doing research over the summer.

[hostileshrubbery]

Asking how residency is going is like asking a drowning person if the water is a good temperature. 

[thenotquitedoctor-blog]

I literally laughed out loud to an empty room upon reading this one. I guess I’d better start preparing improvised flotation devices now before the waters become even more rough.

[fake]

When someone gives you directions but you go the wrong way

[lithiumfrost-blog]

Found my first fetal heart rate today!

Yes, I know it is very simple, but I haven’t posted in a loooong time due to block exams and increasing research hours, so I am going to celebrate my tiny accomplishment.. *sheepish grin*

[lithiumfrost-blog]

Kitties~ 😺🐾

[wordsnquotes]

People think of education as something they can finish.

Isaac Asimov (via wordsnquotes)

[ofcarnivora]

A wolf skull with bone pathology due to a tumor.

(source: taxidermy.net)

[morbidology]

[morbidology]

A shark egg, aka a “mermaid purse”.

[attackonstudying-deactivated201]

Knowledge is special. Even the greatest thief in the world cannot steal it. Materialistic goods can disappear from one moment to the next. But, knowledge is something that cannot fade away unless you stop learning.

My mother’s words of wisdom. (via attackonstudying)

Is this an Asian thing? Just wondering because my grandpa said the exact same when I was a child. :-)

[purity-z-deactivated20160910]

[o7filho]

[elasticcartoonheart-deactivated]

But who went up close and personal for this shot?

[wayfaringmd]

I'd just like to say that just because you're a doctor doesn't mean you know "more" about vaccines. It means you know what you've been taught by the medical field. Just like how the medical field was taught to push Gardisil, a vaccine that caused many deaths and MANY irreversible conditions, on their patients until people started to sue. NOW, doctors will STILL give patients the vaccine, which just proves doctors don't do what's "best" for people all the time.

Umm… I’m not even going to respond to this. Medblrs, fill in your responses if you like. I’m done responding to anonymous critics. 

[greyhuntress]

"a vaccine that caused many deaths and MANY irreversible conditions"

Source? Because I honestly want to know that “MANY” means to you. If you go on the cdc website they say that out of more than 20 million people vaccinated, only 32 died after taking it. And guess what the analysis concluded? The deaths were not related to the vaccine. And I only found two cases of the vaccine allegedly causing irreversible (neurological) conditions, both in France, and both without a proper result that can make any sane scientist doubt the safety of the vaccine.

And yet, if you look for just the right words, you can see websites claiming that those 32 aforementioned deaths of these poor girls were caused by the vaccine and that there were “more than 10,000 terrifying reports of adverse events”. Yup, terrifying symptoms like headaches, redness and dizziness. So life threatening. Definitely better to let 4,000 women die a year because of cervical cancer right.

I put only simple websites everyone can read here because I didn’t want to bother you with the hundreds of pages of academical research that were used to get to these conclusions. But hey, look, if you think that your google search ability is better and more reliable that the countless years of education doctors (and biologists. and chemists. and the other hundreds of pharmaceutical professionals involved in the process)  get all around the world (because these vaccines are not only reviewed and authorized in just one country), be my guest.

[cranquis]

[sweetbabyhamsters]