Friday, November 03, 2006

Altruism

Today was rather painful, but I can’t complain about getting out at 3:00. We had to go to pediatrics grand rounds at 8:30—a child psychiatrist who was triple board certified in peds, peds psych, and something else (psych?) from New Orleans spoke on various issues, I think mainly child abuse and the foster care system, but to be perfectly honest I was fading in and out the whole time. Unfortunately the auditorium was stadium seating so I didn’t feel comfortable playing Bejeweled on my PDA. It is really funny to see how people with different personalities react to different things—a student who also wants to be a surgeon verbalized my sentiments by telling me this rotation is killing her and that being a child psychiatrist is her worst nightmare, the student I was on CT with went up and spoke to the psych guy after because she thinks being a pediatrician+child psychiatrist would be the most fun job on the planet.

After grand rounds we returned to the nursery to present H&Ps. However, first we had to give a 5 minute talk on the process of fatty acid catabolism and how one would diagnose long chain acyl dehydrogenase deficiency in a child since yesterday none of us could remember how fatty acids were metabolized in cells. It went well, and fortunately only one of us (not me!!!) had to present an H&P. We were done by 11:00, so had two and a half hours off before going to our hour and a half lecture on (drumroll) altruism. The lecture ended up being (surprise, surprise) somewhat pointless. The problem is that they always pick the nicest, most likeable people to give these pointless talks, so one feels really bad complaining about it. Very sneaky.

I got spoiled for the last three months by leaving the house before most people are up. These last two days I have left right in the peak of traffic, so what used to be a blissful cruise straight down the highway for 30 minutes is now a frustrating 45-50 minute start-stop session that is making me want to tear my hair out.

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