Getting a week's worth of errands ran in 3 days

In case you couldn't tell from the title, it's been a fairly hectic couple of days, but nothing all that blog-worthy. After dropping Mom off at the airport on Wednesday, it's been pretty much nothing but trying to get everything that needs to be done in person in Ohio (which is quite a lot) done before I leave for DC.

On Thursday, I had my meeting with Dr. Para, one of the Infectious Diseases specialists I worked with on that rotation, about the letter of recommendation he's writing for me. The meeting went fairly well, and he suggested I ask Dr. Schlesinger, the chair of the Infectious Disease division, for another letter, since I did research with him the summer between my first and second year. Unfortunately, Dr. Schlesinger wasn't in the office for these few days, so I handled all that via email (I think that's how Dr. Schlesinger prefers to work, anyway). So now that's taken care of, and I have four letter writers (which is the minimum), so I'm good in that regard.

So then I spent some time cleaning the apartment before my optometry appointment that afternoon (yay for new contacts), and then a mandatory med 4 meeting, which was mostly about reducing infection by washing our hands, and increasing patient satisfaction and stuff like that. The patient satisfaction stuff was based on survey results, which are the least reliable source of data, so I spent most of that meeting trying to distract myself from jumping up and telling them that those numbers mean nothing. But they did give us all-important business cards to give to our patients (which I will not do, in case you're wondering). Here's what it looks like:

After that meeting was the first Military Medicine Interest Group meeting, which got a lot more people than we were expecting (but we had enough food for everyone, so it was all good). I think we answered a lot of people's questions, and that's always the goal. It's strange to be a fourth year now and be the authority on all these things, instead of being the one asking the questions, like I was a couple of years ago.

Yesterday was more of the same. I went to Target to print pictures of MMIG members in uniform doing all sorts of military medicine-type stuff for our display case (it has to be updated every year at the beginning of the year; we just put up new pictures each time), then I had my travel appointment at the Health Center for my Papua New Guinea trip. I only had to educate the nurse practitioner on one thing, mostly because I didn't give her a chance to get it wrong on anything else--I told her what medications I would like and which vaccinations I need. The one thing she didn't get was terminal prophylaxis for maleria, which is when you take a treatment dose of a medicine that kills the liver form of the disease after returning from a long trip (defined by LTC as >4 weeks), to prevent relapse. She had never heard of it, and had to talk to the doctor, who agreed with me. Unfortunately, they don't carry that drug in the pharmacy, and I only get insurance in that pharmacy, so that's going to be expensive.

After that was more running around getting stuff taken care of, such as turning in receipts for reimbursements and taking some old study books to the "book closet" to be used in a book sale (it's a bit like selling books to a used book store). Then Jeff, Adrienne's fiancee, came into town and took us out to dinner, and fun was had by all.