Journal club and more paperwork

Today was a bit of a wasted day, unfortunately. MAJ Soltis was going to go over vaccination principles with CPT Lee and me this morning; unfortunately, she found out at the last minute that she had mandatory training all morning, and essentially told us to make ourselves scarce, our we might get roped into it as well. So I spent the morning going over our patient records again, trying to figure out if there's something I missed the first time (nothing jumped out at me).

Right before CPT Lee had to leave to go to clinic at WRAIR (as a doctor, not a patient), MAJ Soltis gave us the guidelines to write an executive summary (EXSUM), which is a fifteen line brief for commanders, usually generals, who know nothing about medicine. So we put down some stuff about what we've found so far ("since 8 JUL, five soldiers have been evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan and hospitalized at Walter Reed Army Medical Center..."), and then CPT Lee took off and I ate my lunch.

This afternoon was journal club, which was a make-up from last week's journal club, when we didn't have a computer. So I sat through seven presentations about DA PAM 40-11, and then gave my own presentation on the last four chapters. It was fairly mind-numbing.

LTC Cersovsky, MAJ Soltis, CPT Ahluwalia, CPT Lee, and I (I must say, it's getting a bit old being the most junior officer around; everyone else is two ranks above me) discussed the 5th draft of the patient questionnaire as well as the EXSUM. We found only a few minor changes to make to the questionnaire, so I'm hoping that the 6th draft will be the last. The EXSUM, however, didn't fare so well. MAJ Soltis said it wasn't bad for a first EXSUM either CPT Lee or myself has written, but you know whenever someone says that it's not bad for a first try that they really mean that it's absolutely terrible. And it was. I think the only words from the first draft that will make it to the second will be "five patients", "Iraq and Afghanistan", and "Walter Reed Army Medical Center". Oh, well. I'm here to learn, right?

I got an email from the Army's First Year Graduate Medical Education (FYGME) coordinator (the person overseeing the Army Match for residencies) reminding us that we have less than a month until the 15 October deadline to get our applications. As if I really needed the reminder.