Last night, I went out for drinks with my friend Sunil, who is now a surgical intern at Bethesda (note: never go out for drinks with a sailor when you have to get up the next morning to listen to a briefing... ugh). Anyway, he's on a urology rotation right now, and had a fairly entertaining story about commander's coins (see my post on June 25), so I thought I'd share it.
The other day, one of his last patients for the day was a Vice Admiral (equivalent to a Lt. General; 3 stars). So he takes the history and does the general physical exam, and then because he's on urology, did a prostate check (digital rectal exam, or DRE), and then sent the patient out the waiting room while he finished his note or something. A couple of minutes later, he goes out to retrieve the patient, and the waiting room is empty. The receptionist said she thought he was done with the patient, so she sent him on his way. So Sunil had to go up to Executive Health and figure out how to track down this three-star admiral and finally gets a hold of him on his cell phone (he was still on base at the commissary or something), and asks him to come back to the clinic so they can finish the appointment. So the admiral comes back, they finish the appointment, and then they shake hands at the end. Sunil said he felt something round and hard in his hand; sure enough, he had gotten a coin, which he described as "very shiny, with three stars prominently displayed." At this, I had to laugh--that must have been a really good DRE to get a coin out of it!
Other than that, it's been a pretty boring since my last post. I went up to Baltimore this morning for the last part of the Deployment Health Surveillance workshop and then came back to the hotel to do a literature search related to the epidemiological investigation I've been assigned to work on this month.
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