Patient interview and journal club

Today we finally got to do our first patient interview. One of the patients is still in the hospital (actually, being transferred to the VA tomorrow, so our timing is excellent), so we got permission from the doctors taking care of him and went in to talk to him using the questionnaire that we've spent the last three weeks perfecting.

In the course of the interview, we discovered that this patient isn't quite like the others in our cluster of patients. For one, his symptoms were very sudden--he was found down in his barracks in Afghanistan and MEDEVACed to Landstuhl in Germany before being transferred to Walter Reed. Also, Stars and Stripes has already published what everyone believes to be the cause of his symptoms. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64432&archive=true

Well, we went through the entire interview anyway, and with any luck, the other patients in our cohort will get their interviews soon--we sent the questionnaire to the preventive medicine docs at Madigan, where two of the patients are now, and we're hoping they'll get those back to us fairly soon. With any luck, we'll find something publishable. Or, we can do what LTC Cersovsky and Dr. Scoville (the civilian epidemiologist) did a couple of years ago: publish in JAMA that they did an epidemiologic investigation of Acute Eosinophilic Pneumonia, and couldn't figure out what causes it.

That was our morning. In the afternoon we had journal club, this week's topic being rabies. I was assigned to discuss treatment of active rabies as well as to present the case of rabies being transmitted by organ transplantation. For anyone who watches Scrubs, that really did happen; they based the episode off the real-life events. It was actually a really fun journal club, because the second hour was spent discussing some cases that MAJ Soltis invented, most of which started along the lines of "That ER resident who has been calling you about possible rabies exposures all week calls you at 0300 to ask you what to do in the case of the...".

After journal club I had my evaluation session with MAJ Soltis. She said that I did such a good job, she's going to push for me to match wherever she's going to be next year. Seeing as she's trying to get sent back to Madigan, I don't know if that's such a good thing or not...