My DC housing search

Well, I realized the other night that I hadn't been writing about my DC condo search, so I figured I should fill you in.

My parents and I arrived in DC on Tuesday night. Dad had his meetings with various people on Capitol Hill, and Mom and I had an appointment to meet with the realtor on Wednesday morning. So we hopped on the Metro and headed out to Bethesda and met with the realtor. On Wednesday, she took us to various places in Rockville, Bethesda, and Chevy Chase, all fairly close to National Naval Medical Center (Bethesda), the future site of Walter Reed National Medical Center at Bethesda (combination of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and National Naval Medical Center, scheduled to occur in 2011). There were a few that looked really good on the inside, but looked like old apartments on the outside, so I wasn't too thrilled with those. Then there were a couple of high-rises, which I liked a lot better.

Anyway, on day two, we saw some more places in Silver Spring (closer to Walter Reed), and while the units themselves were nice, they were all in the same community, which was a children-and-dog type area--not really what I'm looking for. So we made plans to go back to one of the highrises in Rockville (2 metro stops from NNMC and USUHS, where I'll be spending my second year of residency). Friday I made an offer and filled out all sorts of contracts, so hopefully we'll be finding out soon if the offer was accepted.

Yesterday we met up with Melanie and went on a tour of the new Visitor's Center at the Capitol, then went on to the Newseum and spent some time wandering around there. Quite an interesting place. I'd recommend it if you're in DC with a few hours that you can dedicate to museum walking.

Anyway, here's a picture of the building where I made an offer. Sorry, I don't have any pictures of the unit (which would probably be entertaining, considering the bright gold that is currently on the walls).

Last day of the ACPM conference

Today was the final day of ACPM 2009, which was a bit sad. It was fun hanging out with medical students and doctors who have the same feelings on medical careers as I do (even if they are all bleeding-heart liberals who think that Obama is the savior of the known universe). Anyway, here's a brief run-down of the day (and I'll try to explain acronyms and abbreviations better):

1) One last breakfast with the MSS (Medical Student Section)

2) Listening to the explanation of Healthy Americans 2020, which is a repackaging of Healthy Americans 2010. Nothing's really changed. Pretty boring session.

3) Argued with some administrators/test-writers of the USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Exam; the Board exams) about public health and preventive medicine questions in the multiple-choice and standardized-patient portions of the exam. LTC (Lieutenant Colonel) Cavicchia (one of the OSU alums in preventive medicine) was taking my side, so I guess I wasn't too far off.

4) Lunch (not that exciting)

5) Great careers in preventive medicine-public sector session. This is where the CDC, Army docs, and state/county public health directors talked about their careers. Some of them were pretty impressive. CPT (Captain) Ahluwalia and I were essentially planning out the timelines of our careers (when he would take over from the current Army director at the Global Emerging Infections System and when I would take over from him, etc). I hope it works out that way!

6) Preventive Medicine challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan session. Needless to say, this one was geared toward the Uniformed Services Academy of Preventive Medicine (of which I am the lowest ranked member!)

7) Wrote a speech at the last minute for the awards banquet, and then gave it in front of all these impressive preventive medicine physicians, including my future residency director. Well, they said I did a good job, so I guess that's all that matters. And no, I didn't win an award, I was giving them--I was announcing the winners of the Future Leaders in Preventive Medicine grant, which is what paid for the other medical students to come (I was paid for by being a med student section officer).

Anyway, tomorrow morning it's off to the airport to try to get on an earlier flight on standby. Either way, I'll be home tomorrow.

Update from the ACPM conference

So I was going to write about significant events for each day of the ACPM (American College of Preventive Medicine) conference, but I got too lazy. Here's significant events of the first two days:

1) Met my new residency director. LTC Cersovsky, the current WRAIR residency director, will be getting promoted (as happens in the Army) sometime this year, so MAJ Mancuso will be taking over. I got to meet him, and everyone who has worked with him says he's a really nice guy and very smart, so that'll be a good experience.

2) Met another OSU alum in Army preventive medicine. MAJ Schnabel is a 2002 OSU College of Medicine alum who is currently the director of the Global Emerging Infection Surveillance at the Army's research facility in Kenya. He has done some pretty exciting things with disease surveillance in Africa, which really makes me want to have his job someday. He now makes five OSU alums/future alums I know in preventive medicine in the Army (one resident at Madigan, one resident at WRAIR, a staff member at WRAIR, him, and me). Pretty impressive for a school that doesn't emphasize preventive medicine in the curriculum at all.

3) Impressed the MSS (Medical Student Section). We had our annual MSS meeting this morning, and the members who were there seemed rather impressed with stories from PNG. One of the girls had done some public health work in Tanzania and also sees herself doing a lot of international medicine in her career, so we had a very long talk about that while socializing tonight.

4) Discovered that I get to add another publication to my CV. The project I worked with at WRAIR during my preventive medicine month has been made into a poster (CPT Ahluwalia, the resident--and OSU alum--I worked with that month will be presenting).

5) Been invited to join in another research project. Another WRAIR resident (CPT Manos) invited me to join in a project that involved WRAMC interns (of which I will be next year). It'll probably lead to a publication in a few years.

6) Been welcomed to the RPS (Resident Physician Section). CPT Ahluwalia is the RPS president, and I think he's grooming me to follow in his footsteps (being as I'm a fellow WRAIR Buckeye and all), so he's been taking care of me during the conference and talked me into coming to the RPS meeting and is trying to get me to run for an officer position (as an intern!). He's also been trying to convince me to go to Johns Hopkins for my MPH, which is what he did.

7) Networking, networking, networking! I'm meeting so many interesting people with very interesting careers in the field, and I'm getting very excited about the possible things that I can do, both in the military and if I decide to leave when my commitment is up (in eight years).

So far, it's a really great conference, and I'm looking forward to learning more tomorrow. As for now, it's time for bed.

The never-ending day

Wednesday, February 11 began at 5:15am in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. After a quick shower and packing everything that didn't get packed the night before, I helped myself to breakfast and checked my email again before getting in the taxi at 7am, headed for the airport. Check-in went rather smoothly, although we discovered that my itinerary required me to get an Australian visa (which they were able to handle at the POM airport), and I found myself with some time to kill before my 9:40 flight (which left at 10). I occupied some of that time by buying a six-pack of South Pacific beer for the brothers as a souvenir at the duty-free. Unfortunately, they'll never get it—it was confiscated by customs in Sydney. I guess it's the thought that counts, right?

It was an uneventful (thankfully!) flight from POM to Brisbane, and then I grabbed my bag, went through customs, checked my bag in again for a domestic flight to Sydney, took the train to the domestic terminal, and had just enough time to buy a bottle of water before boarding the plane to Sydney. Then in Sydney it was another transfer from the domestic to international terminals before it was time to go through customs again (this time for departing Australia). This layover was a little longer, which gave me time to peruse the duty-free in Australia (I bought crocodile and kangaroo jerky to replace the confiscated beer) before hopping on a nine hour flight from Sydney to Honolulu, most of which I slept through (thankfully).

I was awake for the last two or three hours, which gave me time to start reading a book I bought at the Sydney airport called A Doctor's War, by Rowley Richards, a former Australian Regimental Medical Officer who was captured in Malaysia during the Second World War; the book is from his diaries of his time spent in the POW camp. I'm not done with it yet, but so far, it's an amazing book, right up there with A Surgeon In Combat by an American Army battalion surgeon in Europe during this same period. Many of the things Dr. Richards writes about I have experienced myself as a young, future medical officer in the Army in a time of war. One thing that really rang true to me is his descriptions about his excitement about seeing combat, which in the wisdom of his older years (after having been a POW) he scoffs at as youthful ignorance. I will admit, I have experienced the same anticipation about deployment, which I am sure will happen, it is just a matter of when and where. I know it is youthful ignorance, and I know that my preconceptions about what the life of a doctor is like in a combat zone are probably 90% false, but those feelings are still there, and I am sure that someday, like Dr. Richards, I will look back and wonder why I looked forward (if that is even the right term to describe it) to being deployed. Still, what I have read so far is very powerful, and I'm very impressed with what Dr. Richards went through and how he managed to continue working as a RMO during his time as a POW. And all of that was in the tropics, so he was dealing with things like malaria and dengue fever and tropical ulcers, most of the time without any medications (the Japanese confiscated their medicines); he wrote about applying good hygiene and preventive measures in a time when such ideas weren't popular at all. He's now a preventive and occupational medicine physician (well, he's now semi-retired, but he was a preventive/occupational medicine physician), so there's another reason for me to look up to him. I hope if I'm ever in conditions half as bad as he faced that I can show the same initiative and integrity that he writes about.

But anyway, back to the never-ending day. I ended up landing in Honolulu around 9am, still on Wed. Feb. 11—in other words, I landed before I left PNG, which made me laugh. I had to calculate time zones to determine if I should take my anti-malarials or not (I did, including my first dose of my terminal prophylaxis on primaquine), and then wasted time on the internet in the Honolulu airport (I would have rather been at the beach, but we don't always get what we want) until it was time to board for the last leg of today's flying, a five-hour flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles, where I will be for a few days for the American College of Preventive Medicine conference. I'm still on that flight as I'm writing this, to be posted later.

Overall, it's an exhausting 30 hours of travel time (not counting my flights from Kikori to POM “yesterday”)—all of which spans 11 hours on the clock (10am in PNG to 9pm in LA). I'm just hoping that my sleep won't be so disrupted that I'll miss out on important parts of the conference.