Sick professors and endless didactics

So, it's been awhile since my last post... sorry. There's just not a lot going on in Dodd Hall.

I had a couple of new patients yesterday--a man who was ejected from a single-car crash on Jan. 31 and a woman who had had a burst aneurysm in her head after being pushed against a wall at work (a center for "troubled" teens). The woman is rather easy and probably won't be at Dodd for very long, but the man has quite a few problems, including a broken pelvis (surgically fixed but still healing) and several other surgical sites. He also has quite a lot of pain in his foot due to nerve damage. The hospital where he was staying since the accident (not OSU) had him on all sorts of narcotics, which aren't that great for nerve pain, so we're working on changing him over to better medications. It'll be a long process, but on the plus side, his brain injury isn't too bad, so he might actually get to return to a somewhat-normal life, unlike many of the patient on the traumatic brain injury service.

This morning I saw these patients, then headed over to Children's for didactics and a quiz this afternoon. The topic this week was domestic violence and children with complicated cases (either medically or developmentally). Not too thrilling, and none of us really wanted to be there--tomorrow is match day for most of my classmates (the military matches in December, but civilians match tomorrow), so nobody was thinking about didactics anyway. As one of my residents put it, match day is one of the three important days that dictates the path of your life; marriage and birth of a child are the other two. So it's a really big deal, and I'm looking forward to celebrating with my classmates tomorrow.