Not a med student anymore

I got real comfortable calling myself Doctor today. My beeper and phone were going like crazy all morning. Doctor LaPointe is much quicker than First year Pathology resident. Anyhow, I probably should change the title of my blog, or should I? I want to keep this up as a site that Med students (especially at UND) can turn to, but I also want to share my experiences...

So, today was day 2 of my program officially starting. We have a few hours of training in the morning (like how to use the computer system, dictation, blah blah..) Then start getting and looking at slides for the day. I'm doing GI and Liver right now. It is very interesting. UW has a big transplant service and I have seen a lot of liver biopsies to evaluate for rejection. Today however I diagnosed my first patient with cancer. Delivering bad news. They gave us sample cases in med school. They test us on it. And even though I dont have to look the person in the face, there is still quite an impact. Okay so this is something that is going to become routine but I hope that (unlike some pathologists I interacted with on the interview trail) I never lose the human touch. That calling a cancer really is a heavy thing to do, no matter how obvious the pattern of cells under the microscope.

One last thing is I am a little torn about the jokes about how the only patients the Pathologists see are dead... I think they are pretty funny myself, but the fact of the matter is that at this institution alone they see over 30,000 cases of tissue samples from LIVING people. Autopies are part of the picture, but only a small piece of what Pathologists actually do. I still think the jokes are funny though...

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