Spleen or Gallbladder

So I’m doing a rotation right now called ER Ultrasound. It’s pretty much a joke because the attending who is into Ultrasound just had a baby and isn’t really around much. We basically just sign up for slots and do ultrasounds on whoever will let us. However, Manijeh and I haven’t gotten much formal direction besides a video we watched. The form of rebellion we hatched today is to start labeling everything we see. It might be correct, but when the spleen we labeled turns out to be large intestine, we’re hoping they’ll throw their hands up during the once-weekly image review and say “We’ve gotta teach these yahoos something.” If not, I guess we’ll know the spleen really was a spleen.

The Day the Black Box Came to Life

This is a big day for me because it is the day that something I have been dreaming of doing for years has finally come to life. I am always coming up with ideas for products or other innovations and I’ve realized that I have so many I need a way to figure out which ones are worth pursuing and get going on them. Orthopaedics won’t allow me time to do the whole process on my own and after reading a biography of Thomas Edison, I figured out that I wanted to get together a group of people I could work with to flesh out and make something out to the good ideas I have. I’ve always envisioned something like a meat grinder where the handle is always turning and I can just throw ideas in and possibilities will come out the “business end.”

Well, thanks to my brother Jon, I’m working with someone to make this a reality. He has a lot of experience in tech and the medical field and has already started and sold a company. We talked during my drive to pick up the crib on Sunday morning and the basics came together. I then put the rough idea for the meat grinder “black box” into a googledoc and sent it over to David. He made some corrections and added some stuff today. After that, I feel like the process has been started and now it cannot be stopped. The biggest hurdle of taking something that had been a daydream and seemed way off in the future and putting it on paper had been overcome. When I saw David’s editing and contributions, it made it real. Someone besides myself was on board with the vision.

Even though we haven’t talked about a single idea or invention, the framework and foundations are being laid. To me, it feels like a chain reaction that cannot be contained, like an avalanche that it just starting to break loose. Nothing has really happened, but to me, everything is done. It is not the end success that I await because just knowing that the ball is rolling is enough that I know the end result already. In case it’s not obvious, I feel that this is a very important day and I am excited to see how all of this unfolds. Finally my ideas will have a home. Maybe that’s why they call these things idea “incubators.”

Utah vs. New Mexico

Finally got over the hurdle and started this thing. I have been meaning to do it for so long, but it was always so hard just to start. I commit to doing it regularly from now on, for the rest of my life. Right now, the biggest thing going on is the decision for the rank order list to submit to ERAS. I’ll do a Pro/Con list later, but let’s just say that I’m trying to figure out if this is the point in my life when I’m deciding between family and career. I know family is more important and I have always sought to put it above everything else, but I’m just not sure if ranking Utah first is putting career before family or if putting New Mexico first is necessarily putting family before career. In my mind it would be so, if the hours don’t actually work out to what I thought. I keep thinking about the conversation we had with Kevin and Tony on the first LOTOJA ride and how I had made a commitment to always put family above career. I keep wondering if this is that fork in the road, if this is the test I am being given to choose one over the other.

I’m basing all of this on limited actual data for hours and workload at the two programs, but it seems like it is pretty true when I think about the overall personalities of the two programs. Utah is not malignant, but there is a sense of “you signed up for it, you better believe we’re gonna max out the 80 hours per week.” At New Mexico there is an amazing sense of teamwork and concern for how everyone is doing outside of the hospital.