Island Med Student

The last few days have been quite unpleasant, hence the absence of me from my blog. Friday was the last day of my pain management rotation, but I didn’t make it in to the hospital because I was in “pain.” Don’t you just love the irony?! I woke up Thursday night around midnight in horrible pain. My abdomen was gripped with 8/10 cramps, and I felt extremely nauseous. My head was pounding and I felt feverish as well. After about an hour of this torture, the crap really hit the fan! Well, actually, the vomit hit the floor. I began vomiting uncontrollably all over the floor beside my bed. After several rounds of this, my partner Micah carried me into the bathroom, plopped me into a bath, and placed a trashcan by my head to catch the vomit. To make a very long, and unpleasant story short, I didn’t get much sleep Thursday night, and by Friday morning I was in no shape to make it to the hospital, so I had to call in sick, and miss the last day of my rotation. Hopefully my attending will understand when I ask him for my evaluation next week.

I realized last night that I had been vomiting so much and so forcefully that it had caused petechial hemorrhaging around both of my eyes. I guess I’m lucky that it didn’t cause subconjunctival hemorrhaging as well (I’ve had that happen in the past with a bad case of food poisoning). I’m still not sure what exactly caused my ails, but I am starting to feel better today, and have tolerated a solid diet for almost 24 hours, so I think I’m mostly in the clear.

To share some better news, I have (with help from Micah) made some upgrades to my site over the past few weeks. I have added a new Publications tab, which has links to a few journal articles I’ve published and my Medscape articles. I’m not allowed to cross-blog my Medscape articles for the period of one year. So, I’ve gone back and updated all my Medscape posts, which are older than one year, so that they have the original post, and not just a link to the Medscape post.

We also put my site on a new, enterprise-grade server, which makes it load much faster (says Micah!), and we updated my Videos page so that the player is much nicer, and all of my YouTube videos are displayed. I hope you likey!