Week 5

I don't feel like my weeks are all that different from each other, but this week I did get to do some new things! 

Monday:

I spent today with Carmen. I like spending Mondays with Carmen because that means I get to go to the morning multidisciplinary meeting. I just like being able to get the whole picture. Also sometimes someone says something funny :) Can't beat a laugh to keep you going Monday morning. I pretty much work as "staff relief" at Ben Taub. We split up the patients, I work them up on my own, and then the dietitians check my notes at the end of the day before I sign them off. It's given me some really good experience practicing my own clinical judgement. I think that's the hardest thing to develop because you have to have experience to form good clinical judgement. Since I was with Carmen, it was the usual type of patient (metastatic cancer, osteomyelitis, tube feed follow ups). The most exciting patient was an aggravated assault with a car. Let me just say that I've seen some pretty messed up things at Ben Taub. It makes me never want to drive a car, walk down the street, or pretty much leave my house, but then I think about how boring my life would be and I get over it. 

Tuesday:

Tuesday was an early day in the Neuro ICU with Kendall. I think ICU nutrition is fascinating. It's just so different from what I do with Carmen's oncology patients. Part of the reason it's so interesting to me is that I hardly know anything about the ICU. I've learned about so many different medicals tests and standards of practice. It keeps things interesting. Probably the saddest patient situation was a guy with an accidental gun shot wound to his head. Not the type of accident I ever want to have. 

I got to go to wound rounds with Courtney. That was definitely a different experience. She goes to rounds once a week with the wound care nurses to see patients in one of the units with really bad wounds. It's mostly pressure ulcers (more commonly called "bed sores") and diabetic ulcers. I got to see some pretty gross stuff. I also got to see a little more of the patients than I bargained for. There are just some things I don't think you can un-see. The nurses examine the wounds and measure how big and deep they are. The grossest wound was this really deep diabetic foot ulcer. The patient was refusing amputation. I've never seen such deep layers of tissue so exposed. When they removed the dressing to see the wound, the worst smell instantly filled the room. It was an instant gag reflex. Courtney told me that the patient used to have maggots. I probably would have thrown up if he had maggots when we saw him. I hope he goes for the amputation. 

I also got some good practice calculating tube feeds with Kendall. The Neuro ICU is really good about following Kendall's recommendations and starting feeds early. I also got to watch the way Kendall does diabetes education with a patient in the emergency room. I'm glad I've been able to watch a few different dietitians do these educations. It helps to see the different styles they have. That way I can pick and choose which things I like from the all the different dietitians I work with.

Another fun thing we did today was a taste testing with the Neuro ICU residents. We went to their office to go over our new recs for the day and got talking about different oral supplements and tube feeds. They had never tried any of them and were really curious what they tasted like. We brought back a couple Boost products and a supplement we use for renal patients. One of the residents really wanted to try a tube feed formula that we carry. We talked him out of it since tube feeds are gross. Why would you want to taste something that doesn't have a flavor? The patient doesn't even taste their tube feeds since it bypasses their mouth. It was fun to be able to educate them on supplements in such a relaxed environment. It helps them be more sympathetic to the patients who don't like their supplements or won't drink them. One of the residents said he has Boost as his post workout drink...Too far.

Wednesday: 

Two early days in a row with Kendall in the ICU! Today was even earlier because rounds started at 5:30. It's days like this that I wish I lived downtown. I got some more practice giving education to a patient with a new colostomy. I had a few gun shot wound patients and even an inmate as patients today. Always interesting at Ben Taub. Kendall also helped me practice calculating TPN (total parenteral nutrition). I was glad we had some time at the end of the day just to work through some practice scenarios.

Wednesday is our day to meet as interns at UH. I somehow always manage to have early mornings the days I have to stay longer to meet on campus. We went through a few more presentations from our pathophysiology powerpoints that we created our first week during orientation. Starla presented on a procedure called a total gastrectomy. Basically they remove your stomach and reconnect your esophagus to your intestines. This type of procedure is pretty common in patients with stomach cancer to remove tumors or other malignancies in the stomach. I presented my slide show on maple syrup urine disease, and no I did not make that up. This disease is when a person is born with a defect in a specific enzyme that breaks down branched chain amino acids, which leads to accumulation of these type of amino acids. It causes a lot of neurological side effects and developmental delays if it's not detected and treated early. It gets its name from the sweet smelling urine of babies who have this disease. Ashley also presented on superior mesenteric artery syndrome. Don't worry, I had never heard of it either. Different things can cause this syndrome, but it results from compression of the third part of the duodenum. It causes all sorts of fun abdominal and gastrointestinal symptoms. I like meeting with all the interns on Wednesdays! It's always fun to catch up with everyone and swap fun stories from our different rotations. 

Thursday:

First off, I drove to work in a HUGE thunder storm this morning. It was the biggest storm I've seen since I moved back to Houston, and it was awesome! I absolutely love thunder storms. The rain was so heavy and had huge drops. Lightening was striking all along the highway in huge bolts that went straight down from sky to ground. It slowed traffic down to about 10 miles per hour though. Plus the roads downtown are awful in the rain. They flood so fast. But, it was such a good storm that I wasn't even mad that it made me a half hour late. 

This was my last day of the internship with Carmen! I'll still be working in the office she sits in, but I won't be working on her patients at all after today. We were at Quentin Mease today. Ashley, who I worked with there last week, left on vacation, and the dietitians from Ben Taub get to help cover her shifts. We just split up the patients and tried to catch up and also get ahead for the week. I mostly had patients on the geriatric floor. It's very different from Ben Taub since it's a rehab hospital. Nothing too critical. I think I prefer the hospital setting to a rehab hospital. I've never been super excited about long-term care type facilities, so it makes sense that I wouldn't enjoy Quentin Mease as much. I do always enjoy reading patient histories. When I read about patients who can't read and have a history of addiction to cocaine since childhood, I'm definitely grateful for the way I grew up. I did get two patients mixed up for a quick minute and scared a lady into thinking she had diabetes while I was doing my assessments. Oops! I guess you live and learn :) I also got lost taking the stairs. The elevators were being inspected and were out of use for a little while, forcing me to take the stairs. Unfortunately the stairs at this hospital don't correspond with elevator locations. Luckily I found a nice security guy to help me find my way back to the office. It kept things interesting for a little while. I also got some good practice doing diabetes educations. It was a pretty low key day.

Friday:

Fridays are always great, even if you have to be at 5:30 rounds. The Neuro ICU is so cool. The residents are always doing cool surgeries and the patients have medical conditions I've never even heard of before. I got to practice calculating TPN some more. I had a really good interaction with a nurse on the floor as we tried to figure out what the doctors wanted to do with a certain patient's feeds. She was really nice and super helpful. I also got to do an education on congestive heart failure with Kendall. It was a pretty good day, and you can't beat getting done at 2:00 on a Friday!  I can't believe I only have one week left at Ben Taub.

Week 4

I'm already more than halfway done with my first rotation! Crazy is an understatement for sure. I got to do/see some different things this week, and it was nice to add the variety to my daily routine at Ben Taub.

Monday:

Mondays are the worst, agreed? So hard to wake up this particular Monday. Not sure why, but it is what it is. I spent another day with Carmen working up her patients. At 9:30 we had to go to our weekly multi-disciplinary meeting. I think I described this before, but just in case I didn't... The residents from the different medical teams go through their lists of patients with the social workers, nurse managers, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and last but not least the Dietitian. It's a good way to hear what's going on with the patient from every perspective. It's also nice to find out which patients have plans to discharge so that we don't spend lots of time assessing them :) I also got some good practice calculating tube feeds. Alix, one of the ICU dietitians, showed us a CT scan for one of her patients. He a cocaine addict and ended up pretty much brain dead in half his brain. The CT scan was crazy! There was literally nothing going on in the scan once you reached a certain point. 

I really like working with Carmen, because she lets me work really independently and practice making my own recommendations. She pretty much just signs off on everything. I'm better at making recommendations for some patients more than others, but Carmen gives really good feed back on why she does things certain ways. My biggest problem is having enough confidence in my recommendations. I'm still too worried about being wrong. Working on it....

Tuesday:

Remember how I was so excited that all of my computer logins were up and running? Imagine how disappointed I was when it stopped working :( For some reason, the charting software had me in the system as a registered nurse again. If I'm going to be assigned the title of Megan Thacker, RN, I think I should at least get a nurse's salary. Is that too much to ask? I guess I'll just stick with my intern "salary." Who wouldn't prefer to be paid in experience? Good news is they fixed it by the end of the day.

I spent the day with Carmen again. One of the things I haven't gotten a lot of experience with yet is providing patient education. I've done a few, but Carmen hasn't be consulted for hardly any educations since I've been there. Today I watched Carmen do a diabetes education. It was nice to see how she balanced providing the patient with the information that he needed, but not teaching above his understanding level. Probably best not to overwhelm someone. 

Ben Taub sees a lot of HIV/AIDS patients. I've had so many patients that end up in the hospital because they're wasting away from AIDS. Can't say I saw a lot of that at the hospital I worked at in Salt Lake...

Wednesday:

You know it's going to be a good day when you wake up a little before 4:00 am. Mornings with 5:30 rounds make me wish I had a shorter commute. This morning was especially fun because I couldn't find my keys or ID badge anywhere! (of course they were both in a pocket in my backpack I thought I had checked a thousand times). I've become really good at "losing" things just long enough to make me stress about it. 

I enjoyed getting to work with Kendall a little more today. (she's the Neuro ICU dietitian). I mostly just enjoy being able to assess different types of patients. I also got to do two educations today: a renal diet and a cardiac diet. I don't love working with renal patients, so that education wasn't as fun for me, but it was good experience. 

To end my day, I watched a speech pathologist conduct barium swallow studies. The person eats/drinks different textures that have barium in them. We then watched them swallow the different textures through an X-ray machine. It was so cool! I wanted to watch this test because as a dietitian, we refer patients to speech therapy for any problems with chewing or swallowing. Sometimes they have to get this type of test done to determine if they're safe to swallow certain types of liquids and solid food. Sometimes the X-ray will show a person aspirating, meaning that instead of traveling down their esophagus as normal, whatever they ate or drank travels down their trachea into their lungs. The barium swallow can also show other swallowing problems. Some of the things I saw while watching the tests were liquid collecting around the epiglottis, improper movement of the very back of the tongue when swallowing, and needing to swallow multiple times just to swallow one drink of water. The speech therapist that was doing the tests was really nice. She was super helpful and answered all my questions. There was also a med student there watching so she was fun to to talk to as well. I'm glad I was able to watch these tests. Never underestimate the power of asking for things. All I did was email the manager over the dietitians and she set it all up for me! Now, what else do I want to see/do at Ben Taub.... :)

On Wednesdays, we have a standing appointment at UH to meet as interns with our program director. This was the first week we could meet because of a few conflicts on our program director's part. It was fun to hear about everyone's different rotations! We also started our patho presentations that we prepared our first week during orientation. Mag presented his on C. Diff. Wednesday was a pretty busy day!

Thursday:

Today was another early day with Kendall in the Neuro ICU, but rounds started at 6:00 instead of 5:30. Yay for "sleeping in." Kendall ended up leaving early because she wasn't feeling well. Turns out she had strep throat! Luckily I am still healthy myself. Thank you disinfecting wipes and some good old fashion hand washing. I spent the rest of my day with Carmen finishing up her patients. Since I did a longer day Wednesday, I cut out a half hour or so early today. It was nice to beat traffic and have a shorter afternoon. 

Friday:

Friday was a completely different day! I was at Quentin Mease, a community rehab hospital that is also part of the Harris Health System. They also have a geriatric floor. The best part? I didn't have to come in until 8:30 :) This hospital only has one dietitian, Ashley. Her patients typically stay for 3-4 weeks. A lot of them come from Ben Taub or Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. Ashley assesses all of the patients at the hospital. She also does more education. I was able to observe a class that she teaches as part of a weight loss/exercise program for the patients. The class was on portion sizes. It was a pretty fun environment. Ashley knows the patients at the hospital really well since they stay for so long. It makes work a little more fun when you have a good relationship with the patients. I also got to see a patient that had transferred to this rehab hospital after a stay at Ben Taub. I knew he looked familiar, but I didn't realize I had assessed him until I reviewed his chart. I have such a good memory.... He's a sad patient. He's younger than I am and has really bad AIDS. He's super non compliant with his medication so he's ended up with toxoplasmosis in his central nervous system. A lot of the patients that come to the community hospitals don't have access to the care they need when they leave the hospital because of funding, lack of transportation, lack of family support, etc. Then they end up back in the hospital much worse. 

Ashley was really cool to work with. She's really good with her patients and they all love her! I enjoyed getting to see a different hospital with some longer term patients. 

Friday night I met up with some of the interns at a little Mexican Cantina for happy hour. Don't worry mom, I just had a diet coke and an enchilada ;) It was fun to get to know the other interns a little better over some good chips and salsa. It worked out perfectly because then I could hit a church activity afterwards before I headed back to Spring.

Fun Facts of the Week:

• They do leech therapy for patients at Ben Taub. Leech Therapy. I work in a hospital with leeches. GROSS! 
• Ben Taub has had about 3-4 people jump off their parking garage this year. I think they need better security or something.
• One new way doctors are treating C. Diff is with flora reconstitution, or as I like to call it a poop transplant. That's right, they are putting stool from a fecal donor into your intestines to try to introduce the good bacteria into your gut again. Eww.
• A nice old lady at Quentin Mease told me I have a baby face. She also told me I was cute, so I'll take it.

Week 3

I cannot believe I've already been at Ben Taub for two weeks. I'm starting to realize how fast this internship is going to fly! I'm definitely starting to get more comfortable with clinical dietetics, but I still have SO MUCH to learn. One thing I love about dietetics is how much I don't know. I'm not worried about getting bored because there's so much I can still learn. With that being said, get ready for the weekly run down!

Monday:

I spent today with Carmen again. Remember, she's the oncology dietitian and she's super cool. Basically everyday I come in and help her finish up screening and then she gives me some of her patients to work up for the day. I'm learning so much by being so independent. It's so rewarding to write up my own recommendations and actually have her sign off on them. I'm slowly building my confidence. One of my favorite assessments this day was a cute older Vietnamese man with some type of oral cancer. He and his wife were a really nice couple. Overall today was pretty typical. Nothing too new or crazy. 

Tuesday:

Tuesday was another Carmen day. Today we had some tube feeds to calculate, which was good because I need practice! I'm excited for the day when calculating nutrition support is second nature. I'm hoping that's a thing? Hopefully it can be that easy for me eventually! One of the patients had a nasogastric tube that was used only to suction things out of his stomach. I didn't know they did that, so that was interesting to learn about. Apparently in patients with bowel obstructions they sometimes need to do this in order suction things that are just stuck sitting in the stomach (fluids, secretions, etc. that can't move past the obstruction). Makes you grateful your stomach works doesn't it?

Wednesday:

Who was I with today? You guessed it, Carmen. Today was full of pretty typical patients. I did get to do my first diabetes education today. The best part? It was a patient in the Emergency Room. It's a whole different world down there! I'm not even sure how we got there. I definitely could not find my way back there by myself if someone asked me tomorrow. To get to our patient, we had to walk through the shock room where all the traumas come in. I should say traumas and dramas. There was a man in there who was not happy with the hospital policy of putting all of his belongings in a special bag to bring around with him. Carmen came down to watch me do the education. It went well, but it wasn't the best patient to do an education with. He didn't quite seem all there so I'm hoping he actually understood what was going on. It's amazing to me how some people have had diabetes for 30 years and never received proper education. Carmen had to leave a little early today for a dentist appointment, so I spent the last 2ish hours of my day with Alix, the surgical trauma dietitian. She's awesome and really smart! ICU nutrition is so different from everything else. They practice "permissive underfeeding," meaning they intentionally provide less than the amount of calories a person needs. It's really important to not overfeed in the ICU. Most research supports underfeeding rather than overfeeding. She showed me around her ICU a little bit. I also got to see her visit  a patient who had come in as a trauma and suffered an anoxic brain injury when he was extubated. (not the hospital's fault, just a freak accident. I was worried it was the hospital's fault too). It was really sad because he's pretty much just a vegetable now. Today I also got one step closer to being a self-sufficient "employee." My email account got set up! Too bad my log in still had me in the system as Megan Thacker, RN. Definitely not a registered nurse...baby steps. At the least the email was working. 

Thursday:

Thursday was a fun change of pace! To start, I had to be at the hospital a little before 6. Gross! Traffic wasn't bad at all on my commute though :) Thursday I was with Kendall. She covers the Neuro ICU. She gets all the head traumas, etc. Rounds started at 6:00 am. Besides struggling to keep my eyes open, rounds were pretty cool! Since Ben Taub is a teaching hospital, we round with residents, interns, and students, plus their attending physician. Fun fact neurosurgery is something like a 6-7 year residency. As if medical school wasn't long enough....The 5th year resident was the one reading all the medical history off of the computer as we went from patient to patient. The interns did the physical assessment, and everyone else just kind of pitched in when appropriate. There was a point when the last year resident challenged the 5th year's treatment knowledge and plan. Kendall the dietitian wrote this in my notebook after that encounter was over, "you just witnessed a HUGE power struggle. Awkward." It was awkward, mostly because the 5th year resident didn't have an answer to the other resident's question. It was early, I don't even remember what the issue of debate was, but apparently it was a big deal. I really enjoyed learning more about brain injuries, ICU nutrition, and medications I had never heard of. 

I also got to do an education for a patient with a new ileostomy. I'll save you the trouble of "googling" what an ileostomy is. Basically they surgically bring your ileum (last part of the small intestine) through an opening they create in your abdomen to create a stoma. This connects to a pouch that collects the waste/output from your intestines. Super fun right? I educated this patient on the effects of fiber on his ileostomy output, how to schedule his eating patterns, and the importance of fluid intake. It was an interesting education. It was fun to do a little more research and learn more about ostomies. I also got some good practice paging the different teams of doctors today. All the time I spent talking to strangers on the phone for my job with the outpatient weight loss program last year came in handy! Kendall said they had an intern one year that was so nervous about talking on the phone that they had to role play a ton before she would page the doctors. Thank you work experience for coming in handy yet again. The good thing about starting so early was I got to leave at 2! Woo hoo! I enjoyed missing heavy traffic both to and from the hospital today. 

Friday:

Friday I was back with Carmen. The highlight was getting some good practice calculating TPN. TPN stands for total parenteral nutrition. This means that all the calories, protein, fat, fluid are provided through a person's veins and don't use the GI Tract at all. The patient we were calculating this particular feed for had a small bowel obstruction so obviously we couldn't use their gut until that was resolved. The assessments have been really good practice. I'm slowly learning how to ask the right questions and interpret information from patients. 

Another week of wearing scrubs every day! I'll enjoy it while I can because I just found out today that I can't wear scrubs when I'm at Texas Children's starting in September. Obviously it's the little things with me :) 

Week 2

Starting Clinical

I was so excited to start with my first week of real rotations! My first rotation is clinical 1 at Ben Taub Hospital, which is part of Harris Health Systems. Harris Health Systems is a large network of hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare service locations throughout Harris County (my home county, woo!). Ben Taub is an elite Level 1 trauma center in the Texas Medical Center. Ben Taub is a teaching hospital, and is staffed by faculty and residents from the Baylor College of Medicine. They also have students and residents from the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. Ben Taub is also a community hospital. Most of the funding comes from Harris county tax dollars, followed by Medicare/Medicaid, and then private insurance, etc. Orientation told us that more than half of the Harris Health System employees are African American and more than half of its patients are Hispanic. A little different than my hospital experience in Utah...

Those are the official facts of Ben Taub, but here are the Ben Taub facts according to Megan so far. Ben Taub is a pretty old hospital, although I'm probably biased after working at the Intermountain Medical Center which was only about 7 years old. Spoiled, I know. A lot of the patients don't speak English. A lot of the patients are homeless, uninsured, and/or come from really interesting and unfortunate social backgrounds. Since Ben Taub is such a good trauma center, it receives most of the severe trauma patients in the city. In the words of my mom, "gun shots and knife stabbings." Throw in really terrible car accidents and that pretty much covers most of the ICU patients. All that being said, I am really grateful to be at Ben Taub for half of my clinical rotations. I already have, and will continue to get really good experience working with the dietitians and patients here. I'll get to see a wide variety of patients and learn a lot! 

Ben Taub Hospital in its retouched internet glory

The weekly run down.....

Monday:

I won't bore you with the details from this day, because frankly, I'd put myself to sleep. After a week of orientation at UH, I was excited to have my first day at Ben Taub. That excitement was short lived because today was a full day of new employee orientation. Imagine you're at new employee orientation for a company you don't get paid to work for. Sounds awesome, right? The employee leading orientation did remind me of a bald, slightly less thrilling version of Steve Harvey hosting Family Feud though. It might have been because he had a mustache and said that all the employees are a family. Could've helped a little bit, right? I did get to leave a little early since I'm not an employee receiving benefits, so it was nice to avoid sitting through some of the useless information. 

Tuesday:

Today was....more orientation! At least they provided some free breakfast snacks. Today was only a half day of orientation, so it wasn't quite as painful as Monday. I did get to spend the afternoon with Carmen the dietitian. I'll spend most of my time here with her. She is awesome! She's really good at her job. She handles the oncology units and a medsurge floor (basically stabilized patients that used to be traumas). Most of the dietitians at Ben Taub are really young and it's one of their first jobs out of their internships. It's really encouraging to see how capable and confident they are so early in their careers. There's hope for me :) Tuesday afternoon was a good chance to meet the other dietitians and watch Carmen do some assessments.

Wednesday:

Just when I thought orientation stuff was over, I spent Wednesday morning in computer training. It wasn't terrible. We ended up getting done two hours early, so can't complain about that! That meant I could run to the scrub store by the Med Center.

Side note: I finally get to fulfill my dream of having a legitimate reason to wear scrubs every day without being a nurse or a surgeon! I'll be honest, the scrubs are one of the best things about this clinical rotation. Who knew you could be so comfortable at work. I feel like I'm wearing pajamas all day long. Which is great because scrubs are much more socially acceptable than pajamas. They're super soft too! Okay, I'll stop freaking out about my scrubs....But really, I'm wearing them right now after "work" and it feels great.

Other side note: I will refer to most of my days as an intern at work, simply because it is easier and flows better. Remember, I don't get paid for any of my labor as an intern. Rip off? Probably. Required to be a dietitian? Absolutely.

Back to Wednesday... I got to spend more time working with Carmen today. I also found out I get free lunch and free drinks. I'll take it! I learn so much every day at the hospital, it's hard to remember which day was which! I learned a new way to calculate fluid needs that I had never learned before and is more accurate according to the dietitians here. (Nerd alert: Apparently I get excited about new formulas to calculate how much fluid someone needs in a day.) One thing I did notice while learning the best way to write chart notes was the way you have to word your recommendations as a dietitian. It's an interesting balance between making a firm recommendation and staying within your scope of practice. 

Thursday:

My first full day with the dietitian! I even got to see my first patients by myself! Nothing like jumping right in. Both were pretty similar patients, so it was nice to get the repetition. I am so grateful for my job at IMC last year. I didn't realize how helpful it would be in the moment, but I already feel so comfortable in a hospital environment and visiting patient rooms. If nothing else, that alone is so valuable to my internship already. It's been great to already be seeing my own patients. I learn so much faster by doing, so it's really helpful to just get thrown right in this week.

The dietitians in the office (Carmen's office is shared with the two ICU dietitians) have also recommended some really good research articles and other resources to find research to support our standards of care. I'm so impressed with how well versed they are in current research. One of the dietitians recently passed her test to be a CNSC (certified nutrition support clinician). I'm really excited for the days I'll get to spend with her because she knows a ton about enteral nutrition (tube feeds) and parenteral nutrition (nutrition support through an IV line). 

Friday:

I was able to work up some more patients on my own today and add to my lists of "things I learned," "abbreviations I don't know," "things to look up later," etc. Carmen is bilingual, so she had me do some of her Spanish patient's assessments and translated for me. Today was the first day that I felt a little sad working with cancer patients. It's a lot harder to work with younger patients who have families and have really progressive cancers. It also makes me really appreciate what you can do as a dietitian and I really feel like what I'm studying makes a difference. Friday was a great day and a good way to end the week!

Overall Highlights:

• FINALLY getting my ID badge and parking pass figured out with the lovely security office at Ben Taub
• Note, this was also a "low light" because of how frustrating it was
• Getting the $30 parking pass for the onsite garage instead of the $75 pass for the offsite garage with a shuttle 
• Celebrating one of the dietitian's birthdays with free Yogurtland frozen yogurt that the manager brought to the hospital
• Having good hours that help me avoid prime rush hour 
• When the dietitians told me that I'm much more prepared than they were for their internships :)
• Assessed my first (probably of many) gun shot wound patients. Welcome to Ben Taub!
• Did I mention the scrubs?

It was a great week! I'm liking my clinical rotation a lot more than I thought I would so far. I celebrated by sleeping in on Saturday :) and going to a fun beach activity with the church group of young singles from Houston. Who knew Surfside was so much *nicer than Galveston?

*key word "nicer," still not what I would call a "nice" beach :)