Okay, So I've Been a Little Busy

Sorry about the total neglect of things, but the pace of life has picked up a bit over the last few weeks. For the two or three of you left out there, thanks for tuning in. Everytime I take some pictures and think "Oh, I need to put these online," something more urgent comes up, such as the vast amount of material I have to know pretty well by mid-August. Compounding things, is that there just isn't a way to talk about interesting hospital stuff without getting uncomfortably close to privacy concerns, whcih I won't do, so that knocks out about 80-90% of my life. Also, all my traveling has come to a stop, so all those fun photos from Europe are a thing of the past. Oh well, I'll just play the blogging thing by ear from here.
We had more shelf exams this past Thursday. I took Pediatrics in the morning and Surgery in the afternoon. They seemed to go well enough. Am spending my last weekend in the UK looking at video lectures on Obstetrics. I return to Dallas on Friday evening. Sunday morning, I'll fly up to Chicago for a week for a course on how to pass the physical exam part of Step 2 of the US licensing process. Then it's back to the Dallas- Hallsville area to study for the Clinical Knowledge part of Step 2. I'll take them both sometime in August. Then I will head to Tallahassee, Florida at the end of August to do a 4-week Family Practice rotation.
By the way, that's not me in Henry VIII's pond at Hampton Court. My gut hasn't gotten that bad, yet. Some guy felt the need to grope around the bottom of the pool, while his wife held his feet. I did take part of one afternoon off to ride a riverboat from Kingston up to Hampton Court Palace to see where the frequently married founder of Anglicanism lived and ate giant turkey legs.

Only One Month Left at Cecil House

On July 3rd, the Higher Education Roadshow returns to the United States on a permanent basis (probably). I was going to stay in Surrey until mid-August, but have decided to come back and study for a month or so.
All 3rd year students have to take two monster exams, the USMLE Step 2 CS, or Clinical Skills test, and the Step 2 CK, or Clinical Knowledge Exam. The CK is a lot like the big Step 1 test I took last summer. It's 8 hours of multiple choice questions. The CS puts you in a situation where you examine and question professional patients. Technically, you have until the end of the year to take them, but for people who want to best position themselves for landing a residency in 2010, it's good to have these knocked out by early September.
Therefore, I land at DFW on the 3rd, celebrate the 4th, and on the 5th, head to Chicago for a week-long CS prep course. Then, it's back to Texas for 5 or 6 weeks of hard-core studying at a neighborhood Starbucks. Hey, the Starbucks formula worked last year, so why tempt the fates? We have here pictures of Cecil House from the bus stop outside and a long shot of the house taken from my study area in the Surgical Building. The photo of the Thames was taken around 9'o'clock at night, as the days have become insanely long. It's also this light at 4:30am.

Only Bald People Can Sit Here

Once, a Woman Tried to Use These and the Back of Her Head Blew Off

The only tissues Chuck Norris will use.

Meanwhile, Back at the Hospital

I can't believe it's been 10 days since I've posted anything. Sorry! That may be a new record for slovenliness. It's been very hectic ever since I left Austin a couple of weekends ago. Even my time in Hallsville was mostly spent studying. Since I've been back here, there's been more studying, as well as figuring out what course of action to take regarding summer exam scheduling and where and when to do my 4th year elective rotations.
I've also started my OB/Gyn rotation which has been good so far. I fanned a nice lady with a manila folder as she gave birth, as the maternity wards here do NOT have air conditioning (or for that matter, fans). She said I was a better fanner than her husband, (her exact words to him, in mid-contraction were "Your fanning is rubbish!!!") so I'm glad that all that expensive medical training is finally paying off. These are the deserted halls where the outpatient clinics are. It's a Sunday afternoon, so naturally, they're empty. I'm up on the 5th floor of the surgical building in a small study room, reviewing pediatric endocrine disorders.

Stormy Austin

Saturday, a cold front rolled in and brought day-long thunderstorms with it, turning downtown skies dark. In spite of the showers I walked around the campus of my alma mater for a little bit. You can see the state Capitol over George Washington's shoulder.
On the lower right, you can also see the infamous Tower, where the original school shooter, Charles Whitman, did his thing back in 1966. Charlie, from Lake Worth , Florida, was a well-liked engineering student, scoutmaster, and former US Marine sharpshooter who barricaded himself up on the tower's observation deck after murdering his wife and mother. From the tower, he killed 14 and wounded another 32, before being shot dead by Austin cops. (Of course many Austinites were also returning fire towards the tower with their own personal guns that they had on themselves.)
During an earlier visit with the school psychiatrist, Charles talked about turmoil over his parents' divorce and of experiencing uncontrollable hostility. During the interview, he made a remark about feeling the urge to "start shooting people with a deer rifle" from the university tower.
He was prescribed amphetamines.
During his autopsy, which he had requested in his suicide note, it was also discovered that he had a brain tumor.

Congratulations to Nephew Jack

Friday, I went from Amsterdam to Austin, as the whole family turned out to see my nephew's performance in his final play as a high school student at the state One Act Play Championship. Jack's school, Stephen F. Austin High School in Austin, wound up winning the state title with "Over the River and Through the Woods" a comedy with serious stuff in it.
Jack played the Italian Grampa on the left. The One Act Play competition means whittling a full length production down to 40 minutes. Jack's collegiate career starts this fall at the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. I'm telling you again, one day your gonna be at the movies and you'll point at the guy on the screen and tell the person next to you "I used to read his uncle's blog."

Other Stuff from Holland

Here are a few other things I saw on my layover. I made the obligatory visit to Anne Frank's house, but they were closing as I arrived, so I didn't do the tour. Then I came upon our old family Kroon Makelaars Store. How come I never get any Kroon Makelaar royalties? I saw signs pointing to the Homomonument and wondered what the heck that was. Turns out it's a memorial to gay folks who were killed in the Holocaust. Then I came upon this statue of Multatuli, whom I had never heard of. Wikipedia says his real name was Eduard Douwes Dekker, famous for his satirical novel Max Havelaar, in which he denounced the abuses of colonialism in Indonesia. Ohhh, that Multatuli!

Killing Time in a Dutch Airport

There's now a small chain of hotels called Yotel. based on Japanese cubicle hotels. There are a couple in Britain and one at Schiphol Airport in Holland, so I stayed at one of these for the night. It's in the secure part of the terminal, so you just get out of bed and walk down to your gate. You get a fold out bed with an excellent mattress, a fancy shower, a fold out desk and a TV, all in a space even smaller than my Kingston Hospital dorm room.
One thing the Yotel neglected to tell me, however, was that when you leave the secure area of the terminal, as I did when I went into Amsterdam, is that airport security won't let you back into the secure area until midnight of the date of your outbound flight. Therefore, I wound up sitting around the lobby for a while, taking pictures of the chopped up airplane and various displays that were on display.

Oddly Enough, This is on the Way to Hallsville

Pediatrics wrapped up last week and I used my Northwest Airlines frequent flyer miles to get home for a week's visit before OB/Gyn starts. They put me on a KLM flight, which meant I got routed through Amsterdam. I was able to arrange it to where I had a full night's layover at Schiphol Airport and enough time to take the train into town to see 3 or 4 hours' worth of Dutch sights.
So... Amsterdam was nice, but not breathtaking either. There are lots of interesting buildings, canals, winding streets, and about 100,000 white kids with dreadlocks smoking weed, since marijuana's legal there, and if you're a pot-addled white kid, you have to grow dreadlocks to prove how authentic you are.
The red light district was also interesting and crammed with tourists gawking at the Ho's. I read in the guidebook that the Ho's don't like it if you take their pictures, and I'm no expert, but it seems to me that making hookers angry is a very bad idea, so I only took shots of the red windows from an oblique angle.

More Departures

Just as various characters leave shows like Grey's and Scrubs, we have several more key players in the AUC/UK scene moving westward, as the number of Americans and CANADIANS!! whom I know at Kingston Hospital dwindles. Sandip, in the striped jacket, went back to Toronto and then goes on to Chicago, I think. Wes, in the red shirt heads to Michigan for a bit and Anna, with the super-blonde highlights, is now being educated by psychiatric patients in Chicago. Those of us that remain are quite sad to see them go and that our little gang of expats is being broken up.