What a week...

So I'm still recovering from our exam week and subsequent partying, as witnessed by my sleeping close to eleven hours last night. It was a good week; I did well on the tests (we are lucky enough to have a quick turnaround). On Wednesday night we went salsa dancing at a little club close to my house that I never knew existed and stayed out till the wee hours of the morning. It was so much fun. I wore this cute little $10 black dress with a red flowery print and danced with lots of very talented and forgiving salsa guys (the sketch factor was low, which is good for a woman who is not single). Then one of my friends and I stayed up talking till really late. It was fun and normally, that much partying is something I'll give myself a few days to recover from...but a classmate's birthday party was the next night.

We went over to her house and there was plenty to drink, yummy food like cake and chips and sour cream, and karaoke! She owns a karaoke thing you can put on your TV. Another late night, and then last night I went over to two other classmates' house (they live together) and we cooked cous-cous and soup and rhubarb pie (okay, so the latter two were made by the same talented individual), and then we watched Across the Universe. It was good. One of the others fell asleep, and my other friend I don't think liked it as much as I did, but I thought it was the perfect mix of plot and social commentary and necessary, but not gratuitous, violence. There were some parts I had a really hard time watching. It was such a fun night.

But anyhow, that's why I slept for eleven hours last night. When I woke up I figured out how to use my new transcription software and foot pedal, which will hopefully make analyzing the data from my thesis way way easier. I've got to try it out to finish the interview that's due to my qualitative methods professor tomorrow.

Today I'm going to PetSmart with a girlfriend who has decided to return her pet guinea pig. She thinks the guinea pig is lonely and depressed. I am sad at this turn of events, for it is a very cute little guinea pig and I think it likes her. But when it comes to pets, it's like children: if you don't want them for whatever reason, you really shouldn't have them. Poor pig. When I came home after petting the guinea pig and my cat smelled my hands, she immediately ran over to her treat dish. It gives me some hope for her as a predator that at least she recognized the smell of rodent; otherwise, she's an adorable but survivally-challenged siamese. Right now, she's snoozing in her favorite place: a fluffy blanket in a wine crate in the sun. It looks disgustingly cute, like a magazine cover.

Okay, I should actually work and wash dishes and stuff so I can go out with a good conscience. I also have a patient write-up from the OB/GYN preceptorship I had on Tuesday. Oh, that was intense. First, I saw a woman who thought she had a tampon stuck (she didn't, it turns out). Then I saw a really sad story -- there was a woman who had been diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy and was in for follow-up. Her hCG levels (the hormone a placenta sends out) had been too low for it to be a normal pregancy, so they did a vaginal ultrasound. They saw nothing in the uterus, even though it should have been there, so they thought it was ectopic (meaning the pregnancy had implanted in the tubes). Then they gave her methotrexate to clear out the "products of conception" -- usually, the embryo has died by this time and this is just to make sure that nothing gets septic in the reproductive system, because that could make you infertile forever or even be life-threatening. However, she kept having bleeding and pain, even longer than normal, and so they did a laparoscopy, which is minimally invasive surgery. In the operating room, they found nothing in the tubes.

What this means is enormous: the pregancy wasn't in the tubes at all. It was abnormal, but it wasn't in the tubes. It was in the uterus. So this woman would have had a miscarriage in a few weeks, but because they found it early, they essentially induced the miscarriage instead of it happening on its own. The lady in question was tearful, because I think she understood that the embryo would not have survived since it wasn't normal and didn't show up in the uterus when it should have been big enough to see, and the doctor explained how that's usually because the number of chromosomes is wrong, but she didn't speak a ton of English and I hope she left with some understanding of what had happened. Of course, there's also a tiny possibility that somehow, it would have worked out. Tiny, but no medical diagnostic is 100%.

After that shocker, I saw 'my' patient; an elderly woman who had a huge abdominal mass and was in for a pre-op exam before surgery. She was so sweet, and she and her daughter were so accepting of my care. They even said I was very thorough and left me with their email address so I could give them a copy of my notes from Tuesday (which I should do before this lady gets out of the hospital). I bonded with them, and the daughter said, "I really want to follow your practice and find out which specialty you choose." It was so heartwarming.

Last, but certainly not least, I attended the long and difficult labor of a woman who was attempting to deliver her first child vaginally. The child's head was just too big, though, and the labor was stretching out. She was fully dilated but the head wasn't progressing. She kept getting more and more tired, until with every contraction, we essentially had to hold her up physically in a curled position so she could push. It was really hard work and I was sweating (although not hard compared to her job, obviously). Then there were some really awkward moments when the woman's inlaws (mother and grandma-in-law) decided that they were going to be in the room. They sat there, and her mother in law even said, "Push! Push harder," until her son, who had been helping this whole time, gently shook his head at her. I think it was awkward because I'm pretty sure the pregant woman didn't want her in-laws there, but also didn't want to offend them forever by keeping them out. I can only imagine what the family dynamics were, but she didn't talk to them a whole lot, even when they addressed her directly. They were all speaking cantonese so I had no clue what was going on.

Man. OB is very intense. I could barely think, let alone study and prepare for my oral exams the next day, after that one. I hope everyone involved comes out okay.