ER Day 5: Sutures and Good News!

This was originally going to be a post about today (which was a mixed bag of craziness), but I just got some awesome news so I'll be brief.

Today started out with the weekly Residents Confrence. Basically the first hour is a Morbidity and Mortality meeting for the ER where we discuss a case where a patient died, and how to do better next time. The case discussed today was for a patient that had come through the ER a few weeks ago (before I got there) with NECROTIZING FASCIITIS. Which was kinda cool because I got to learn more about it, just wish I actually could have been there... I wanted to see the case!!!!

After The Morbidity and Mortality meeting, there were a few lectures by medical students on cool cases they've seen. They basically present the case and how it was managed, then lecture on the disease for about 20 minutes. I have to go next week, I still haven't decided which patient to present on. Plus I kinda suck at presentations so I'm really starting to procrastinate this...

After all that, one of the attendings showed up with a present for us all. He had grabbed a bunch of expired suture kits and a ton of chicken legs from the grocery store. He sat all us medical students and residents down and helped us practice suturing for about an hour. I stationed myself next to a resident doing a rotating interm year at the hospital before going on to a surgical residency next year. He was able to really help me learn "surgical grade" sutures. (ER residents and students are usually content if the edges of the skin meet and if the ties aren't going to come apart anytime soon. I wanted to learn the RIGHT way to do it.) I got to practice my suturing skills later on an actual patient (under supervision of said future surgical student), so I'm feeling a lot more confident about them :).

And on to the good news.

When I got home from the hospital today, I saw that I had an email stating that my USMLE scores had been released and could be downloaded from their website.

I was really scared to download it, but thanks to some encouragement from a certain ginger, I opened it and saw....

I passed my USMLE :)

I got the score I needed to pretty much do whatever haha. I found a table that somewhat represents what the scores means for residency applications. The bottom line indicates the lowest scored applicants a particular program will look at, and the top line indicates the score that almost always merits an invite to interview for a program.

And since I have off tomorrow, I'm off to do some celebrating. Toodles :)