Two years down, two to go

So, it's official, I'm a third-year student at PCOM? Well, I don't like saying that until I know my boards scores (in about four weeks), and then I'll throw myself a party when I'm by myself at some hospital in rural PA. And by "party," I mean, "treating myself to Cold Stone and watching the latest episode of Teen Mom online." The USMLE and COMLEX were...beasts. By the end, you have such a headache from staring at screen for 8+ hours and you just want to run away from the testing center screaming. But, they're done (for now), and that's all that matters.


My first rotation is OMM, so the first week is a quick in-class review of the past two years of OMM (luckily we just studied this material for the COMLEX, so we haven't totally forgotten it) and next week is the Palliative Care course at a local nursing home. The last two weeks are spent with a Family Medicine/OMM clinician of your choice. You can enter a lottery to complete the two weeks within the PCOM OMM Department, but I was looking to try something new, so I'll be with a doc out in Narberth. One of my friends is starting out with surgery (yikes), and when I saw him during lunch, he had a beeper and a pager (my fellow OMM rotators kept ooh-ing and ahh-ing, while I kept saying, "This is LEGIT! Like, this is REAL! You're for REAL!"), and he didn't look as excited as I was for him. On Day 1, he was told that he would be on call every fourth night and that he had to have SOAP notes ready for two patients by the hospital's grand rounds at 6 AM then next day. Then he (along with the other students, interns, residents, and some attendings from his site and other local sites) had to come to the PCOM surgery grand rounds at 9 AM, followed by a quick lunch and back to his site for an afternoon surgery. Since I woke up at 8 AM, put on gym clothes (OMM attire) and sat in the OMM lab for 6 hours, I felt a little bummed that I wasn't doing all the legit doctor-y stuff my friends are doing, but I'll be walking around in scrubs and my new Danskos (with a reappearance by my friends the under-eye bags) soon enough. Until then, I can put on my old anatomy scrubs and walk around my apartment during commercials of "The Bachelorette." 


Since I don't have any intense, primetime drama-worthy tales to tell, here's a shoutout to two wonderful projects going on at PCOM: 

FARI (Food Allergy Research Initiative)

It was founded by Lita Indzel Cohen, Esq. after she found her grandson to have peanut allergies. It is headed by C. Scott Little, PhD as the lead scientist and the research is working on working with lab rats to try to understand what causes the peanut allergy and to try to weaken the symptoms and how it affects individuals, sort of like hay fever. The main focus is peanut allergy but the overall scope is food allergies.

CCDA (Center for Chronic Disorders for Aging) 

The CCDA focuses on research concerning chronic aging disorders and improving people's quality of life who have them. They focus on mechanisms from childhood through later stages in life of the age affected chronic diseases. The mission of the Center for Chronic Disorders of Aging (CCDA) at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine is to improve the quality of life for all individuals suffering from age-related chronic diseases and disorders.

If you would like to support either (or both!) of these worthwhile endeavors, you can purchase tribute cards in honor of loved ones (proceeds go towards the CCDA or FARI). Packs of 10 are $50, and they are available at the PCOM Alumni Office. 

Some fellow OMS-IIIs and I celebrated our first week of rotations by running the Color Me Rad 5K on June 17.
I'm the one who looks like she's halfway to becoming one of the Na'vi. And as much as I love cheesy photos, I was not the one who suggested the middle-school throwback star pic.