Some sun and a "burn."

This week my preceptor got "burned," or at least that is how he describes it. He tends to be a pretty aggressive provider - doing a lot of things in-office that might normally get sent to the ER, taking risks here or there, but usually his intuition is right and he does much more good than harm. Unfortunately, that was not the situation this week. Without giving too many details, he took a risk and the patient suffered some negative sequelae as a result. The patient will be fine, but my preceptor got a phone call from one of the patient's other specialty docs and got a verbal slap on the hand. It is very humbling to see the person you regard as so much more intelligent than you make a mistake. Everyone gets burned though. My own primary care doc told me once that a provider makes something like 500 decisions a day...and its just the law of statistics that sometimes it is going to make a wrong one. It was just weird to see it happen.

Tomorrow we have to tell a patient that he has skin cancer, though it should be easily treatable. We also just got a pathology report telling us that another one of our patients has breast cancer. She will have a rougher course of treatment, involving probably surgery and radiation...but there is certainly hope for a full recovery as it is in a relatively early stage. This probably sounds very odd, but I feel lucky to have the opportunity to sit in on telling these patients the bad news. It is a skill, and one that I will need to learn, so to observe a long-time practitioner and his method of delivering the news will be of great value to me.

In regular life, things are moving along swiftly. Only 7 1/2 days left in Oakridge. CJ will be up here for the weekend, and it is supposed to be so nice and sunny, which is exactly what I hoped for. We are going to go on hikes, do some sight-seeing, and go out to dinner, all the good stuff...and if we really get bored, Eugene is only 45 minutes away!

Last night my temp roomie, Michelle, invited me to dinner, which was really nice of her. We went down to the bar in the pizza parlor, ate and then met up with a couple of her friends at the other bar in town (yes, there are 2 bars....but only 1 grocery store?!?). I got invited to be a substitute again at Bunko tonight, and I said yes, which I kind of wish I hadn't. Still, it is good for me to force myself to be social, especially since I got off work early today so I'm just sitting around anyhow.

Which reminds me, I have a paper to work on.....

Jen