Infectious Disease Elective, Week 1

I just finished the first week of Infectious Disease - it is pretty neat.  I like talking with someone essentially ONLY about bugs and drugs.  So much more fun than getting pimped on things I have no clue about - and it is great for finding the holes in my bugs and drugs knowledge.  Our day is as such - in the mornings we usually hang out in ICU for their morning rounds, and he chimes in for patients who are on antibiotics - a lot of his job is managing patients on multi-antibiotic regimens to make sure they are all medically necessary so as not to promote bug resistance.  After that we round on his personal patients or check out consults.  Most of them are pretty standard, but some of them are fevers of unknown origin, and most likely infectious but we can't find the cause so that's always fun.  

He gave me a New England Journal of Medicine drug study publication to review and discuss with him.  Also I am going to start writing SOAP notes next week, which should be fine - I'm not particularly nervous about that.  I've done a lot of SOAPs, and while ID SOAPs will probably be a little different, it should be easy enough to adjust. 

Tomorrow I am driving down to LA with my boyfriend to stay at a friend's place while I attend the California Academy of Family Practitioners conference for residencies and education - I should be able to learn more about what is going on in residencies and I can interact with residency directors and talk to them about their programs, their requirements, etc.  I'm not sure how it will go, but hopefully I'll have some free time for socializing.

Also I am in the midst of signing up for my Step 2 exams and planning out my study regimen - I've decided to take the USMLE Step 1 sometime between December and February, and I'll be starting questions soon.  I was doing Step 2 questions, but if I really want to maximize the chance that I will match somewhere in the Bay Area, then I really need to make myself as competitive as possible.  We shall see how it goes but as long as my two digit score is over 80 I will be okay.  It's a bit stressful, and money, but it will probably help me prepare for Step 2 and it will give me some focus now.  I have two electives and a relatively chill surgery rotation for the rest of this calendar year, so this is a good time to study.