Recipe: Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Walking out of the hospital post-call is one of the most glorious feelings. If I were a Sim my "room" bar would jump from full red to full green, particularly on this beautifully sunny morning. My hunger, hygiene, energy, and fun bars though...they'd be lost causes. (Did anyone else spend far too many hours of their childhood on a '90s PC playing the Sims or is this all crazy talk to ya?)

(http://www.macobserver.com/columns/nameofthegame/2000/20001003.shtml)

Weekend Review: NHL Game, Timmy's Steeped Tea, & Glee Finale

I'm in post-call zombie mode today, having arrived home from a 28-hour call shift at 10 am this morning (and fighting to stay awake all day so I that I can sleep early tonight for call again tomorrow!).

Last night after a slew of the usual cholecystitis, hernia, and bowel obstruction consults, we had a trauma come in to liven things up. Strange confession: over the past couple of years trauma calls have led me to develop a weird helicopter anxiety...which is inconvenient given that I live just over a block away from the hospital helicopter pad. Whenever I hear or see the helicopter coming in, I reflexively feel dread and anxiety (conflictingly mixed with excitement (?) if I get paged stat to the trauma bay to meet them). Mainly, I know that the helicopter is a portent of bad news (think Harry Potter seeing the grim during that stormy quidditch game).

To further qualify my helicopter anxiety, hearing the chopper reminds me of a creepy scene from the book Tomorrow When the War Began, where the characters hide from an enemy chopper hovering at the windows of their house (here's that scene from the movie -- see, creepy!). Okay, enough about helicopters! Here are some things I've enjoyed in the past week:

A Day In The Life: General Surgery

I'm over halfway through my four-week general surgery rotation and thought I'd share what my days look like. General surgery is undeniably cool. You get the chance (privilege!) to see stuff that few people ever do. In medical school it was such a thrill to touch the liver, feel the aorta pulse, and hold a colon cancer (freshly resected; the surgeon casually passed the piece of colon over to me).

It took me most of third- and fourth-year med school to realize that "This is new and exciting and so so cool!" does not mean "This is what I want to do for my career." I used to see surgery as the pinnacle of medicine. Surgeons were the ones who saved people. They made obvious differences to their patients' lives, with immediate and tangible results. They worked hard and remained calm under pressure. I felt that surgery would be the most challenging field of medicine to enter and to choose any other specialty would be wimping out. Looking back, all I can say is that I could not be more relieved that I snapped out of my Grey's Anatomy-inspired delusions of grandeur and picked a (non-surgical) specialty that was right for me.

While I still believe that surgery is one of the most challenging specialties, I know that my specialty (like any other) will challenge me in unique ways. Surgery is not for everyone and I'm glad I didn't end up pushing myself into it, only for the sake of taking the "hard route".

Study Tips: Abbreviating Powerpoints Or Textbooks Into Study Notes

I've written previously about how I make study notes, but I realize that I wasn't very clear on how I take Powerpoint lecture slides or a textbook chapter and turn it into a page of notes. In this post I'll go through the process with an example, so let me apologize in advance for this being the most. boring. post. ever. for the majority of readers (including anyone who has already found a system of note making that works for them).

I'll reiterate my two goals in making study notes:

1. To condense a hefty stack of lecture notes into a minimum number of pages...i.e. be concise and waste no words! Who wouldn't rather study 50 pages instead of 500?
2. To include every potentially testable fact in my study notes, so that I can get rid of the Powerpoint slides/textbook and only study my own notes come exam time.

Seeing the Aurora Borealis in Edmonton

One thing I've dreamed of since I was a child was seeing the aurora borealis, so you can only imagine my excitement at realizing that I had chosen to move to a city for residency sufficiently far north for this dream to bear out. Sure, it's already spring in Vancouver and here in Edmonton we're working on clearing a fresh foot of snow, but northern lights >> cherry blossoms in my opinion, and are one more reason why living in the great white north is more awesome than you'd think.

Since last summer, I've been keeping my eye on the AuroraWatch website, a venture by the University of Alberta to monitor Edmonton's geomagnetic activity and generate a real-time probability of witnessing an aurora. When the probability reaches 50%, a yellow email alert is issued; at 70%, a red alert is sent out.

(http://www.aurorawatch.ca/)

Weekend Review: Aurora Borealis, The Druid, & The Rosie Effect

I'm halfway through my general surgery rotation and sure am happy to have this weekend off! Due to a combination of insomnia, poorly timed coffee, and aurora borealis excitement, I got barely three hours of sleep for the first four nights this week...but not to worry, I slept for eleven hours last night to average things out! The days have been long and busy, hence the paucity of posts, but the week in general has been good -- here are some things I've enjoyed:

Recipe: Irish Soda Bread

While St. Patrick's Day is not a grand affair in the part of Canada I live in, I figured there'd be no better time to try one of the Irish recipes featured on AllRecipes.com. Specifically, I'd had my eye on Brennan's Irish Soda Bread, a quick and simple recipe that intriguingly called for no yeast, butter, or oil. Furthermore, it had 4.5/5 stars and close to 90 overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Happy Pi Day (and Albert Einstein's birthday)!

Because I'm too sick in bed to bake or eat pie, let's celebrate with a comic I drew 4 years ago:

Happy Pi Day!

Weekend Review: Surgery Gripes, Blue Jay, & Spring Melt

This week has been nuts (hence the radio silence). Some less than enjoyable things that have happened in the past few days include:

• having to be out of the house by 5:30 am
• getting a parking ticket (because the parking office "forgot" to register my new permit in their computer system, argh)
• fainting in the OR
• having fevers yesterday and now the flu
• having the busiest 26-hour call shift ever...I lost count of how many consults we did, not to mention the ward calls about delirium, wound dehiscences, a patient who left AMA (after smoking on the ward), etc.

Clearly I don't have the stamina to be a surgeon. And that's okay. I'll happily be a tourist in surgery for these four weeks, getting a glimpse into all the interesting stuff, and then leaving it to better people to make it their career.

This week actually wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to be; here are some things that I've enjoyed:

Recipe: Bean Salad (& Freezing Cilantro)

Last week I picked up a bunch of cilantro while grocery shopping. I seldom buy fresh herbs as I hate to see them wilt in my fridge after I've used the few sprigs that a recipe calls for, but on sale for 50 cents, I couldn't pass up one of my favourite herbs.

I turned to AllRecipes.com's ever helpful "by ingredient" search and browsed through the top cilantro-containing recipes. I decided on two to make: a potato soup (perfect for cold weather...and involving bacon!) and a bean salad. Here is the recipe for the bean salad, slightly modified from one submitted by Karen Castle to AllRecipes.com:

Weekend Review: Chocolate Pumpkin Cake, Alberta Instagrams, & Transcend Coffee

This week is my last one in the emergency department and I just have two shifts to go, tonight and tomorrow evening. Next week it'll be back to early starts on general surgery -- waking up at 4 am is going to be tough, after sleeping from 3 am to 9:30 am for the past couple of weeks! The past week has been a good one and with these warm (well, 4 °C) sunny days we've been having, it feels like spring has arrived. About time! Here are some other things I've enjoyed over the past seven days:

How To Peel Grapefruits & Oranges For Packed Lunches

I'm sorry if this seems like the most obvious post ever, but it's something that took me waaay too long to figure out...so if by any chance there's one person who reads this who is in the same boat as I was, posting this will have been worth it. For the rest of you who had this figured out eons ago and are rolling your eyes, there's no need to read any further.

The Things That They Don't Teach You In Medicine

In medicine, as in any other specialized field, there are things that you can't help but pick up by way of assimilation. It's kind of incredible that despite not being taught these things explicitly, any medical graduate from any medical program anywhere ends up learning them. Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:

Recipe: Hummus

Since a jar of tahini came into my possession from a Superstore shopping trip last week, I'd been looking forward to trying a new hummus recipe. For lack of tahini, I'd previously been using this AllRecipes.com cumin-spiced hummus recipe on the rare occasion that I blended up a batch. It was tasty, but, seeing as it's been over two years since I've made it, evidently not quite the grocery store hummus substitute. I had high hopes that the Minimalist Baker's Best Ever 5-Minute Microwave Hummus recipe would produce a hummus that would stand up to any preprepared or restaurant version. More so, it looked like a recipe that even I'd be hard pressed to mess up.

Recipe: Dominican-Style Oatmeal

Happy March! I awoke to the sun filtering through my blinds on this beautiful blue-skied Sunday morning. Looking past the snow on the ground, I could almost convince myself that it was summer (wishful thinking!).

In keeping with a slow Sunday morning -- and the fact that I have a 4-L jug of milk in my fridge -- I decided to cook up some oatmeal on the stove. I seldom make stove-top oats, but when I have both time and milk on hand, I can't resist making Pepita's Dominican-style oatmeal, a five-star gem from AllRecipes.com that shouldn't be overlooked for its simplicity. This Dominican recipe makes the creamiest, tastiest, most delicious oatmeal you can imagine -- and, with 20 grams of protein, keeps you satisfied until lunch.