Done with Neuro

It is nice to have neurology over and done with. I just wasn't to crazy about it. This year was the first year it was moved from a 4th year pass/fail to a 3rd year grade. The organization just was not on par with the rest of the year. I did get a good amount of exposure though; strokes, Parkinsons, Alzhiemers, Guillian-Barre, Miller-Fisher, Downs, meningitis, encephalitis, and tons of seizures. Reading about the different pathways in the nervous system was fun too. If I were to have to rank the rotations so far, it would probably be:

1) internal medicine- tough, but intereting and well organized
2) ob/gyn- chaos (especially if you don't know Spanish), but I guess that is how you have to learn it here
3) neurology- disorganized and most of time you are called in when things have gone south
4) psychiatry- well run rotation, but probably just not my thing

Still to come: family practice, pediatric, and surgery

Finishing a rotation is a great feeling, because that means you actually have the weekend off. 30 minutes this afternoon was spent running through a few practice tunes on the bagpipes. Fourteen months into it, I finally feel like I am making some progress. Who knows what my neighbors are thinking at this point, but I have to be prepared for my lesson tomorrow morning. A switch weekend also means you might get a chance to catch up with your classmates you haven't seen in a month, and there are always a few good stories to share. We get to see so many interesting things in the hospital and most of it is for the first time.

Week in Review

Work at the new hospital has been interesting. Children are certainly not just small adults. They say neurology is the double SS field for "strokes and siezures." It certainly has been true. The ventrans hospital inpatient was mostly strokes. The outpatient clinics had a bigger mix with some rarer conditions. The children's hopital has been predominatly siezures. There are a couple meningitis or neuropathy patients. There have been a few strokes in children or infants too. I guess I just didn't think they happened in this age group but they do.

Bible study tonight was on Acts 14, where we took at look at the second portion of Paul and Barnabas' first missionary trip. Not your typical modern two week mini-mission trip; run out of the first town or two and then stoned and left for dead. I thought it was interesting to look at two approaches used by the apostles when sharing the gospel. When speaking to groups in Antioch and Iconium which had a knowledge of scripture, they presented the gospel using Old Testament material. However, when they went to Lystra and spoke to predominantly Gentile's who lacked a knowledge of the Bible, they referred back to the more universal gospel that is presented in creation and mentioned in Romans 1:20. There is a lot of other interesting stuff in the chapter. Anyone have interesting thoughts on the passage? Maybe that will be the topic for the next entry.

For now, I should run. I have an early morning bagpipe lesson. Hopefully, I will have more than Amazing Grace learned and my lungs will hold up for more than half the lesson.

New Hospital

These are two pictures from my trip to Ecuador with Matt during first year. The mountain is Ilinizas and I can't remember if we were climbing up the north or south peak. I did eat the critter on the plate and there are some other pictures to prove it.


Tomorrow morning I will be starting pediatric neurology at a new hospital. I hadn't even spent two weeks at the last one. Third year medical school is like getting hired and fired every two weeks with three or four bosses looking over your shoulder at all times. Just when you think you might have one place figured out, you have to move on to the next one. Sometimes you wonder if you can find the new hospital in the morning. How long does it take to get there. Where are students allowed to park. Where is the rounding room. How do you contact your weekly boss. Where can you put your books. Where are the bathrooms. Where can you find food. Anyway, I guess it is all just part of the process.
The weekend was good. The assembly in Lewisville had a series of Bible meetings. It was mostly teaching with a little discussion afterwards. I won't go into all the details here. One of the questions that I was discussing afterwards with a law student was how to share the gospel with an atheist. Interesting stuff.

Neurology plus Matthew

It has only been one week and I would hate to pass judgement on a rotation so quickly, but I think it is fair enough to give neurology a 1 week evaluation. Maybe I am biased because I just came back from my Christmas break; who knows. Maybe it is because my first lecture was at 7:30am on a national holiday and and the slide projector did not work. Seriously, how much can you get from a neuroanatomy lecture at 7:30am when there aren't even any pictures to see. There are a few other things, but I don't know want to post them on the blog. Who knows who actually reads this thing. I will post an update on the rotation after it is over in four weeks.

One advantage to working at a hospital that requires a 25 minute commute is that there is time to listen to the Bible on CD. I have been going through Matthew. There are a couple of things that have struck me as I have heard it. Jesus is very harsh on the Pharisees. It seems they excelled at professing a knowledge of the scriptures, yet lacked an understanding and a practical application. Their hypocrisy is certainly laid bare in chapter 23. "Ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity" (vs 28). We must remember what is recorded in I Samuel 16:7, "the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

The other day during a lecture on epilespy, I think someone brought up Matthew 17:14-21. Maybe I have the wrong place, but I am curious to get someones thoughts on it.

The pictures are from a trip I took last year in California along the coast.

They received the word with all readiness of mind....

Well, school is back in full swing and I am already buried under in homework. It is always fun to go the first few days and be completely lost. Medicine these past few months put a serious damper on Bible study but I am hoping neurology and family practice allow for some free reading time.

The pictures in the post are of Quechua adults or children in the Otavalo area after receiving 2007 calanders with verses on them. Most of these people were so excited to recieve material in their own language. Please pray for those that read the gospel, that they might receive it with "all readiness of mind."

Over the past few weeks I have been discussing with some friends of mine how exactly we feel we should share the gospel. I have been reading http://dyspraxicfundamentalist.blogspot.com/ and he occasionally has blurbs about his experiences preaching on the street. I have heard of people doing that ten or twenty years ago, but don't hear much about it anymore. Where I live, there just isn't too much pedestrian traffic and a large percentage of those walking the local streets seemed to be armed. I wonder what is most analagous to Paul's experience in Acts 17. Any thoughts as to what that might look like these days? Does this relate at all to what we find in Matthew 5:13-16? It seems like we live in a society where our faith is supposed to be excluded from our place of work and the gospel is to only be preached within in the confines where believers meet.

During the last three years, there have been some interesting opportunities to share the gospel with classmates, co-workers and friends. One of them came to know Christ a few years back and we can praise God for that. However, the majority of the responses have either essentially boiled down to, "it works for you, but I really think that we can believe what we want" or "based on what science tells me these days, there really just isn't a need for a god." A couple had much more complicated objections, but those are topic for another day. While I was down in Ecuador over the Christmas break, a group of young adults sat down and discussed a variety of Biblical issues; among them was how to address various objections to recieving Christ. I thought Dean Rule had some interesting verses and ideas. I am curious to konw what other people out there might be thinking.

New Year

Well, I had a few hours off and figured I would go ahead start a blog. I have been mulling the idea for a year or two now. Can't promise this will not be my first and last entry, but I will try to do periodic updates.

Christmas break is drawing to a close. I spent the majority of the last two weeks down in Ecuador visiting some second cousins. Although I took 420 pictures before filling up my card, I will only stick one or two on here.