No matter what I do, I seem like I'm always on the run. Balancing work, teaching, writing, running to my daughter's softball games, working out and tackling the long laundry list of daily activities provides little time for anything else. Finding a few minutes to refresh my knowledge of a medical topic is a difficult task. Or it was, until ...

With nine shifts down and six to go, it's hard to believe that my emergency medicine rotation is more than halfway complete. (You may remember that I was originally scheduled to work just 12 shifts this month. Through a change of events, I was fortunate enough to pick up three extra days in the ED.) This month I am given 150 hours on the job to ...

Last week my classmates and I began a clinical skills course. The professor described the course as a time for students to ''put away your laptops and notebooks and simply use your eyes, ears and hands.'' Topics and workshops covered include aseptic technique and surgical scrubbing, casting and splints, injections and phlebotomy, suturing and ...

What does it feel like to wait nearly an hour in a cold room with only a thin cloth separating your private parts from the outside world?  More than likely, we have all had some uncomfortable incident where we were the patient.  Now, the dominant perspective has us behind the white coat.  As PAs or aspiring PAs, it is possible for ...

The hospital can be a hostile environment if you are not aware of whose house it really is. Right now, I am taking a class called Supervised Practice where we spend one day per week in a clinical setting. The other day I performed rounds in the hospital with a PA who was doing GI consults. It felt like a foreign land, being that we ...