Richard and Vanessa McLaughlin are having a baby!!!

This is awesome news.  Yesterday evening, my family had our bimonthly world skype-fest, which involved simultaneous video-calling from Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney (Australia), and Hong Kong.  After all the technological issues were solved, my eldest brother Rich had an announcement: Vanessa (his wife) is three months pregnant!  The little critter should be saying hello sometime around April 6th, 2012.

Obviously this is huge event in the McLaughlin family, and one that I’m still figuring out.  First off, it’s great to know that McLaughlin men are fertile.  On a more serious note, though, I guess it means everyone moves up a generation.  Mummy will become grandma or granny or something like that; same for dad; Nick and I will be competing for who is the cooler uncle.  Let’s be honest, Nick’s going to win that one hands down – I’ll probably be the boring uncle that’s asked for math help and career advice.  Despite being quasi-respectable at this point in my life, I still feel kind of weird to be “Uncle Tom”, and not just because of the literary connotations (look it up, see picture below).  I didn’t realize that a potential niece or nephew could stir such paternal feelings, but I’ve been feeling them all day.  I’ve wasted a huge amount of time looking up baby videos on youtube, and found myself reading through some old books my mum used to read me (e.g. The Velveteen Rabbit, Love You Forever).  I even perused some old pediatrics notes for some reason.  If this is how I’m feeling as a potential uncle thousands of miles away, I can only imagine how Rich and Vanessa are feeling (see comic above)!

Anyhow, high fives all-round for new life, family, and being able to see each other laugh and cry over vast distances.  Congratulations, Rich and Vanessa.

You’ll be outstanding parents.

Love,

Tom

Well, after promising twice weekly posts, I went and didn’t post anything for 10 days…in my defense, I was busy!  I spent the past weekend jetting off to Calgary for the Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students.  Lot’s of good business done (mostly about student advocacy and medical education topics), and also the opportunity to ride a mechanical bull at Ranchman’s Bar (see photo above of me struggling…).  There might have been some line-dancing and two-step in there, but the dancing went substantially worse than the bull-riding – which is really saying something!

In terms of school, I’m now almost at the half-way point for my first rotation (psychiatry).  I definitely have developed a newfound respect for psychiatrists.  They are actually real doctors, who have to deal with intense medicine, powerful drugs with loads of side-effects, and patients who are generally undergoing the worst period of their entire lives.  As a student, I’ve rapidly developed a thick skin (involuntarily-admitted psych patients can get really angry at everyone, including me!) and a non-judgmental interviewing technique.  ”That sounds awfully distressing” is my go-to line when a patient endorses some false delusion (e.g. the government is stealing their blood because it cures HIV), and I have to walk the line between agreeing that the delusion is true (wrong!), and having the patient begin to think that I am a part of the conspiracy (even worse!).

In any event, there is never a dull moment in inpatient psychiatry.  I’ve learned an immense amount about the various diseases that can cause psychosis, and managed to keep my patients calm enough that none of them have required mechanical restraints – pretty good for three whole weeks!  Next, I’m off to consult-liaison psychiatry for three weeks, which means I’ll be walking around to other floors of the hospital to see patients with psych issues (mostly delirium secondary to whatever their medical issues are).

Once more, good luck to everyone transitioning into clerkship.  Life is grand!

-Tom

Monday night was my first night of call.  I arrived at 5 PM in the Psychiatric Emergency Services Unit (PESU) at the Toronto Western Hospital, keener and greener than ever before.  I was so excited to be thrown into the action, and had carefully studied the diagnosis and management of various psychiatric disorders, and then: nothing!  No patients.  All night.  The resident on call said that it was an “unusually slow night”, which meant that we sat together in the PESU conference room, eating Cheetohs provided by a really nice (and equally bored) nurse, discussing and debating the various issues that arose from a nearby issue of the New York Times.  It was a great night for interesting conversation, but I felt guilty afterwards for secretly wishing the whole time that someone in western Toronto would become psychotic or manic and need our help.

Oh well, on to the next firsts.  Over the next days, I got my first call on my new pager (it was a wrong number), first hospital locker, first run-in with the hospital bureaucracy (my login to the electronic patient record didn’t work, and they said only “Alexander McLaughlin” could fix the problem).

Finally, today (Thursday), a much better first – first day on the wards!  You see, the last few days have actually been spent in class getting lectures about psychiatry, not on the wards.   We only started our clinical duties today.  I happened to be assigned to an inpatient ward that houses particularly high-risk (ie: potentially violent or high risk of running away) patients, and I started today.  I was hoping to be intellectually challenged and excited by the acuity of the patients, but I have to say, more than anything, working on an inpatient psychiatry ward is emotionally more than intellectually challenging.  Sure, the patients stories tend to be lurid and filled with unusual behaviour (sorry, no telling, confidentiality stuff!), but when they’re right in front of you, it’s not funny.  I spent the day getting to know the 5 patients under the care of my supervising physician – and thus me, since she isn’t around a lot of the time, the only resident’s on holiday, and for some reason the nurses think I know what I’m doing – and each one of them told a story of incredible loss of function due to illness.  Even in one day, I feel like I have a newfound appreciation for the crippling damage inflicted on people by mental illness.

In the end, the days have flown by.  I’ve seen lots of other 1T3′s (people in my med school class) who are all looking extremely excited to finally be out on the wards.  Once again, best of luck to all of you, and don’t stop believing!

Rock on,

Tom

Well, after 2 years of preclerkship, 6 years of post-secondary education, and 24 years of life, tomorrow I will head into the hospital under the title of “Senior Medical Student”.  More commonly called a clerk, this position entails being the most junior member of the medical team.  Before this, I’ve been mostly confined to a classroom.  Now, along with 223 classmates, I will be expected to take histories, do physicals, attempt the occasional procedure, and generally avoid killing or maiming people who think that “senior” medical students know what they’re doing.

Starting tomorrow, I can look forward to about four weeks off in the next two years, before being minted a new MD in June of 2013.  The “real medical school” of clerkship is supposed to be a period of amazing professional and personal growth, and I can’t wait!

I hope to use this blog to communicate with family back home, and to share my thoughts and experiences along the way towards becoming a doctor.  The site is going to evolve over the next weeks as I learn how to use the various WordPress features, so bear with me!  I am on call tomorrow night, and I hope to check in on Tuesday.

Until then, goodnight, and good luck!

I has a website!