Happy New Year!

It has been too long since I last wrote on here. Since August or so, I did my internal medicine rotation as well as my surgery rotation, hence why I have not had much time to write! Internal Medicine meant that we were on call every 5th day, staying up to 30 hours in the hospital at a time! And then during surgery, it was 4 weeks of on call schedule every 3rd day, so my priorities became: sleep, eat, study some, and taking care of patients...and oh yeah, not falling asleep during rounds. During Christmas break I went to Chile for 3 weeks, which was wonderful, I will posts pictures as soon as I actually get them here in the US of A. As per usual, I was getting all my stuff ready to come back to the US a little last minute, and I left the DVD with ALL my pictures, videos, etc. sitting on my aunt's piano in Chile, in South America, on the other side of the hemisphere. Luckily, my parents, sister and brother-in-law are heading there in about a week, and so they will get the DVD for me.

I am currently on Psychiatry, which has been very challenging. My patients are mostly people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and a few with major depressive disorder. For the past two weeks I've been in the inpatient psychiatric ward, which is pretty much where the most sick patients, the ones no other hospitals in Dallas want to take, are admitted. Sadly, most of the patients do not get better, even when all the medicines out there for their illnesses have been tried. One of the attendings mentioned that psychiatry is behind other specialties when it comes to pharmacology and research. Many of the patients we discharge home or to other facilities are simply at their baseline functioning level, which may be pretty low. Sadly, they are one of the groups that is most scorned, abused, misunderstood, and mistreated by society. I pray that I would not lose sight of what God can and does do in these patients. I ask that He would give me compassion for them, and that I would learn to see them as He sees them.