Charlie goes to Medical School

Unpacking by Ben+Sam

I wish I had a little more time to put something together, but I want to do a quick update while I’m thinking about it.

The big move went off without a hitch.  This is in no small part to due to the help of my family, Wife’s family and several of our friends.  If you all happen to be reading this blog, thank you for all the help.

Up to this point, we have not so much been unpacking boxes as making sure they are in the correct rooms and making space for stuff to land.  However, tonight we’ve started ripping open boxes to empty with reckless abandon.

The place is starting to shape up.  The apartment is going to look pretty good once we get through this stuff.  I will say that if you are going to be making a move, starting throwing stuff away (i.e. donating, selling, etc.), early and often.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wlscience/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Vacuna Influenza by alvi2047

Prevention and Control of Seasonal Influenza with Vaccines, Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), 2009 – MMWR – Early Release

While I am packing, here is something to tide yourself over while I am not writing.  I wrote a couple of posts about the novel influenza A H1N1 virus (a.k.a. swine flu) a while ago.  One question that arose following the initial reports was about vaccination for this year.  I haven’t been eagerly awaiting this report, but now that it is out I am eager to read it.

I don’t have time to read it over, but wanted to push it out to everyone especially since the CDC decided to push the report early.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alvi2047/ / CC BY 2.0

It’s been a few days, but a lot has happened.

Mainly driving.

We have moved a light load of stuff into the new place.  However, there is still a bit of packing to do at the old place, so I’ve been going back and forth.  Wife has started her new job and is attending orientation sessions and getting a lot of HR work sorted.  My main concern is that Wife not be alone her first week in a new city, and my second concern is that everything at the old place needs to be boxed up by…say 11 pm Friday in preparation for the big move on Saturday morning.

I brought Admin Cat to the new place on one of my trips.  Over the past month, he has traveled with us on one trip.  He was abandoned during another trip (we’ll leave him at home alone for up to 2-3 days).  Then the place gets turned upside down into boxes for two weeks.  Then Wife and I start leaving him alone 16-18 hours a day.  I think this last drive was the last straw.  He’s been doing laps around the apartment and keeping me up at night.  I can’t wait to see what he does when he realizes that this is his new home.

What is going on?!!!

I’ve knocked out most of the packing of big items, but I still have a bunch of stuff that has not found a home in a box yet.  If you are not an inherently and immaculately neat person, you will wind up with random crap around the place that crops up while you are packing everything else.  The result of this is that you wind up with a few boxes which will essentially be “random stuff that accumulated on a specific shelf and is only bound by the one common attribute ‘was on this shelf’”.  My goal has been to minimize the number of boxes filled with random stuff, but I can see now that I have essentially failed at this.

The big move is Saturday.  That gives us a day to finish up what little major stuff there is (master bath, clothes, coat closet, pantry) and then brush all the random crap into boxes that are labeled “random crap”.  These boxes will be the last to be opened and sorted through in the new place and they will inevitably house something important.

The Health Information Hut by john-norris

Med Students Get Training In Second Life Hospitals

Most every school that I’ve heard about now is doing mock clinical scenarios for the purposes of practice and feedback.  Practice and virtual experience is now a large part of the medical school experience so that as a medical student does not enter a hospital their third year with only classroom training at their disposal.

The Second Life thing sounds neat and all, but I’m not sure why a printed map wouldn’t have sufficed.  And I don’t think that a virtual ward with patients will ever produce the nervous lump that you get when in front of a real person during any kind of public speaking.  However, this will probably engage some younger students and will probably be fun.

Not that a lot of schools will adopt this, but I’m kinda hoping that at some point I see an overworked and very tired med student/resident confuse the real hospital for Second Life and fall on their face trying to lift up and fly down the hall.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/john-norris/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

btw, different Charles

HIPAA (wikipedia) training is required for all incoming medical students.  One of the requirements of a health care organization is to train everyone on what HIPAA is and how it is implemented.  I’m not sure if it is required that the training be as boring as it is, but if it is then job well done.

HIPAA deals with the use and access of protected health information (they actually abbreviate this) including any information that can be used to identify the person.  Most of this is common sense, but then again I’ve been working in computers for eight years so I understand the need for a password and what a VPN is.

The law regulates with whom information can be shared with or without a patient’s consent (e.g. mandatory reporting to the CDC on public health issues or 3rd parties involved in treatment or operations do not require patient’s consent, everything not specified pretty much requires consent).  The law also deals with patient’s individual rights to their information regarding access and privacy.  If you’ve been to a doctor, then you’ve been handed a privacy policy which is mandated by HIPAA to be given to you.

I’m learning about this through web-based training modules.  Whoever set this up didn’t take much of a crack at resolving any of the legal-speak into plain language, probably for a good reason.  I think the training module gets audited by someone else.

Obviously, HIPAA is a very complicated set of rules which has then been crammed into an on-line training course and then filtered through me and cooked down into a blog post.  Nothing here should be mistaken for an actual representation of what the law actually is.

Anyway, I’m only halfway through.  Back to it.

Just a quick packing update. We have about half of everything we own in a box. Wife also brought her boxes from work and dropped them in the hallway which you now need to turn sideways to go down.

Admin Cat hates all this.

I hate all this.

Danboard Super Box by Steve Keys

Quick Moving Tip: Get free boxes.

Wife’s cousin kindly donated some flattened boxes to the cause which took a small chunk out of the load.  Then Wife started working craigslist to get us the rest.  Since most people with moving boxes are looking to get rid of them anyway and are usually tired from recently having moved, the cost is usually just hauling the boxes and possibly some other trash out of their house.

Wife and I met with a nice lady last night who just moved to this city and was offering a variety of moving boxes and supplies.  Wife and I along with another woman were going through the nice lady’s moving materials and taking what we could fit into our respective cars.  After most of the stuff had been sorted through, we had a nice conversation where the four of us shared our current moving experience and a little friendly advice.

Moving boxes are expensive, doubly so for being such a single-use item.  So don’t rush out and buy new boxes, and if you have them please consider allowing other prospective movers a chance to help themselves to what you are about the throw out.

The lady who gave us our boxes last night told us that she had twenty messages asking for her boxes, so when you respond to an ad give a working phone number and make sure to say that you can meet up at a moment’s notice.  If craigslist doesn’t have what you are looking for, give freecycle a shot or your local liquor store.  Also, considering recent news about, please look over craigslist’s safety guidelines while interacting with people you meet through online classifieds.

The title to the post is a reference to the open source software terminology about what “free” is.  Things can be free as in beer (i.e. without cost) or they can be free as in speech (i.e. without restriction).  Since craigslist has allowed people to post ads for free (as in beer) it has allowed for the free (as in speech) communication between people encouraging the offering of once-expensive items for free (as in beer).

One man’s trash…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevekeys/ / CC BY 2.0

It would be somewhat befitting that my exodus from my current city is being hurried.

Wife was served with a jury summons.  I want to go ahead and say that if this were to ever occur to me, I would be more than happy to serve my civic duty.  However, the people in charge seem to have a knack for pulling people out of their lives at the most inopportune times.

Somehow, they managed to summon Wife with a jury service date just after the move.  They also managed to put the original request well before the move.  Luckily, a signed lease will serve as proof of new residence as the nice lady on the information line informed me, so we moved up the lease signing to get us some residency proof.

So, a little bit quicker than planned, the official residency for Charlie and Wife has changed.  Now we just have to pack everything we own and actually move.

God Fodder by Ned's Atomic Dustbin

An exciting weekend as Wife and I got to see our godson christened.  I’m a little tired for a full update about the event.  If I get the chance, I may write a little more about this.  It is a little off topic for the blog, but it was a very wonderful weekend getting to meet my new godson and see him join the Catholic Church.

I also got to hang with some of the extended family for the weekend which wound up being a nice vacation which is why I didn’t take the time to update the blog.  Things are going to be a little hectic over the next couple of weeks, so updates to the blog will be a little sparse…and quick.

The next couple of weeks will be full of packing and moving.  Wife and I are going to get as set up as possible before we both start up in our new gigs in our new city.  Hopefully, this means that a posting lull over the next few weeks will make for more time to post as school starts up for me.

God Fodder by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin is available at Amazon and hopefully your local independent music store, hence fair use of the image for my similarly named post.

The Apartment Pool by liangjinjian

Wife and I have picked out a place and are sending off an application.

In the end, it came down to washer/dryer hookups in the apartment category.  Both this place and the one down the way had laundry rooms, but Wife said that she preferred to have a laundry option in the place.

The houses were all very cute (according to Wife), but were lacking in things like closet space and dishwashers.

We also have a dining area, a huge pantry, dishwasher, back entrance/balcony, and a pool.  This place is slightly smaller than the other apartment, but I think that a lot of this space loss has come out of the smaller bedroom (read: our future office) and the living area where we don’t already have a lot of furniture that we plan on keeping.

One killer was that all of these places had pretty sizable pet deposits which I wasn’t expecting to be so much.  I probably wasn’t as prepared for this process as I should have been.  Doing your research will help you figure out what to expect as far as fees and deposits as well as the questions that you should be asking, especially when making a big move since some apartment rules and regulations can vary from city to city.

I know that this may not seem pertinent to the med school process, but there are a couple of things to be aware of.  You will be moving several times during your career more than likely, and more than likely the process will need to happen quickly.  Doing your research before traveling to look at apartments will save a lot of effort.  Also keep in mind that you can also move after six to twelve months should a better living situation arise, so keep some perspective on the situation while looking at places.  Finally, you will probably be putting deposit and rent down before you get your loan money, so leave yourself some extra cash to help with the transition.

For ideas on places, we got a lot of suggestions from a welcome packet that the school sent to me.  There are also some great websites for checking out listings including HotPads which will give you a nice interactive map to check out locations with and the ubiquitous Craig’s List which can give you a low down on what is available…especially from independent, local landlords.

Now we just have to move all of our crap.

Apartment Pool: http://www.flickr.com/photos/liangjinjian/ / CC BY-ND 2.0