believe in the power of muffins

evidence-based medicine

if there is one thing i have learned as a resident it is to appease your audience with baked goods!

as residents, we have conference almost every morning (really, every day except for friday). we have conference at noon, too. you’d think i’d be brilliant by now with all of that structured learning time, but to be honest i never felt fully present in conference until maybe the middle of last year. as an intern, it’s just a chance to sit there and rest your buzzing head for a second, until you get paged. and you will get paged — usually just as you’ve taken the first bite of your lunch, or when the speaker is about to reveal some important key point.

but now, i really like it, for the most part. as a third year, my pager isn’t so . . . beepy, and i can actually focus on what’s going on. in the morning, we do case presentations — someone is assigned to present a scenario, and we pick it apart all house-style (well, actually i’ve only seen one episode — but this is what i imagine) until we come the punchline at the end. “OH! HEMOPHAGOCYTIC LYMPHOHISTIOCYTOSIS! OF COURSE!” the guessing game keeps it fun, but the learning occurs along the way, as we tease through the workup and diagnostic process.

then again, there are some conferences that are less exciting. in particular, there is the dreaded evidence-based medicine morning report. when you arrive at morning report and find copies of an article strewn about, you KNOW you’re in for a boring 45 minutes filled with statistical formulas and words like “prospective” and “cohort”.

sadly, it’s MY TURN to have to present an evidence-based medicine conference today. it’s been looming on my calendar for months — so i’m actually glad to be getting it over with! i decided to focus on likelihood ratios (since i really didn’t understand them before) and picked an article that i thought was widely applicable, on transcutaneous bilirubinometers — ie, a way to tell how jaundiced a baby is without having to poke them and bleed them dry!

the good news is that this will be my only EBM conference.

the bad news is that i have no voice whatsoever (thanks to lingering pediatric virus #872) and am coughing up a lung.

i AM bringing muffins, though. so there’s that.

laptop lunch: fall edition

plain yogurt with pumpkin granola + pumpkin butter, granny smith apple + almond butter, baby carrots

ahhh. i love this thing!

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10.21.09

workout: rest day

doin’ time: we had a little happy hour event (thank you alaina for organizing!) last night. it was fun, but i didn’t stay that long because a) it was really killing me to talk with my voice gone and b) i wanted to go home and see josh. sadly, b) didn’t pan out so well because i think he came home at around 2 AM, but it was probably better that i got home to bed anyway.

when i got home, i whipped up this super-easy martha dinner, thinking that maybe josh would be back in time to join me. and he wasn’t, but it was good (and SO easy!) nonetheless!

spinach, quinoa, and mushroom salad with feta, with a slice of toasted dakota bread

i recommend this dish to vegetarians and meat-eaters alike! also, roasting/broiling is my favorite method of cooking, i’ve decided. so low maintenance, yet SO GOOD.

reading: i finished prepping my presentation! that counts for something, i think.