First Rotation: Medicine

My first rotation was internal medicine (7/9 - 8/16; 8/20 - 9/28). This is a 12-week rotation, which for me started with 6 weeks of outpatient medicine in a little town near the Washington coast called Montessano. It was a great rotation spent primarily with Dr. Ki Shin. He was a great teacher. I also worked with his wife Clara Shin a few times. They are both great doctors and teachers



The housing was fabulous, with three bedrooms and two full baths shared between me an one other student (Bryce Inman). There was a nice yard, wireless internet, and it was a three block walk to the office.















My room was huge, and accommodated my bike, kayak, and surf board.


There is a wonderful state park literally one mile up the road, so I'd often go for a 5 mile morning run there. One morning I actually saw a beaver. There were also mountain bike trails up there, but they were a bit too gnarley for me. In fact, Dr. Shin ate it big one time over the lunch hour and had some serious soft tissue injuries in his mouth. His wife banned him from ridding up there for a while.

The best part about being out there was that it was summer, it was light until 9pm, and I was 40 minutes from Westport, which is the surfing capitol of the Northwest! So you know what they say: "When in Rome..."

Without this rotation, I'm not sure we would have gotten into surfing...at least not yet. This has now become our passion and I'm grateful that I was at Montessano for that reason.
So the first day I went out there, I took this picture. It was a beautiful day, and you can even see the Olympic Mountains in the background.

The waves were really small that day, but there were at least a hundred surfers in the water, and I had a credit card burning a whole in my pocket. I knew I had to have a board and that I had to get in the water. In Washington, that also meant that I needed a wetsuit.

So I got my wetsuit at a store called The Surf Shop, and I got the board at a place called Steepwater Sports. These are now very frequent stops for us!



SO this is what my little bug looked like sporting a brand new 7-10 fun board made by Blue. Yup, that was my first board.






Medicine was tough because it required me to be away from home and Seth for 12 weeks, but Seth was in California for two of the weeks while I was in Montesano, which made things a little bit easier for me. When he cam back, he got totally into surfing, too. In fact, he bought a board at Wise surfboards in San Francisco on his way back up. He got a 9 foot Walden long board.

The first day we went out, there was a guy from they Olympia newspaper doing a story on Westport and surfing. He took our picture as Seth was going into the water for the very first time with a surfboard. The picture was in the paper the next day. It was fun. :)

Seth also came down on Wednesday nights, because he works in Olympia on Thursdays, and it was just as close to leave from Montesano. So we'd surf weekends and Wednesday nights while I was there.


The second half of the rotation was much different. It was inpatient medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center, where call was every 4th night for 36 hours. The only days off were if you weren't on call or post-call on the weekends, so most of the time you had one day off a week (if you were lucky). It was a grind and a lot of work. But I learned a lot, especially from Dr. Moe Haggman. She was great.

The other good thing was that I was able to ride to work, so even though I was busy, I got 12 miles of riding in every day...because it never rained on me...once.
I leased out a really nice studio condo in Belltown from Nick Wysham.