PA Profession

One of the neat things that my school does is bring in speakers they think will be beneficial to us. Since we have committed to giving them our time from 8-5 M-F, they can schedule speakers at 24hrs notice (although they haven't given THAT short a notice yet). Today we had a speaker who actually wrote the book on physicians' assistants. Really, she wrote The Manual to Being a Physician Assistant. She herself is one of the first PAs in the country and the program director of MEDEX, a PA program in Washington state. She gave us a history of the profession, speaking about the hurdles that had to be overcome in the first years and those that have come up since. I won't give a whole recap of the lecture, but will give a few interesting tidbits:

• There were 4 PA programs that got the profession started off (and all their founders were talking to each other about how they were going to get theirs rolling): Duke, MEDEX, University of Colorado, and a little school in Virginia.
• Each program started with a different student population in mind and different goal. Duke and MEDEX wanted to use corpsman to prove to medical residents that they aren't the only smart people in the world capable of doing what they do. Colorado wanted to use people with all different types of backgrounds to improve maternal-child wellbeing (why we have a pediatric focus, in fact). The little school in Virginia wanted to develop medical providers from rural Appalachian communities to stay in the rural Appalachian communities that they were from and were severely lacking in medical care.
• PA type roles have actually been around for a lot longer than the 20th century and in many different countries. The Chinese used to have what they called "barefoot doctors" that would travel around rural areas in China to provide medical care. Russians had "feldshers" that were basically PAs.
• Dr. Henry Silver, the man responsible for beginning the PA program I am in, actually started the first nurse practitioner program.
• The guys who started the PA profession actually meant to start it as NPs. However, when they approached the nursing community with this idea of training medical providers with skills like doctors from nurses, the nursing community shot it down, calling it a corruption of nursing. If they hadn't been so unreceptive to this, we would never have PAs!
• PAs are the medical professionals least likely to change careers.
• PAs are the happiest medical professionals with their jobs. This is influenced by the choice to change jobs and specialties if they aren't happy.
• The title physicians' assistant was chosen by the men who started the profession. None of them liked the name, but couldn't choose one they were all happy with.
• There was a controversy to call PAs Physicians' Associates, but the American Medical Association said that this was too collegial and not representative of the true status of PAs. By this, the AMA didn't want PAs to think that we were equals with doctors or even a co-worker. This was a long time ago.

After this lecture, I went with some of my classmates to the Ronald McDonald house to serve dinner to the families who stay there. If you haven't heard of the RM house, it's an establishment that allows families with children in the hospital to stay at a reduced cost. The families who stay there are usually from far away and can't drive back and forth to the hospital every day to see their child. It is a really neat establishment and I highly recommend volunteering there, if you live in a city that has one. These families are in a city they are unfamiliar with, with people they don't know, away from everyone and everything normal to them, and their children are sick. They just need some loving and a friendly face not always associated with the hospital. Also, food that is NOT hospital food is very much appreciated. It was awesome and really gave me a much needed lift for remembering why I'm going through this school stuff.

Back to studying!

Ahhhhh

This past week was again completely different than all the weeks preceding it. Missing Monday for Labor Day meant that I had a 4 day weekend, since I have nothing on Tuesday. I was completely thrown off the rest of the weekend, but it was nice. I enjoy things being different, which is excellent in this program. Lectures can get moved to different days and times based on the availability of the lecturer. This is excellent, since it means that we can hear people at the top of their field lecture on the subjects they are experts in. Luckily we have a fair amount of "flex time" built into our schedules to allow for things like this. What's flex time?, you may ask. Well, when I signed up for this program, I agreed to give them my life from 8am to 5 pm. They in return don't use all of that time, but do keep it scheduled as flex so I don't forget my agreement and get all huffy when they move a lecture to a time when I had something else scheduled. They are kind enough to give us advanced notice of when something does come up, but are constantly reminding us to be flexible.

Part of my week was becoming involved in the PA students bible study. This just started on Thursday and had an impressive turnout for those interested. There were so many people in that showed up that we didn't have enough chairs. The 2nd year students are starting it and they were just blown away at the turnout. One later told me that in the class above them, there is only 1 Christian. They saw how hard it's been for her and began praying last year for our class, that there would be a large number of believers. I was blown away by this and touched by the way God answered their prayer. For our Bible study, we're going to be going through a series about being in the medical profession and being a Christian. I'm really excited to do this, since it's been something I've been thinking about.

Steve is currently in South Bend, Indiana, fulfilling his dream to quarterback for Notre Dame, a la Rudy. Well, by quarterback I mean go to a philosophy conference. He and a classmate drove out their last Wednesday evening and have spent the past couple days being blown away by the philosophical bigwigs they are getting to hear. Also, Steve got one of his favorite philosopher's autographs. This is one advantage of enjoying contemporary philosophy - you don't see anyone with Plato's autograph these days.

Quick Share

Just had to write this quickly so I didn't forget; today in Microbiology, our lecture on staph and strep was taught by the man who was involved in discovering Toxic Shock Syndrome. Woah!

Labor Day: No Work Involved

This past weekend was the last break I'll get until Thanksgiving break. Luckily Mom and Dad were able to make the long drive up here for a very quick visit. I think that time with family is rarely long enough and this weekend was no different. However, I have been really needing some good quality time with family and have been lucky to have it two weekends this past month. We were able to take the dogs to the local state park and let them run around with the hundreds of other dogs that were there. (And we seemed to be the only owners that brought toys to play with - other owners preferred to let their dogs play with our toys. Odd.) Mom and I went to get our nails done while Dad and Steve watched the big OSU-Georgia game. Then we went for a little hike the next day at St. Mary's Glacier (the signs for this hike literally have it labeled as a "glacier", apostraphes and all, since it's technically just a snow field that stays all year long) and let the dogs swim in a "glacial" lake and run across the snow of the "glacier". Then Mom and Dad had to leave, since they have these job things people keep talking about. :) Steve and I just relaxed on Labor Day - putting the name to its full honors - and watched movies and indulged in some free Chick-Fil-A.

Tomorrow starts the daily grind again, but so far every week has been different than the week before it. Steve leaves tomorrow evening for a conference at Notre Dame. Tonight dreams of Rudy will dance in his head, I'm sure. As for me, dreams of BRCA1 and detecting breast disease will dance in mine. :)

So Many Classes, So Much TIME!!

Classes are definitely getting in the swing of things, but I am not! In my toughest class (by reputation thus far), we've got thru 2 lectures. We've had class about 9 times. I don't know how it's happened, but it really makes me bored. I have a sinking feeling I'm TOTALLY going to regret saying that, but this is the truth right now. Furthermore, I have all of Tuesdays off since I don't start rotations until the 2nd half of the semester (which is supposed to be the worst way to have it - I had no choice!) as well as Wednesdays after noon, every other Thursday off at noon, and Fridays off at noon. So far I've made use of that time studying, but have also done errands.

On that note, you may remember that I found out over the summer that my thyroid was enlarged. Just to give you a reference point on the mega-ness of this gland, you aren't supposed to be able to feel the normal thyroid. You can SEE my thyroid. Woah. Woah x 4. Finally got around to getting it checked out and I'm totally fine, just have a little autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Sounds totally intimidating, right? As one of my professors said, "If you have to have a disease called Hashimoto's anything, this is the one you want to have." So basically all is well healthwise in the Schley household. Our dog has even lost 15 pounds. (Hopefully he's kept it off. We've been accidentally leaving tempting food items in plastic bags on the floor level. I don't know why, but who can blame a dog for ripping into it?)