Less than 5 weeks left of my PGY1 year. I can't believe it! I am on my last clinical rotation of this year which is in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The tiny babies are so much different than even young kids, so it has definitely been a learning experience. I am also continuing in the Bone Marrow Transplant Clinic. I'm really enjoying seeing the kids every week. One of my favorite weeks was when one of our patients who was 4 years old sang Single Ladies while the attending physician was her backup dancer. It was one of the cutest things I have seen.
Since my last post I have also completed my big presentation in Hershey. It was just a 10 minute presentation on the results of the study I did this year, but it's kind of a big deal in the residency world. One of my biggest areas of feedback this year has been my presentations, so I was nervous going in to this presentation. There were a lot of my friends there from other residency programs as well as other people from the pediatric pharmacy world. I am proud to say that I nailed it! I was also told that I did a good job answering questions, which can be one of the hardest parts of a presentation. To celebrate, the next morning my coresident and I got room service for breakfast. Since we were in Hershey I got chocolate chip pancakes.
After I left Hershey I headed back to Missouri to surprise my mom for her 50th birthday which was a few weeks earlier. My dad told her that they were meeting some Chinese business associates of his for dinner. She spent a lot of time researching how to act at a business dinner with people from China. Much to her surprise- Natalie and I showed up! The next day we had a surprise cookout for her at the park with her coworkers and friends. And that night we had a pizza party with all of her family. It was quite the weekend! Happy 50th birthday to my amazing mom!
The next weekend I headed to Washington DC to tour with my Uncle Ray, cousin Tucker, and cousin Marcia. My cousin Tucker is 10 years old and had a great time seeing all of the sites of DC. I hear he even put on a Q&A for his classmates upon his return. It was a beautiful weekend, and I got to see some monuments I hadn't seen yet. Living crazy far from family isn't ideal, but it's fun to live in a place that people want to visit.
In the last of my stretch of weekends off (I did some trading so June is not going to be a fun month), my friend Elijah came to visit Philadelphia. He's recently moved to Baltimore, so he's less than 2 hours away now. I took him on a walking tour of Philadelphia, and we saw a ton of stuff! One of the more memorable moments was at Independence Hall when the guide got stuck on his personal ideas of how history should be reported and neglected to tell us anything about the actual building. Fortunately it was so ridiculous it was funny.
I'm planning on spending about a week and a half in Missouri at the beginning of July, so I'm looking forward to seeing all of my Missouri friends and family!
