Today marks the end of my first year of clinical anesthesia (CA-1) and wanted to reflect on things I learned. While my intern year was filled with lessons inherent to becoming a new physician, my CA-1 year was very different! Anesthesiology has an incredibly steep learning curve – advanced physiology and pharmacology, new…
Tomorrow is my last day of obstetric anesthesiology and also my last day as a second year anesthesiology resident (CA-1). Over the last two months, I’ve done a ton of epidurals, spinals, and combined spinal-epidural anesthetics to help provide labor analgesia and surgical anesthesia for my patients. There’s nothing more gratifying than…
Having completed nearly two years of residency, it’s clear that residents from different fields who are constantly relying on each other will often find ways to ridicule each other as well. This is just the nature of medicine. We’re all busy. We’re all intelligent. We’re trying to manage patients, orders,…
Now that the American Board of Anesthesiology’s Basic Exam is over for CA-1s, I wanted to write about my experiences from the exam on Friday, June 12th.
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Since last year, the anesthesiology written boards have been split into a basic exam taken between the 2nd and 3rd years of residency and an advanced exam taken after right after graduating from residency. My class will be the second group to cough up the $775 for another exam. We’re given…
Its become very evident that obstetric anesthesiology is an entirely different animal compared to my other rotations. I haven’t intubated anyone in three weeks. All my patients are relatively young, pregnant women. I haven’t even seen a vial of propofol in a week! For various reasons, the preferred means of anesthesia for parturients remains…
Today marks my first true day of my two month obstetric anesthesia rotation, and what a way to kick it off – weekend call! I’ll have roughly 60 days to master the art of neuraxial anesthetics (epidurals, spinals, and combined spinal-epidurals), maternal and fetal physiology, obstetric emergencies, medications (methergine, hemabate,…
Protocols and checklists are routinely used in healthcare to avoid oversights and preventable mistakes. In the perioperative setting, there are multiple hard stops to prevent dangerous mistakes (ie, doing the wrong operation on the wrong patient). The more I grow as a resident physician anesthesiologist, the more I appreciate the importance…
For the last several years, our program has hosted an annual anesthesiology poster symposium where CA-1 (PGY-2) residents discuss interesting cases or topics in anesthesiology. I presented an overview of anesthetic/surgical considerations in penetrating neck trauma yesterday morning. At our level 1 trauma center, my colleagues and I have been involved…