Friday, October 14, 2011

Friday, October 14th

It's not been a terribly exciting couple of weeks. Most of the spare time has been spent with Internal Medicine board review materials. I have nearly plowed through all eleven subjects (General, infectious disease, dermatology, rheumatology, cardiology, pulmonary/critical care, endocrinology, gastroenterology, nephrology, hematology/oncology and neurology) and take the test on Wednesday of next week. If the test is on all of the esoterica I once knew, I'm sunk. If it's skewed to make sure that I am not killing people by doing stupid things, I may be OK. It's just been way too long since I've had to know or use a lot of these things. I look at the review questions and wonder where is the choice 'refer to specialist'? It's a smart doc who knows what he doesn't know.

All the usual craziness goes on at work. More and more budgets are being cut back leading to more and more circling of the wagons to protect territory and perquesites. I'm still trying to find some realistic budget numbers for my areas but all I ever get are spreadsheets made up out of whole cloth. It's times like this when I feel that Don Quixote really is my role model.

Tommy is half way through his internship and well on his way to finishing up both degrees. What happens next is, of course, up in the air as the entire state of Alabama's education system collapses in underfunding.

And don't even get me started on our lovely new immigration law. The best adjective I can come up with for it is 'Wicked' but 'Immoral' and 'Nasty' are right behind.