Oh my gosh, it has been a full month! Crazy… and kind of sad. Time is going by too fast! This week has been full of phenomenal new experiences, a few challenges, and some homesickness, with the cure being a best friend visitation!
Aspen Sports Medicine: The good news, patients are getting better!!!!!! Yay!! Okay, seriously. Let’s see, many of you care more about this aspect than anything else in the Aspen experience, so I’ll try to fill you in. Conveniently, work encompassed most of my life this week. Tuesday provided a GREAT trip to Vail. We spent the day at the Steadman-Hawkins clinic, one of the most famous orthopaedic surgery facilities in the nation, and watched a really phenomenal hip surgery! For all the medical nerds out there, this was her 5th hip surgery, she had damaged femoral head cartilage, osteoporosis, and unexpectedly NO LABRUM! Dr. Philippon did a spontaneous labral reconstruction with the IT band. It was awesome! We then saw some patients with Dr. Millett and chatted with the other physicians. Dr. Steadman went to medical school at UT Southwestern and still goes back to Dallas to teach! Small world. Dr. Karli then gave a lecture on the use of PRP (plasma-rich platelets) and the up-and-coming evidentiary support. You will be seeing this as injections and in surgeries in the near future, as they are already common here! Okay, back to English. Wednesday mornings are rounds with Dr. Pevny in Aspen, who happens to be an Aggie and a spectacular surgeon. The clinic is going well, and I am really learning more than imaginable. Those of you who know me, know I need more feedback than “doll, you are doing great”, but I’m learning to adapt to that too. Overall, the clinic has just created more questions than before! This dose of clinical skepticism, hopefully which is a healthy dose, keeps my nose in the books. Either way, based on it, we found a mistake in an older edition of the McGee textbook. Crazy! I feel as if UTSW provided a fantastic educational foundation, and in the clinical we are now improving hand skills, clinical reasoning, providing an appropriate plan of care, time/patient management, plus much more. However, I am still very much a student, because my thought process is still extremely textbook. Eventually it’ll be different…..Oh, yeah, most of our patients are post-surgical, so the opportunities to REALLY evaluate patients are limited. However, where there has been the occasion, the therapist and I have come up with the same conclusion! Whew!! That’s a good sign.
Texas Visitation: This week was more difficult than normal in regard to being a bit homesick. Pam, who I live with and have grown extremely close to, was in Denver all week. I worked super late every evening so didn’t have the opportunity to meet with the normal crew, or make it to the young adult group on Wednesday night, or ski, or really chat with anyone. Getting off work late, and then adding in the time change, there was not a good opportunity to talk to anyone from home either. New friends are fantastic, but my close friends are still in Texas and I miss them soooooo much!!! It was a semi-lonely week, but then Jodie made it on Friday!!! Yay! She is such a blessing, and a great friend from college I terribly miss. Jodie is one of those amazing individuals who is completely real, down to earth, always bluntly honest, funny, and a blast to be around. She says things the way they are, and I have missed her friendship dearly! You can be confident you look good around her, because she would politely tell you to change if you didn’t, lol. Unfortunately, both of her flights were delayed, so she was late getting to Aspen, and really late getting home. Overall, her trip was a blast! The weekend with her involved seeing Aspen both day and night, talking, hiking (in the snow), shopping, more talking, laughing, trying new restaurants, the chocolate factory, a lot of laughing when Joey, the teenage chocolate salesman, gave us free hot chocolate then worked hard to impress us with bar-tending flare of the whipped cream can, a lot more laughing when he let us know when he was free to hang out, watching it snow, playing in the snow, slipping on the ice, more talking, a few games of pool, and my personal favorite response to gay ski week, playing “yay” or “nah” in guessing the sexual orientation of almost every guy in Aspen.
Crossroads Church: Still spectacular as always. Ended the Fast. Amazing experience. AMAZING sermon on Sunday evening about the Power to Change. Recommend podcasting it. Go to http://www.crossroadschurchaspen.com/flash_web/front/1510/media/media.php?a=1 and it should be up soon, for the 1/24/10 service, under the “Jesus is my Homeboy” cover. Yeah, I know what you are thinking about the title. Its great though!
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