For many people, a typical day includes waking up, having breakfast, going to work, coming home, having dinner, and going to sleep. Sometimes, if we're being good, we'll sneak in a workout. But then again, most of us aren't studying medicine abroad in Gabarone, Botswana! Perelman School of Medicine student Hayley Goldbach shares what a "typical" day is like for her as she continues her medical school studies (and blog posts) with the Botswana-UPenn Partnership.
Hayley Goldbach
Given that today was fairly typical, I thought I'd share my agenda in excruciating detail…
7:00 am - Leave our apartment and walk to the hospital
7:30 am - Check on a patient who is being enrolled in my study and has an appointment today
7:45 am - Morning report (internal medicine doctors present cases)
8:30 am - Check on the inpatient consults. Today we are re-visiting a woman with a very swollen leg and a bullous (like huge blisters) rash. It seems like no one else is checking on her so we are compressing the leg and dressing it each day.
Writing a note for an inpatient
9:00 am - Dermatology clinic begins. We saw quite a few complicated cases today.
1:00pm - End of clinic. Time to clean up, bring our biopsy instruments to get sterilized and take stock of what we'll need tomorrow (because tomorrow we have outreach clinic).
1:15pm - Go to the main hospital lab and then the microbiology lab to drop off our bacterial cultures and mycobacterial stains
1:30-3:30pm - Go across the street to the national lab. Agenda for today- drop off fungal cultures, find missing slides (we got 'em all!), load new slides on robotic microscope and then Doug does preliminary reads of the slides (he looks at them before they go on the robotic microscope and get read by Dr. Kovarik in the US) while I double check on the retrospective samples (they are finally ready!).
The biopsy bag
3:30pm - Quick stop by gynecology clinic to see if I can find out anything about my study patient
4:00pm - Walk home
4:30-7:00pm - Scarf some food (lunch slipped through the cracks today), restock biopsy bag, arrange a ride to the bus station for tomorrow morning (for outreach clinic), look up anything I didn't understand in clinic today, write up an instruction sheet for VisualDx (the computer program I installed in the library here), update the blog.
7:00pm - Dinner for Aileen (a 4th year med student at Penn) because she is leaving