Oh, I can do this.

So, I’m not a math whiz. I make no bones about it. I’m more a “right brain” creative type. When I go out for dinner with the wife I usually wind up looking at the bill and saying, “Hmm… Honey? How much tip should I leave this guy?”

So, yeah. Math. Not a fan.

However, the medical math portion of medic school is surprisingly easy. I thought it would be a lot more complicated that it is. Of course, I haven’t had a quiz yet, but I’ve been able to figure out all of the drug calculations without too much brain sweat. My question is this, how many of you guys do the math in your head? Does it just kind of stick after a while or do you work the calculations out on paper or with a calculator every time? I mean, I know the Epi clock makes the drip rate easy, but you still have to get there…

We do our first round of skills check off in lab this afternoon. This is the precursor to us getting out of the classroom to do our first hospital and field sticks and tubes. We’ve got to get a lot of them, so they want us out there practicing the monkey skills as soon as we can. It nice to know that the “skills” portion of my program, while not minimized, is secondary to the education portion of the class. After all, anyone can learn how to tube a dummy, but not everyone can learn the rationale of when and why and what the possible repercussions of shoving that tube into someone will be. That’s the important stuff. Same goes for drugs or IVs. Some medics follow the cookbook and push a tan box during a code, but they never learned the why. In our class, it’s ALL about the why.

And that is why I love it. Fill my head!

There’s a big quiz tomorrow on pathophiz, acid/base, medical math and pharm. I’m feeling okay about all of it, but we’ll see how it goes.

The pace continutes to be fast and furious and we jump right into cardiology next week. That will continue, along with additional pharm, right up to the quarter break.