I was hoping that, since I accomplished next to nothing last night, I would be able to catch up a bit on the studying today. Silly me. It's amazing how quickly the day fills up when you have a heaping mound of review books to read...

My first task of the day was to head over to Stanford Hospital to obtain new copies of the laboratory requisition forms for use at Arbor Free Clinic, since most of the ones we currently had in use had been photocopied ad infinitum, such that much of the form was no longer legible, and/or had incorrect information written on them.

It was, as usual, an absolutely gorgeous day on campus, and walking over to the Hospital, I had one of those increasingly infrequent moments where you just stop and realize, with a sense of quiet awe, how privileged you are to live and work in a place like this:

Of course, the quiet awe soon dissipated and was replaced by frustration when I got to the Clinical Laboratories and couldn't get the forms I needed (the person on duty didn't know where the forms were kept; I left my number for them to call back if they located them or found out where I could get them from, but haven't heard anything).

On the way out of the hospital, I was struck by a different sort of image: two waiting room chairs pushed together into a makeshift bed--a temporary, fitful resting place for someone whose mother, or son, or wife was in surgery? Many times I've walked down the halls of our hospital, brimming over with excitement at the prospect of seeing an interesting case, or heady with a sense of accomplishment, swishing about in my white coat and my stethoscope draped around my neck.

But for most everyone else who paces those same corridors, the hospital is a place of uncertainty, helplessness, and maybe of fear. It is sobering to think that a place in which I feel so much like I belong is the same place that causes others to feel alone and alienated, and it is a divide that I think must not be overlooked in the practice of medicine.

So, even though I didn't get the requisition forms, I headed to Arbor anyway, and spent the next two and a half hours updating the old forms...ghetto-style it may be, but there's nothing a little cut-and-paste + Xerox action won't solve.

At 3 pm I had to dash...to yet another Arbor-related appointment. The managers of the clinic had recently been contacted by a group of students at the Graduate School of Business, who were interested in doing a project to analyze the human resources needs of the Cardinal Free Clinics (Arbor and our fellow student-run free clinic, Pacific, which has more of a chronic care focus, and serves a different patient population).

This meeting, which I attended with fellow manager Shirin, turned out to be mostly an introductory Q&A--the GSB group wanted to know more about clinic operations, our finances, what our long-term goals are and what the major obstacles are that stand in the way of achieving them.

It was nice, in a way, to be able to verbalize a lot of the frustrations that come of running a free clinic with limited resources. While we could always use more volunteers (especially physicians), the real stumbling block continues to be funding. As a fairly well-established organization (Arbor was started in 1990), it is increasingly difficult for us to get grant funding, and University limitations make establishing an endowment an arduous task.

Hopefully, one day, both clinics will be self-sustainable, but for now, it is still a struggle to stay in the black. At any rate, I am excited about this potential new partnership with the GSB, and it would be fantastic if their project yielded some results that could benefit our clinics.

With the meeting adjourned around 5PM, I headed home to meet my roommate, Paulina, for dinner. Paulina and I were randomly assigned roommates in Lyman Graduate Residences (where I've lived since I started medical school). She's currently a 6th year PhD student in Applied Physics (she works with lasers!). I've always found it very refreshing to live with a non-med student. With as small of a class size as we've got here at Stanford Med (86 people to a class!), it pretty quickly becomes apparent that medicine can be a somewhat isolating community.

Since most of the hours in my day are spent eating and breathing medicine, I really appreciate having another perspective around (particularly as I've found that, among medical students, the conversation pretty much inevitably turns to medicine at one point or another, despite all efforts to the contrary).

Unfortunately, because our schedules are so different, Paulina and I don't hang out nearly as often as I'd like, so it was great to finally go out for dinner tonight. We hit the Cheesecake Factory, which, bless its heart, is so ridiculously BAD for you...yet so mouth-wateringly good. I tried to keep it healthy with a Spicy Thai Steak Salad, but I guess they figured they'd make up the deficit in calories by sheer quantity. Witness the veritable mountain of salad in front of me.

All my valiant eating heroics resulted in hardly more than a dent in that thing. The effort tired me out, though, so I had to get my cheesecake to go (Oh come on. You can't go to the Cheesecake Factory and NOT get cheesecake. That's like going to Egypt and saying, "The Great Pyramids? Nah...I think I'll just find a mall to go hang out at or something.")

Anyway, that provided me with a sweet cap to the night...and one that I got to share with the other great love of my life (second to Robbins, natch...KIDDING.):

Tomorrow: 12PM, Arbor meeting for which I am severely underprepared...yay!

Posted at 11:19 PM

Back to My Homepage | Next Day