March has always been one of my favorite months. When I think of March, I think of two things: my birthday on March 27 and March Madness.
“March Madness” refers to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. What makes it so great is the unpredictability and the excitement of the games. Take this year, for instance – number 10 seeded Davidson beat number 2 Georgetown and number 3 Wisconsin, and, our local Drake Bulldogs (seeded number 5) lost at the buzzer to number 12 Western Kentucky. (Hats-off to a wonderful season by Drake, by the way).
This year, March was a little different. I’m a third-year DMU D.O. student on my surgery rotation. The hours can be long and hard, but almost every day brings something new and often unpredictable – it’s kind of like the NCAA tournament…. Sometimes the patients who are very sick (we’ll call them ’the Underdogs’) surprise all the doctors and get better really fast. Other times the healthy patients with the most straightforward, smooth surgeries (ie. ’the favorites’) end up having the most post-op complications.
There is plenty of excitement in seeing a procedure done for the very first time (and when you’re a third year on surgery it seems to happen every day). That is the best part of clinical rotations – I no longer have to rely on pictures or words from books to draw my references; I can use actual patients and experiences. This month I have seen a leg amputation, a total colectomy, a ruptured aneurysm repair, a knee replacement and so much more! Phew! March Madness indeed…
-Dale Colorado, DO/MPH Class of ’09