A while back I was in this facelift, and I was dying of boredom. Surgery is fun, but if you’ve done your surgery rotation you know, it can be B-O-R-I-N-G too. Facelifts are usually good cases. I mean you’re pulling someones face off and then putting it back on. The problem with facelifts is when you add in lot’s of other pieces: upper and lower eyelids, plication of the platysma, neck lipo, etc. All these little pieces feel like they take forever and like YOUR face is falling off because as the assists you don’t do much on all those small parts.
This particular day I had a student with me. Which usually is great, but with this case, I was watching her, watch the surgeon during the boring parts. I was mentally dying and trying to figure out how I could get out of there. The student was doing great, and she didn’t need me watching her, but the surgeons sometimes like to make sure you’re around just in case.
Then I got a phone call. It was labor and delivery asking if I could come up and help with a c- section. My heart sang. I’ve got a great relationship with this doc and the student was doing great, so I asked him, “mind if I leave you two here, and I go do a c-section that just came in.”
“No problem, just make sure you have the baby named Jim,” the doc replied, and everyone in the room giggled.
I headed upstairs happy not to be watching my student watch the surgeon. I found the mom to be and with my flat sense of humor I introduced myself.
“Hi, I’m Brian, one of the PAs at the hospital and I’ll be helping with your c-section today. The only issue is that I had to leave another surgery to come up here. No worries we were almost done. The surgeon I was working with said it would be fine as long as you name the baby Jim after him.”
The mom’s face dropped. “That’s what we’re naming him.”
Holy cow! What are the odds? She thought I’d heard what they were naming the kid and I was making up a story to be funny. Nope. True as the day is long. We laughed and laughed. It was unbelievable.
Do you know what else is unbelievable (possibly my worst segue to date)?
The amount of money you can save with a few simple moves right now. I had someone email me the other day. They weren’t complaining, but they thought I’d gotten away from the exam stuff, and so they unsubscribed from PAER. This person wasn’t wrong. These last two issues are a bit far afield, but this information is so important (and so easy to get right if you know what to do) that I could not in good conscious not share it.
Next month we’ll get back to study skills, but this month we’ve got something even more valuable. I like to teach skills and things for the exam, but I LOVE even more to teach skills and ideas that will pay off more and more over time. Skills that will compound for you as the years go by. That’s why I couldn’t’ resist covering the financial side of graduating from PA school, what you should do the first year, what you should do BEFORE you graduate.
There’s so much to cover.
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