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7 Weeks

This week I am beginning my three weeks of Christmas vacation. Following those three weeks I have scheduled 4 weeks of vacation time. All in all, that’s 7 straight weeks off.

Upon hearing about my schedule, many residents have sighed and said, “Oh, the life of a 4th year. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

It won’t be all fun and games, though. This first week I’ll be studying for Step 2 CS and taking the exam on Thursday. The following couple weeks I’ll be finishing up my interviews. But then I will have a few weeks off at the end. I’m still not sure what I’ll be doing. There has been some talk about the possibility of going to Korea. My sister is leaving for Korea in about 1 week. She’ll be teaching English there for 4 months. She would like me to come visit. Well, I’d like to go visit too.

But I’ve also considered other travel alternatives. The others are all cheaper than a trans-Pacific flight. One option would be a road trip. I considered just driving east and just going for a week without any planned agenda. I considered flying out to the east coast and just wandering around for a while. I also considered trying to talk my parents into letting me use a week of their time share somewhere — perhaps I’ll go to Hawaii again.

Obviously my mind is all over the place.

We’ll see, though.

Whatever I end up doing, you better believe I’ll be posting about it!

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Today’s Medical Lesson — Sausage Fingers

In my continuing quest to prepare for Step 2 CK in just over a week, I have been going over practice questions. Here’s something I reviewed today — a condition called Psoriatic Arthritis.

Here’s is a picture depicting classic symptoms of the disease:



Classic symptoms include:

  • morning stiffness
  • deformed joints
  • nail involvement
  • dactylitis
  • “pencil in cup” deformity on x-ray of hands

My favorite one is dactylitis — aka “sausage digit.” See the man’s left index finger? That’s the sausage digit — a diffusely swollen finger.

And that’s the lesson for today.

And I have really been wanting to share about what I learned last week (or was it the week before). It was about something called the “anal wink.” But I guess that will have to be for another day.

Hope ya’all are having a fantastic Thursday!

Update: And a thanks to Ryan who commented below to remind me to add the “pencil in cup” classical finding on x-ray!