The week that was...

Glad the weekend's finally here. There was a steep learning curve for me this week. Returned to work on Thursday after my short ill-fated vacation to the west coast that never came to be, spent a couple of days at the thyroid and bone clinics. In that 2 days alone, got to perform 4 ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration/biopsy of thyroid nodules. Give me a few more tries, and I think I'll get pretty good at it. The pathologist called us back 3 hours after we sent off the slides; all good bites with adequate tissue.

Been thinking about my career plans; still somewhat keen on type 1 diabetes and islet transplantation, but haven't seen much of a progress in that field. And certainly, Malaysia has no viable islet transplant program, and looking at things, will likely not have one for the next 20 years even if this becomes an accepted procedure. So, been leaning towards thyroid diseases. And the procedure is straightforward enough that should I decide to practice back home, I can set up my clinic to perform FNAs quite easily, unlike something as technically complicated as islet transplant.

Having said all that, it's hard to jump totally into my fellowship and start thinking like an endocrinologist, not with my internal medicine boards in 17 days (gosh. 17, is that it??). So for now, at least until after the Boards, I still consider myself to be an internist.

Boards. Bleh.