The award for "Worst Blogger of the Year" goes to...

ME!

I have been slacking on a serious level on the blogging. It's been a whole month since my last post. Yikes, bikes and trikes! Sorry about that!

I have not been slacking on other things, however. I have been a busy little bee over the past month. I'll save you from another long post about the rundown of my life and throw out some highlights.

Just a little humor to start you off. 

SMDEP
So as I've mentioned before, I am a TA for the Summer Medical and Dental Education Program. It's a program for undergraduate students interested in healthcare. It's been really fun so far. The kids (okay, they're like a year and a half younger than me) are from all over the US, so they bring all sorts of excitement to our great city of Omaha.

They had lots of orientation stuff last week, so we only delved into actual classwork towards the end of the week. One of the mornings early last week, they took assessments about how they learn and their personalities and such. They had some extra Myers-Briggs assessments so all of the TAs took one too. As it turns out, I am an ENFJ. According to the website, these are my traits.

Warm, empathetic, responsive, and responsible. Highly attuned to the emotions, needs, and motivations of others. Find potential in everyone, want to help others fulfill their potential. May act as catalysts for individual and group growth. Loyal, responsive to praise and criticism. Sociable, facilitate others in a group, and provide inspiring leadership.

I do hope that the description runs pretty true to me because it makes ENFJs sound like pretty awesome people! It would have been interesting to do some of the other testing too, but I had other work to get done instead of taking the assessments.

The program is pretty awesome for the students. They get the chance to see all sorts of different researchers, professors, clinicians, etc. They get two shadowing experiences, plus all sorts of other great things. This past Friday we were in the cadaver lab at UNMC. The TAs were helping to show them specific things on the cadavers. I taught about the brachial plexus. The BP was covered during the third week of our anatomy core and so it was a little bit of a stretch to call on that information again. But alas, I survived and the students learned something!

The keynote speaker for their "opening ceremonies" was a clinician who works with the College of Public Health in Healthcare Disparities. She showed them this PSA about public health. It's a pretty good one! It highlights many of the issues we need to talk about for an effective reform to our healthcare system.

HIV Counseling
So, I've wanted to become a certified HIV Counselor basically since I started doing HIV Prevention Education about 7.5 years ago. And this weekend, I finally did it! I'm CDC certified! Whooohooooo! Yay me!

I did the training through Nebraska AIDS Project and so I will begin observing other counselors for a short period of time and soon I will be testing and counseling clients all on my own! I actually have tested several individuals for HIV before through a program that UNMC did earlier this spring, but we weren't CDC certified.

Much of the training was stuff that I already knew between my years of HIV Prevention Education and my clinical skills class in med school, but it was still a good refresher. Oh and there were some specific slang words that I learned (and maybe didn't need to ever learn...). It was a good time overall. Great to meet new people in the HIV prevention community!

Ethics of Treatment
You'd practically have to be living under a rock to not hear about Angelina Jolie having a preventative double mastectomy (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/double-mastectomy-angelina-jolie-_n_3270390.html) because she had a >80% chance of having the BRCA1 cancer gene expressing itself, which puts her at a high risk of breast cancer (and some ovarian cancers).

Well anyway, my question is at what probability of disease do we suggest that it's a possibility to undergo radical treatment options as a preventative measure? Which surgeons feel comfortable at which percentages? Is there a golden line we cannot cross? I feel like surgery (3 surgeries at that!) was very drastic for Angelina, but it was possible for her because she had access to great care (genetic testing and counseling) and the means to pay for those doctors. But that's not realistic for everyone.

And then we get into just the general ethics of treatment. Do we give certain antibiotics as preventative measures? Who deserves these treatments? Who are we to decide who is worthy to treat? Who bestows this great judgmental knowledge on physicians? What sorts of preventative treatments are too radical?

And now I'm just onto general ramblings and wonderings about ethics. But my point is, was Angelina's preventative surgery too far? What about all sorts of post-disease diagnosis extreme measures? At which point does natural selection take over when humans are always trying to dupe it?

Well, that was a happy note to end my post... Adios for now. Let's hope that it doesn't take another month for another post.