Plastic Surgery Intern Year: Month Five Update

Still enjoying Florida life!

Can you believe December is only three days away?!?! This year has flown by so incredibly fast! As I sit here typing this just a few days after Thanksgiving, I continue to feel so much gratitude for all this year has given me. Where I am now is so vastly different from this point last year, and I continue to be thankful for all of life's twists and turns.

Love that I get to  wear my Medelita scrubs this month

Anyway, in terms of residency updates, I am currently finishing my Surgical Dermatology and Mohs month. Mohs surgery is a procedure in which skin cancer is cut out, viewed under a microscope, and cut out again until there is none left. We perform around 10-20 cases per day which allows for the steady work flow that I love. It has also been an awesome month hanging out with my dermatology colleagues, and I finally got to a point where my attending is comfortable with me performing routine excisions and closures on my own, so that has made me super happy. I'm learning a lot, and I love the overlap between dermatology and plastic surgery in the form of tumor resections and flap closures.

Thankful for the opportunity to share my story!

Outside of residency and studying, I've had the opportunity to pursue my passion of inspiring and engaging future healthcare leaders over the past month through many speaking engagements. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking to students from literally around the world and sharing the story of my path to medicine. I remember when I first started this blog how hard it was to find someone with similar circumstances who had made it to where I wanted to be in life, and now I am proud to be that shining example for anyone else who might be on a similar path. I went from being the low stat single mother who everyone said had no chance of passing boards, surviving medical school, or getting into residency to doing ALL of the above! I take great pleasure in sharing my story and life circumstances because the world needs more physicians with life experience, empathy, and the tenacity to overcome the odds. This representation matters not just to the younger generations who follow in our footsteps, but to our patients who ultimately this is all about. If I can inspire just one person to pursue their dreams, then I am happy, so I will continue to put my story out there as much as I can.  

Blessed to be able to spend time with my daughter

Lastly, my daughter finally came to visit me last week! Because of work, it was hard for me to travel to her for Thanksgiving, and between her school, band, and color guard schedule, it's been difficult coordinating a trip to see me due to her schedule somehow being more hectic than mine. Luckily, we are both more into quality of time than the quantity, so I'm happy we finally made it work. We had an awesome museum experience, enjoyed the beautiful November weather on South Beach, took an airboat ride through the Everglades to see alligators, enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner together, put up the Christmas tree, and I may have been slightly conned into allowing her to get a 2nd ear piercing, lol. I feel so blessed to build memories and spend moments like these with her that I hope she'll keep with her forever. 

Enjoying doing touristy things on my days off

That's pretty much all I have for updates. I'll try to write more than one post in December, since I'll probably go under a rock for my ICU month in January and my schedule will be super busy for the first half of the year with trauma surgery and such. Honestly my life is pretty boring since all I do is work, and I can't share too much information out of respect for my patients, so I'll try to think of some inspirational/motivational posts to come up with it. If there's anything you want me to write about, feel free to leave a message in the comment section or email me. With that being said, I hope everyone reading this had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I wish you a fantastic week ahead!