#med ed

As part of this reassessment, I brought my POCUS learners to do a lung scan to rule out a pleural effusion/empyema as the reason for worsening respiratory status despite therapy. My learners for this block are less experienced with POCUS, so it takes them a bit longer to get oriented and obtain their images. This little guy was initially very cooperative and chill during the assessment, but of course, once it hit the 5-minute mark or so, he began to get restless. Queue the distraction techniques: MineCraft was pulled up on the Child Life iPad.

At first, this bought us maybe 3-5 more minutes of me slowly coaching my learners through the lung scan, optimizing their techniques and saving their images, talking them through findings, etc. Unfortunately, little dude was getting quite antsy... the longer the scan went on, the more wiggly he got.

"Hey bud, we're almost done! Are you building a house right now on MineCraft?"

"No!" he pouted. "I have no building materials or weapons and it's gonna be nighttime soon. Will you help me?"

So I sat with him, asking him to "teach" me how to play the game while keeping an eye on the POCUS process and offering pointers between questions about the different pixelated animals our patient was encountering in the game. At some point, we had to lift each of his arms to get the lateral views and while he had one hand on his head as instructed, he was directing the sightline of the character while I was physically moving the character around.

Of course... this is when nightfall actually occurs in-game and so half my attention is spent dodging monsters spawning all over the place and the rest of my attention is spent helping my learners complete their images and interpretation.

...Well, in the end, we got the images we needed and my little friend and I only died 4 or 5 times to the scorpions 😅

(I had to review all the images outside the room after to actually get our clinical interpretation... much easier when you aren't being chased by skeletons shooting arrows at you...)

As described by my husband, an engineer.

Pre-Med: you learn about the nuts, bolts and materials that make up a bike; sometimes you go watch people ride a bike.

Pre-clinical med student: you try to learn everything about the bike

Clinical med students: you watch people ride a bike and use a stationary bike to practice.

Interns: you finally get to ride the bike, except with training wheels and supervision

PGY2: you get those training wheels off

PGY3+: now you ride the bike faster