Doc Ahmad Hajiri

Clerkship Day 253/253 Today is the last day of Clerkship (known to UPCM as Learning Unit 6 or LU6), my fourth year as a Medical students. No, maybe it is not yet the official end of the Academic year as we still have our 5 Final examinations and 2 Comprehensive exams next week... But yes, this is the end of our final rotations in the different departments in UP-PGH. I can't even believe I am all done with all of them! We started with Pediatrics, then Family and Community Medicine, then Obstetrics and Gynecology then we had a one-month elective, then we went on to Surgery then Emergency Medicine and Anesthesiology, then the dreaded Neurosciences, then longest rotation which is Internal Medicine and last came the not-so-fun-anymore "fun four": Rehab Med, Orthopedics, Otorhinolayngology (ORL/ENT) and Ophthalmology. Wow! It felt like it started years ago! But it still feels like it just happened yesterday! Maa sha Allah! And as I struggled to "relearn" the ...

Is it crazy if I keep pon sending the same letter to myself after 10 months? Or another year? Hey wake up Ahmad! Hope you didn't fail to read this letter again and again! May 30, 2016 (or anytime in the future after July 30, 2015) Assalamu Alaykum wa rahmatullah! Hey dude, it’s me, your pre-clinical clerkship self a.k.a. the self that you had (hopefully will still have) before you started your death-defying ordeal called “Clerkship”. I know this is crazy, but hey, since when did we ever consider things “not crazy” huh? Perhaps, right now you’re about to begin your most challenging year in Med School. And the anxiety is killing you already—you don’t know what to expect, you feel like you know nothing at all! Don’t worry, that is exactly what you are supposed to feel. Just give it a a few days and you will get used to the feeling, the pressure and slowly you will find yourself adapting to the new environment you have. Or maybe you are already in the middl...

Clerkship Day 204 to 216: Rehabilitation Medicine Continuing on our ever-delayed journal on “How to survive Clerkship in UP-PGH” (I made up that book title), let us talk about the things to know about clerkship in Rehab Medicine. General Info (What you need to know): Duration of Rotation: 2 weeks Number of students: 8 (sub-block) Important hours: Time in: 7:30 AM (They’re strict on this!) Time out: 4:30 PM (Yup! It’s that early) But students preparing for the G rounds the next day will usually stay until 8 to 9PM. Wearing uniforms REQUIRED! Duties: At least once a week for each student. 2 students will have only 1 duty for the whole rotation. Weekdays: 5PM to 7AM the next day Weekends: 8AM to 8AM the next day No true posts. Post-duties to stay until 4:30PM except weekends. SIC work: At most 2 patients each student, with one “G” patient each. With interns? Yes, but onl...

Clerkship Day 212 Rehabilitation Medicine Day 11/14 There are so many things in our daily life that we often take for granted. Take for example the ability to walk. Or the ability to hold things with our hands. And what is so unbelievable is that we never really recognize their importance, until we lose them. Yes, a cliché statement but nevertheless real. I only had two patients during my 2-week stay in Rehab Medicine, and both of them taught me a lot of things. Here I will talk first about Riza (not her real name). Riza is a 22 year old female diagnosed with Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) for almost 10 years now and due to her chronic use of steroids and her lack of follow-ups, she ended up developing Avascular Necrosis (AVN, means cellular death due to lack of blood supply) of her hips one year ago. She had difficulty moving due to severe pain and she slowly lost her ability to walk. Last month she underwent a surgical procedure called Total Hip Arthroplasty (...

March 30, 2016 Clerkship Day 208 Day 3 on Rehabilitation Medicine I received a text message from my dear cousin yesterday: "Ungud (couz), are you free tomorrow? Ama is asking if you're free..." it read. Yayang (as we call her way back then) is my first cousin and a childhood friend, a humble daughter of my favorite maternal uncle. She's also in Medschool and we're on the same year (4th year). Right after reading her message, I was immediately reminded about something: IT'S HER GRADUATION DAY ALREADY! I was not on duty that day but I still have to go to PGH and attend to my patients. I was only free after 4:30 PM, I told her and her father. I really wanted to attend the graduation ceremony and witness and feel that "feeling" of seeing your batch-mates (from other medschool) finally stepping up to the stage... receiving their fruits of labor... their diplomas... and being called "Dr. So-and-so". Maa sha Allah! But I just can...

Feb 2 2016 It was just one of those usual busy days at the wards. My watch just told me it's almost 3 in the afternoon. I haven't had my lunch yet and I still have a lot of things to do. And while I was savagely writing down my SIC progress notes on one of my patient's chart earlier, at that same time, my brain cells were as busy deciding which of the couple more things to I still need to do must come next. And then, someone tapped my back and called me: "Sir sir, excuse me, sir." I stopped writing and looked at this guy whom I almost failed to recognize. I remember his face during my short stay in the Emergency Department, but I just can't locate his name, nor his story how we met in that ever-so-busy place. "Sir, mabuti nakita ko po kayo," He said with a smile. "Oh kumusta na po?" I asked him pretending I remember him that well, while trying so hard identifying the right name to fit his face. Dude, I am wea...

Clerkship Day 137: Anesthesiology Assalamu Alaykum (Peace be upon you all!). It’s been 5 days since our classes resumed. Actually, I prefer calling it “training” than “classes” because we don’t have much “class sessions” compared to when we were on our first three years in medschool. We are spending more time in the hospital, shadowing our doctors, trying to learn as much as we can from them. So yeah, it should be “training”. We are now training under the department of Anesthesiology and this will last for two weeks only. They told us that we are fortunate because there are only TWO medical schools in the whole country has clerkship trainings for Anesth. Cool! So it’s really best to make the most of our two weeks stay while we can.  We’ve been to Surgery last time, so we are not that “alien” to the world of the Operating Rooms. Only this time, we are not working on the OR table anymore, but at the Anesth “territory”: that small, ever-present area where the anesthesiolog...