Doc Ahmad Hajiri

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 (...