AMA CME Meeting, First Moonlighting Shift, NIH Grant, and a Division Presentation

Today ends Block 5 of fellowship. It's amazing to think I've already been in fellowship for five months. It's been a really great experience so far and I'm so proud to be in my program at Scripps.

This week was especially busy.

Early Saturday I attended the tail end of the AMA-CME meeting. We were supposed to have met in Orlando, FL, but the meeting became virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sunday afternoon the AMA had a really excellent forum on Health Equity.

Saturday night I worked my fist moonlight shift as an attending at the VA San Diego. I still fondly remember going to the VA Dallas with my grandparents as a kid. My grandpa got all his care there and thought the world of his doctors. It really means a lot to me now to be a VA doctor, even if only part time. I worked with UCSD residents and had a great time as we cared for our patients. I look forward to working at the VA again next month.

Sunday after taking a nap I continued working on my NIH grant application to work on a skin cancer prevention and screening project in San Diego. I've been working on the grant for two months and it was due Thursday. Over the weekend I got a lot of useful feedback from some public health professionals on my specific aims, but that meant I had a lot of re-writing to do.

Monday was a busy day in clinic. I also had to make a call to the NIH because at least two of my referee reference letters needed to be re-uploaded. I spent all Monday night working on my proposal because the deadline was just 48 hours away.

Tuesday I was in clinic all day -- BMT in the morning and benign heme in the afternoon. Tuesday night I worked on my proposal again and stayed up late writing and re-writing.

Wednesday was just a half day in clinic seeing lymphoma and gyn malignancy patients. I went home right afterward to work on my grant. By about 10 pm I had finished the grant and was ready to submit. I encountered several hiccups navigating the NIH ASSIST website and needed to reformat parts of my application. The application ended up not getting submitted until 1:30 am Thursday morning. This was just 24 hours shy of the national deadline for the 2021 application cycle. Whew!

Thursday was loooooong because I was pretty tired. I was in my continuity clinic with skin malignancies in the morning and then in the BMT clinic in the afternoon. I finished clinic around 5 pm and then realized I still needed to put together a presentation for Friday's heme/onc division meeting. I had known about the presentation for weeks, but had put it off because of my grant. I intended to present a case of Burkitt's lymphoma that I was involved with from last month. By 7 pm I had finished a draft of the presentation and sent it to my attending for review. Then I spent another two hours prepping for my Friday morning clinic. I didn't get home until 9 pm Thursday, and even then I had a bit more work to do on my presentation for Friday.

This morning at 8 am I presented my case to our division. It lead to some really good discussion and I was proud of my work. The rest of the morning was spent seeing new consults in the GI clinic. This afternoon I had two video meetings with collaborators for my research. Whew again! Right now I'm waiting for our last treatment room patient to finish and then I get to go home for a much appreciated weekend. I'm on call this weekend, but hopefully it'll be light.

It was a stressful and busy week. In hindsight, I feel proud of all I was able to accomplish.

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