Random Dots of CPE: Three Days Left

• I did my final verbatim today. Not bad, not good, just glad it got done.
• Baking a chocolate cake for the IPR tomorrow - maybe it will sweeten us all up a bit. It's a birthday cake to myself that everyone else gets the benefit of.
• Tomorrow will be the last formal day of clinical visitations, plus a reading seminar and IPR. I will miss a couple of patients that I've worked with for almost the whole time I've been here.
• I do have a new patient who is an infant who is missing the bones in her thumb. A strange sensation, holding the hand of a baby whose thumb just sort of flops every which way. Sadly, the thumb problem is probably indicative of a genetic syndrome that may mean more problems than the heart defect we are looking at. Cute baby - tough outcome most likely.
• Thursday will be final evaluations and the exit interviews with the committee, with Friday IPR and graduation, followed by a lunch. Our IPRs have been something of a bust, compared to the fireworks in other friends' IPRs. We have only had a few major blow-ups, only a couple of tense moments. This group just didn't seem to have it in them to fight much. There was one person with whom I didn't get along, but we came to a rapprochement of sorts. Not stuffing things down, just dealing with each other's differences reasonably respectfully. I'm not really sure that it was necessary for our group to have that kind of intense disagreement - or maybe the supervisor chose us as people who probably wouldn't fight much. Hard to say.
• I'm tired. I've got all this CPE stuff wrapping up, a son in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy, a dear friend with end-stage pancreatic cancer, and not enough time to process it all. Meh. At least the chocolate cake will be good.