hear the hoof beats of horses and wish for zebras...

Today i diagnosed what i considered to be a zebra, but i learned is actually closer to a horse.

(for those non medical people reading this....there is a saying in medicine, when you hear hoof beats think horse not zebra. Basically its more common to have an uncommon presentation of a common disease than a common presentation of an uncommon disease. Think simple and common first then consider the crazy off the wall crap)

So a woman presented today with a history of migraine headaches for the past 3 years. They have been getting worse lasting longer periods of time, now she has noticed some blurry vision and some mild lactation. Luckily there are not too many things that can cause lactation, and since she stopped breast feeding about 1yr ago, is not pregnant that leaves a single hormone. I am waiting for labs to come back to hopefully verify my first diagnosis of pituitary adenoma!!

And for those reading the updates, the murmur i heard was confirmed with ECHO and is actually quite severe and is severe enough to be partially responsible for most of the patients symptoms...

today has been pretty awesome....I also got to draw blood for the first time on a patient, and i did good. Yes it was an easy stick on young healthy 29 year old female, but still i did myself and was successful. at least according to the patient....


the other benefit to today was that i got the weekend off....YAY!!! pretty unheard of on internal med rotation, but i think next week is going to be a little crazy so i am using this weekend to read up on a variety of conditions so next week when i am pimped, i hopefully dont look like an idiot. (again pimping is what attendings do to students when they ask them questions....for example....we saw a patient today, and after we came to a diagnosis...i was asked what the mechanism of action is for the medication to treat the condition, major contraindication for the medication, why we would chose that med over another one, and to provide a differential diagnosis (my favorite part!!), that in a nutshell is pimping...)

I am going to spinning in the morning then to pilates...so another post is not coming until monday unless something exciting happens....