Grand Rounds: no fun, but done

Last Friday was my day to present for Grand Rounds, and my case was, as planned, the "comedy of errors" case I wrote about previously.

As you might guess, my presentation did not include mention of any of the errors made during this case. Hope none of you were worrying about that (Dad).

The "exciting" part of that week leading up to Friday was completing my 40-slide PowerPoint presentation on Tuesday evening, and my laptop (containing my sole copy of said PowerPoint presentation) experiencing hard drive issues on Wednesday afternoon that left my laptop unable to start up completely.

No, I have not gotten it fixed yet. Yes, that did mean that I got to re-write my entire Grand Rounds presentation. Sigh.

After several hours of struggle on Wednesday evening, trying to get the laptop to work, I resigned myself to the fact that I lacked the technological savvy to fix the computer, as well as the fact that I was slated to give my presentation in less than 36 hours. Thus, I started a re-write about 9 pm on Wednesday.

Which was continued and concluded between 5:30 and 7:30 am on Thursday morning.

The re-writing of the presentation went (thankfully) much faster than the initial research and formatting. And, since I used the older desktop computer's elderly version of PowerPoint (which I actually prefer to the 2007 version), I found a format I liked better.

But I'm not going to lie -- it was no fun and made for a rough end of the week.

By the time Friday morning rolled around, though, I wasn't all that nervous. I ran through my slides once with my advisor (the surgeon for my case) on Thursday night, then made CLH listen to me talk through the presentation when I got home. I did get up a little earlier than usual on Friday morning so I could run through it about 3 times under my breath.

I was scheduled to go last out of the three presenters that morning. The first two cases were about horses (a case of nephrosplenic entrapment and a case of Neorickettsia risticii infection). When it was finally my turn, everything went very well. There were no computer or microphone malfunctions. I really didn't feel nervous and was even able to make a few jokes as I went along. It was over in about 12 minutes (we are allotted 15 minutes and are supposed to leave a little time for questions from the audience), and nobody among the roughly 100 clinicians and students in attendence asked me any questions (the part I most feared -- it's really uncomfortable to watch classmates standing in front of their peers and instructors and being asked questions they don't know how to answer).

The rest of Friday breezed by after that. One of my oncology rotation-mates brought a chocolate cake with "Congrats" written on the top to celebrate (which was really sweet of him). I ended up with just 3 radiation patients (who all left by the end of the day) and an outpatient mammary mass removal. The mammary mass was an interesting case. The mass was subcutaneous and only about an inch in diameter. The surgeon (who I'd not worked with prior to that week) basically told me what to do and then left the surgery suite. Which was admittedly terrifying, but also pretty cool.

Overall it feels great to have Grand Rounds over with. I attended Grand Rounds yesterday morning, and felt much more relaxed and at ease, and more able to enjoy the presentations than before I'd done my own. And I never have to do it again!