I had my site visit for surgery with Professor Rachwalski, which was done virtually through whatsapp. This was a wonderful site visit because he is so pleasant and helpful to talk to. I was able to openly share my experience of the rotation with him and discuss all the interesting OR cases I saw.  He was very understanding and encouraging and gave me a lot of comfort when I expressing how overwhelming yet interesting this rotation was. He was also very engaging to discuss medical facts with, and would share his OR experiences with me, and made the site visit very personal and fun.  

We would then discuss my SOAP notes and go through their structure and content. He would highlight what is needed and not needed in a SOAP, and what information I could have put more clearly. This was very helpful to me as I am more used to writing full H&Ps, rather then just SOAPs, which are more specific yet more appropriate for surgery. I expressed to him some of the struggles I had in writing these, for example I would see a lot of the patients in their pre-op visit, the operation, and their follow-up visit, so to write the timeline of those visits in a well structured and easy to follow SOAP was a bit confusing to me. But Professor Rachwalski did a great job explaining to me how I could better structure that so its easy to understand without having too much information. He would then discuss other differentials, and the anatomy behind it, which would challenge me into thinking outside the box. Finally, we would discuss why we did certain management over others.  

On the second site visit, we then went through more SOAP notes and he would see where I improved and where I still need work. He mentioned how I shortened the notes, but could still cut more information out, which is something that I will continue to work on. We then went through the journal article, in which I wrote about atypical presentations of gangrenous cholecystitis, and had a discussion about that. We related the article back to my patients H&P and how the two overlapped. Over all I really enjoyed the questions that the professor asked me because it made me think and do more research.   

Overall I really enjoyed talking to Professor Rachwalski, as He made me feel very heard and taught me where and what I need to improve on, while still giving me validation on what I was doing well.