I'M BAAAAACK 😜
Hope you didn't miss me too much! It's been quite a while since my last post in January (I'm starting to sound like a broken record 😅) and I've lived a lot of life since then, so you already know that I have a ton of updates to catch you up on! So buckle up and let's get going!
To start off, I'm nearing the end of my second year of fellowship!
Can you believe it?! I sure can, I need to start making an attending salary man 😂
My second year of fellowship has been such a different ride than my first year was. I've been kept pretty busy, but not in the same way I was during my first year. Back then, I had a clinically heavy schedule where I was working what felt like endless weeks in the inpatient setting. And when I wasn't in the hospital, I was either working in clinics, attending/giving educational lectures, trying to figure out my life, or catching up on sleep. I managed to still fit in fun activities and trips throughout the year but man, it was a tough year overall. If you need a reminder, just read some of my posts from that time period lol.
This time around, my inpatient schedule has been a LOT lighter and I've spent a considerable amount of time working on my fellowship research project. As I mentioned in my last post, my inpatient clinical duties were front-loaded in the fall which resulted in far fewer weeks of inpatient service for me to work in the spring. Like, I literally had two inpatient weeks scheduled between January-June. I realized just how much the nurses, pharmacists, social workers, case managers, and APPs missed having me around these past few months. Their comments have gone from last year's “You're ALWAYS working!” to this year's “Where have you been at?? Come back!” It feels really nice to be appreciated and to be thought of as fun to work with. 😊
There were of course multiple clinics (we opened our new dialysis unit in the hospital in February! 🙌🏿), weekend call shifts, and call nights sprinkled in there throughout this time period, but man has it been nice to spend most of my time focused on things outside of clinical medicine. I've had much more of a normal working schedule this year, have been able to make some extra money as a moonlighter while keeping up my general pediatrics skills, have continued working on my kidney biopsy skills via simulation practice and real-life biopsies (my latest real biopsy was the best one I've performed so far!), have been sleeping a lot better, have worked with some physical therapists to finally help manage my sporadic lower back pain that has plagued me since my teenage years (it's crazy how much I've used my lower back to overcompensate for the weaker muscles around it), and have been more consistent with my workouts (still not perfect but I'm working hard at it and have been trying to intentionally pre-book workouts a month out!). I've also had more time to engage in extracurricular activities related to advocacy and medical education, to engage in deep and focused learning of nephrology, and have gotten the opportunity to travel to a few conferences this year. And to top it all off, I actually have a much better sense of what it means to be a pediatric nephrologist and feel a heck of a lot more comfortable managing kids with kidney disease than I did as a first-year fellow. As a matter of fact, I took my second specialty in-training exam back in February and I remember leaving the testing center feeling like I may have done better than I did last year even though it was still a really hard test. Then again, I had set the bar preeeettty low for myself last year lol. Turns out I actually did better than I expected and that my fund of knowledge of pediatric nephrology is right where it should be for my level of training! Don't get it twisted though, I'm still not a fan of standardized testing 😒
So yeah, second-year >>>> first-year.
At the time of my last post, I was fresh off my primetime debut on Wheel of Fortune and was getting ready to go on vacation to St. Maarten and St. Barths to celebrate my wife's birthday. As you would have expected, the trip was an amazingly fun and unforgettable experience! Between the beautiful beaches, our luxurious villa, the lit restaurants, and hanging out with coach Mike Brown, we had such a great time celebrating her in the welcoming warmth of the Caribbean. It was fantastic to unplug from the world and to escape the uneasiness that we were all feeling as inauguration day crept up on us.
Of course inauguration day came and the cruelty from the current administration started right out of the gate. I just might have to make a separate post about my thoughts regarding the current state of affairs in our country. There's just so much to say and I just believe that the feelings that I have regarding the crisis that we are in deserves its own post. Plus, I don't want to take away from the joy of this post. So stay tuned for that…..and for the Wheel of Fortune post that I still need to draft. 😅
I worked the first of my two spring inpatient service weeks a couple of weeks after our trip, where I got the chance to focus on leading our service rounds and formulating my own clinical style as a nephrologist. I must say, it was empowering to play an active role in making clinical decisions for our patients and to be seen as a true leader of the team. It was also very helpful that I was only covering the floor patients and not both our floor and consult patients as I have done numerous times in the past. My call nights that week thankfully weren't that bad either. I plan to continue taking advantage of additional opportunities to lead the interdisciplinary inpatient team whenever I can, especially since I'm entering my last year of fellowship soon. I just completed my second inpatient service week, which was on our consult service where I bounced around the hospital helping other teams care for kids on their respective services that had issues requiring our expertise. Our patient census was remarkably light, though there were unfortunately a large proportion of patients with really tragic cases we were involved in. 😢
With the completion of this consult week, I've officially completed my last inpatient week of my second year!
In regards to my weekend call shifts, I've had three from January up until now, and they have all fortunately been bearable experiences. I felt that I got relatively okay amounts of sleep during those weekends, and it certainly helped that I was working with some excellent residents and attendings. Plus we didn't have an insane number of patients on our two services, which always gives us a warm feeling inside. ☺️ I have one more to work at the end of June before starting my final year of fellowship in July! Let's gooo!!
As I alluded to earlier, even though I've had a lot more time outside of the inpatient setting at my disposal since January, you best believe that it was well spent. Less clinical time meant more time preparing the onslaught of presentations and case discussions I was expected to give this year. To give you an idea of how busy I've been playing with PowerPoint, I've had to lead three interdivision renal pathology case discussions, an interdisciplinary journal club between nephrology and rheumatology, present a lecture on vasculitis as it relates to pediatric nephrology to my division, present an official research update to my division on the status of my fellowship research project, facilitate a couple of board review sessions, and engage in a teaching symposium spanning six sessions over the course of a month where I learned a number of useful and creative teaching skills and methods that culminated in a presentation I had to give to my cohort about how to create a scholarship.
And this was all completed between the time of my last post in January and now.
Although I had spent a LOT of time preparing and delivering these presentations, I've appreciated the opportunity to practice and refine my teaching and presentation skills. I've also learned so much from having to engage in these exercises and would honestly rather be doing more of this and less of call nights lol.
Another thing I've been doing more of is engaging in the ASPN's public policy committee calls, especially given the atrocities taking place in the country as a direct result of the current administration's executive orders and the complicit role that the 119th Congress has unfortunately played in allowing hurtful policies to play out in real-time. I got the opportunity to participate in another virtual Hill Day where we discussed the importance of not only protecting but also increasing funding for both the NIH and the Pediatric Specialty Loan Repayment Program, and requesting two pieces of report language for the report that accompanied the FY 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill as it relates to the HRSA's Organ Transplantation Program and advocating for pediatric patients with end-stage kidney disease. Advocating for vulnerable populations has always been important, but has obviously become all the more critical in the times that we now find ourselves in. Our public policy committee is quite literally the lifeline between children with kidney disease and the policies needed to help them achieve the best shot at living a quality life, so it goes without saying that we play a huge role in influencing policy for this patient population especially since people in Congress are likely not as in tune with the specific needs of this patient population. I will say that the staffers of the congressmen/women that I've come across so far are usually very thankful for our expertise and advocacy for these kids. I just hope that their gratitude translates into meaningful actions taken by the congresspeople they work for.
In conjunction with my increased level of activity in the committee, I've applied for the JELF Advocacy Scholars Program again this year and had my interview yesterday, that of which I think went so much better than last year's interview! My Wi-Fi was better this time around, I felt more comfortable with the format of the interview, and I was much more prepared to talk about policies impacting children with kidney disease than I was last year. I honestly wasn't as ready as I thought I was last year but with all the work I've put in since then, I know that I can now serve as a valuable asset to the program and that I'll be able to glean so much more from my experiences in the program if I were to be selected. Fingers crossed! 🤞🏿
I've also been fortunate enough to attend a couple of conferences these past few months, both of which were incredibly impactful and rewarding! The first one was the combined Pediatric Nephrology Research Consortium Spring Meeting/Miami Pediatric Nephrology Seminar that took place in March in, you guessed it, Miami. Not only did I get the opportunity to hear about all the research collaboration opportunities available for us to engage in, but I also gained so much knowledge from the wealth of information shared with us at the seminar. On top of all that, I was granted the opportunity to present my fellowship research via both a poster presentation and an oral presentation! Both presentations went really well and I received some valuable feedback from various faculty members in attendance. It was overall really nice to be back in Miami again and to have time to catch up with some old friends, although I certainly did not miss the humidity. 🥵
The second conference was the 2025 Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting, which took place in Honolulu, Hawaii! As you can imagine, the experience was phenomenal. First off, it was my first time in Hawaii so I was immediately blown away at how beautiful the island was. Our resort was fantastic and we (yes my wife was not going to let me go without her tagging along 😂) even unexpectedly got upgraded to a beachfront room for free! We loved it so much that we decided to extend our stay for an extra day on a whim. As for the conference itself, it was just as big and jam-packed as the PAS meetings I've been to in the past were. Thankfully, because of my prior experiences, I was prepared to navigate the conference in an efficient manner while catching up with SO MANY PEOPLE I haven't seen in such a long time. I learned so much helpful information at the various sessions I attended and was able to establish new connections that I'll be making the most out of. I also got the chance to present my fellowship research via a poster presentation in the exhibit hall, which went really well and garnered quite a bit of interest from onlookers! I don't know when I'll be in Hawaii again (thank God for department funds because it costs an arm and a leg to fly out here, let alone stay for a few days), but when I do come back I want to get a deeper and fuller experience of what the islands of Hawaii have to offer!
Apart for traveling to conferences, I attended a couple of weddings in Florida and Jamaica (first time in Jamaica!), both of which were such wonderful experiences! It was so nice to see friends that I've known for such a long time get married to the loves of their lives and to reunite with old friends that I hadn't seen in some time. My wife and I also traveled to Kansas City to watch the Super Bowl with her grandfather, who is a huge Chiefs fan. Even in the midst of the massacre of the Chiefs, we had a great time spending time with him and his girlfriend. Their reaction to the Kendrick Lamar halftime show was hilarious too 😂.
Speaking of sports, March Madness was fun to watch this year as always, though there were nowhere near as many upsets as there had been in years past. I came in second place in one of my bracket competitions…..I was sooo close to winning it all 😭. However, I did secure the top fellow score in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases and National Kidney Foundation's NephMadness competition! My grand prize includes one-year online subscription to Advances in Kidney Diseases and Health and Nature Reviews Nephrology, so it looks like I'll be doing a ton of nerding out in the near future. 😂🤓
And last but most certainly not least, in keeping with the theme of exciting news, I was featured in the April 2025 issue of the American Society of Nephrology's Kidney News publication! 🤩
Huge shoutout to the ASN for giving me the space to share a piece of my story with their audience! 🙏🏿
What a post! I think that's all the major updates I have to share with you at this time, so with that said I'll go ahead and bring this post to an end before I start getting carried away typing up a storm about something else!
Hope you enjoyed the ride and can't wait to catch up with you again on my next post! 😁✌🏿
Congrats to all of you graduates out there and best of luck to you all as you move into the next phase of your respective lives! It really is something special to watch you all reach this monumental step in your lives, especially those of you I've known for such a long time. Keep in mind that times flies by really fast, so make the most out of your days and the opportunities that have been and will be afforded to you! Take it from me, I'm still in shock that it has been ten whole years since I graduated from college 🙃
“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.” – Henri Nouwen
– Black Man, M.D.
P.S. – We got less than a month left until the application for The 2025 Desire To Inspire Scholarship closes! Get those applications in if you haven't already! It's looking pretty competitive this year!! 👀