Off-White Coat
PGY-1 resident, Jordan Abney, dives deeper into the lives of up-and-coming physicians and other healthcare workers. Our conversations include but aren't limited to unfiltered behind the scenes stories of working inside healthcare facilities, top study tips, and how to improve one's overall health and wellness. My goal is to reach knowledge-seeking people while working to promote active improvements in medical education, world healthcare delivery, and the enhancement of social, moral, and ethical obligations of the medical profession, all while pursuing my own passion for medicine.
Off-White Coat
Surviving ER Residency Training Month with Dr. Corey Abdeen pt. 1
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Off-White Coat podcast. I'm your host, jordan Amney, and today we got a big one. This man has worn many hats he was a paramedic, an MMA fighter and is now the new ER physician at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. I would like to welcome my friend, my co-resident, dr Corey Abdeen.
Speaker 2:Just finished our orientation month for emergency medicine residency they call it OPM at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Probably one of the better places in the country to do an EM residency. I'm from here. I grew up in Jackson. Hold on hold on.
Speaker 1:This man is amazing, guys, I want to let you know. So I did do your intro, but then I was just seeing if I could get the mic. I was just trying to get the mic perfectly in front of his face. I asked him to start talking. He essentially starts the show. Great way to start it. He gave us the full background.
Speaker 1:I follow instructions well, he's going to be a good one. So this is my friend and now co-resident, dr Corey Abdeen. As he said, we had just finished OPM, which is the training month for the emergency residents. We got a full month of where we essentially did a bunch of simulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we kind of learned a little bit of what we're doing before they send us off to the wolves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you officially got your training wheels taken off.
Speaker 2:You're going to start in the emergency room right, Yep.
Speaker 1:And then this guy, he has the rough schedule, the rough schedule in the medical ICU.
Speaker 2:I think you get four days off for the month and I'm trying to have a baby in the middle of all that.
Speaker 1:It's going to be a wild month. We've got a lot to break down because you have a lot of exciting things starting. You've got the license to kill, you're about to be up in the mic you Exactly, and he is about to be a father.
Speaker 2:Well, we're willing, man. Hopefully it'll work out. We're doing a embryo transfer, secondary to having done IVF, so we're both very excited about it. We already know it's potentially going to be a little boy, so Wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 1:Oh so y'all made the decision. They had a coin flip, Yep.
Speaker 2:Well, we had a boy and a girl embryo. We knew that going in because we did gene testing and our physician, our doctor, told us that the highest grade embryo, sort of a subjective scoring system. They used to sort of say, oh, this embryo is higher quality than the other one. He wanted the higher quality embryo, which is so happened to be the boy, which I'm not sad about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's like yeah, I knew my boy would be the better quality embryo.
Speaker 2:I mean, I feel like every man to some degree, if you want kids has a dream of having a son when they pass it on the lineage.
Speaker 1:Dude, that's exciting and that's literally happening this week, so I bet your nerves have got to be up in the air.
Speaker 2:I'm very nervous. I'm nervous because I want it to happen. I'm also nervous because I really want it to work out for my wife Infertility if anybody ever has to go through it, it's a rough thing, particularly with your wife person. You love having to watch them go through. That's not an easy thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it can be just totally random. It happens on Tuesday, right yeah?
Speaker 2:She has to go back for another round of blood tests to check her estrogen and progesterone levels. I mean, it gets real tricky with the timing and the hormone levels have to be just right. There's a window for implantation. We could spend the whole podcast just talking about IVF. I've sort of become a de facto expert, yeah.
Speaker 1:We did the transvaginal ultrasounds. Corey was a pro.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh yeah, he's like. I've seen you before. There's a lot of them.
Speaker 1:It's awesome, though, because you had mentioned and that was what I was going to say is that when they checked both of you, there was nothing going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we had what they call unexplained or no diagnosis infertility. So she didn't really have any obvious issues, no problems with the uterus. She was effectively making eggs. My sperm count was normal. There's really no indication as to why we've had trouble, which is actually more common than you would think. In fact don't necessarily get a diagnosis. So it kind of makes it tough, though, because it's better to have answers sometimes, because sometimes having an answer makes it at least make a little more sense.
Speaker 2:But in this case you're going through the IVF process. If there's a step that you couldn't really identify as a problem, it will kind of come to light during an IVF process. But you sort of have to go through every step, make the embryo, everything has to go right on that end, all the things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they told you you were old and everything yeah we're both geriatric in the pregnancy world being over 35. That's exciting. So you were giving her injections. I mean it's got to be good having a husband that's in healthcare, that can.
Speaker 2:I guess. So I guess it was helpful that at least I've used needles before and at least given some meds before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Corey has actually been one of the main sources, like a pillar that we've leaned on heavy during OPIM, because he was in medicine for many years, even before medical school. Because you were a paramedic, yeah, yeah, and then he was putting people in ambulances right before that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, my pathway to medical school was sort of a long, convoluted one, but yeah, I started out kind of doing a little professional mixed martial arts, kind of rounded back to doing some paramedic training, emt training. I was new, I wanted to go to medical school, but when I was younger didn't really think it was for me. Or really not that it wasn't for me, I just didn't think that I was smart enough to do it. I guess I proved myself wrong. Here we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll let Corey be the leader for this one. It's a baby where like, hmm, course, probably needs to leave.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, uh, it's been a fun journey, though I mean.
Speaker 2:I kind of I kind of look at your situation is similar to mine in the sense that the path you had to take to get here is very admirable, took a lot of work, you had to do a lot of things that a lot of people didn't have to do, so more is having to do all the traveling you did and hit a little on an island. I have a lot of respect for that man. I like you a lot, I like everybody in our class a lot, but I expect big things from you, man. I think you're going to do great Big expectations.
Speaker 1:I love those. Yeah, no, I want to take I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. The hardships kind of make you and so sometimes when you put yourself in uncomfortable situations, you kind of rise Absolutely, you raise the bar a little bit and so I'm excited. We got a great group of co-residents. Corey, you're probably actually like my first friend, because we met during like the interview day and we did like the tour together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, we met. We both had the same interview day. I had just finished an audition rotation, or sub-eye, whatever you want to call it. I think the last day of my sub-eye was my interview and that was also the day that I met you. I even remember telling you I was like you're going to get in, we're both going to end up here, I'll see you in a few months. Yeah, not to be on horn, but I was right.
Speaker 1:He really was. He knew everybody there and he said the magic words to me where he was like trust me. So first off, I see him shaking hands with everybody, so I already know that he knows at least the day-to-day operations at this place. And then he looks at me and he's like you're going to see some shit, oh yeah. But at the end of it you're going to have the best training he's like and I know you'll get in. And I was like I have more faith in you than myself.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:He knows this, he knows the process, and look at us now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look where you ended up. And yeah, going back to sort of what you were saying a second ago about Jackson Mississippi, I still stand by that. One of the unique things about doing medicine here in Mississippi is we sort of have a lot of distinctions that are not necessarily the best ones. We're the least healthy state. We have the highest infant mortality rate. We've got the sickest people. Jackson Mississippi also, I think, currently is the second or third highest murder per capita in the country.
Speaker 1:I think they said that it was the third homicide rate.
Speaker 2:It's a lot. There's a lot of gun violence, a lot of penetrating trauma, also a lot of very acute medical cases where it's not just heart failure. It's people have multiple chronic conditions on top of whatever exacerbation they're having that leads them into the emergency room.
Speaker 2:So you're kind of doing medicine at a super high level. You're having to think you're not just fixing one problem, you're always, at the very least, fixing a problem on top of several other problems. So things kind of get tricky. Like I said, we talked about earlier a lot of gun violence, which is never fun, a lot of pediatric trauma. That's never fun to deal with either, but as an emergency medicine doctor, you need to be able to take care of it all, and Jackson provides that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when I heard it and I saw it in full effect, it was quite impressive, like just the campus in general. I couldn't say no. So that's I mean, you're a Mississippi man too, so he's the person to actually get your information from.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's. I grew up here, been here by pretty much my entire life, went to undergrad up in North Mississippi, spent most of my time in Jackson. Now I'm back in Jackson, met my wife here. She's a transplant from Pensacola, florida. She went to the PA program. That's in Clinton, mississippi, right side of Jackson. So yeah, my wife and I are pretty much all in on medicine. My mom is in the yard nurse at Baptist hospital, which is another thing. It's a level three trauma center down the street from UMC. My wife works at another hospital, st Dominic's, which is right next door to UMC, which is a level two, maybe three, trauma center. So yeah, my life pretty much revolves around emergency medicine.
Speaker 1:So I'm excited about kind of getting to finally be not to get confused with the yeah, dude, you're about to be a lot of transplants that make you a lot of transplants going on today, but that's the theme of this week, this upcoming week. That's right Now. I did want you've got a tough schedule to start off with, so they eased us in the first round in the ER. Corey, on the other hand, has his first away rotation and, if you're not familiar with it, usually in all three years of your residency you're you're going through rotations where you're not just in the ER. If you're in emergency position or anesthesia, they're not always doing that You're in different parts of the hospital, and so Corey is going to the Miki, which is the medical ICU where the sick adults go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so all those sick DKA patients, heart failure, all the sick people you see in the emergency room a lot of them end up in the Miki.
Speaker 2:So you know if you're in the Miki by virtue of that, that you're probably not doing well. I'm excited about it. It's one of the rotations that initially, when I found out that's where I was starting, kind of made me a little nervous, because I was. I kind of looked at everybody else's schedule. Everybody else at least has one other person for more class with them at the same time. I'm all by my lonesome as far as I don't have any other interns with me on this rotation. I also haven't really done a formal critical care rotation. I didn't do that in medical school. So that all makes me a little nervous. But I know I'm going to learn a lot.
Speaker 2:The schedule is pretty brutal 12 hour shifts. It's either 6A to 6P or 6B to 6A. You got to get there 30 minutes early for sign out and you work. I think out of a 30 day month I'm going to work 26 days. So pretty much, if you want to find me in the month of August, come to the Miki at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and I'll be there. But I'm kind of hoping that at the very least I'll get to do a lot of procedures and I'll learn a little bit about vent management. I'm not going to touch the vent that's apparently a rule at UMC we don't touch it but it's going to be a good opportunity to learn a lot of things. So hopefully my next rotation will be in the emergency room. So hopefully this month will kind of get me schooled up and ready to go.
Speaker 1:This is going to be great and you're going to get so much practice with all those procedures. Yeah, you don't want to go visit Cory in this next month Because he's going to be with a bunch of very sick people, but I think you're going to get a ton of experience and even if you didn't have that formal one like the learning curve, when you get thrown into a job where you're not sure what's going on like, you'll start picking up things and it might just, you know, like we were just talking about, like sometimes, those hard parts really like boost your level.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's kind of like getting thrown into the deep end of a pool to learn how to swim. I mean, you're either going to figure it out or you're going to just sink to the bottom and fail miserably and I try not to fail things miserably, at least.
Speaker 1:We believe in baptizing by fire here in Mississippi.
Speaker 2:I mean we did pick emergency medicine right. They're definitely easier pass.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I wouldn't take it any other way. I love a little chaos.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, I kind of think going on that I mean I'm going to interview the interviewer. I think it's really cool that your mother is an emergency medicine physician. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure that had some impact on your decision to pursue this specialty.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my mom is definitely. My family in general had a huge impact on me wanting to go into medicine. That was like all I would hear. They would come back, be at the kitchen table, we'd be having dinner and they would just talk about either somebody sick over here in the cardiac floor, and my mom always had like some of the best stories to begin with, and I got to spend a lot of time in the emergency room growing up. There was probably even at like 15, 16, I would just be hanging out there. Sometimes they would be like, yeah, every now and then, you know, if somebody had to show me, show me something that needed to be seen, like one time they were afraid am I getting into drugs or whatever. So they took me into like the psych holding cell.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And let me interview one of the drugs.
Speaker 2:So you can see firsthand. This is what it would look like if you did get bad off in the drug.
Speaker 1:I never touched another oxy-cot. Yeah, I think that's really cool man.
Speaker 2:I don't really have any other physicians in my family, but my mom is the person who sort of got me into medicine. She started her career out. She's worked her whole career at the Baptist Hospital in Jackson. I was also born there and my mom worked there in the ER for 10, 15 years. Then she was a case manager, then she was internal medicine. She was like a hot nurse for the hospitalist. She's done a little bit of everything there, but my mom is a rock star. She's one of the people that wanted to go to medical school and be a pediatrician when she was growing up, but life got in the way. She ended up going the nursing route and she's one of the best people I know and she's the one who got me interested in medicine. I remember being a little kid and going to work with her and that's sort of where I got the bug.
Speaker 1:Dude, that's awesome. I'm sure she's proud that she's got a son now. I think so.
Speaker 2:But my mom's, one of the seven people that both my parents actually and it's been good for me. But they're the type that they intentionally make it to where the bar to please them is high. But there's a reason, there's a method to the madness, because if you to please my parents, you gotta do something exceptional. And if you wanna make my parents happy and you aim for something exceptional, you're gonna hit. You're at least gonna get close to that.
Speaker 1:That's pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So you wanna be under novel. It goes for sports, mixed martial arts. Whatever you're doing, you just wanna be excellent. You don't wanna be excellent in the sense that you tell everybody that you're excellent. You just want the way you perform, just like your whole essence, the way you set example by your actions. You just want everybody just to know that you're legit. You don't have to tell people you're legit. People who I look at it this way people who are tough, people that know how to fight that's my frame of reference here. They don't go around and talk about how they can beat people up or how good they are at fighting. They just are. They don't talk about it. I feel like it's the same way in medicine or whatever. You're good at. People who are excellent, people that have put in the work, people who are good at what they do, they don't have to talk about it. You just do it.
Speaker 1:That's exactly where I wanna be, where I'm standing in the back, calm, when people start to freak out, and then I can just easily handle the situation. That's the beauty of we will get to do that plenty of times in our career.
Speaker 2:And it's also one of those things you can't fake that.
Speaker 2:It's not something that you can, no matter how bad you wanna be the chief, no matter how bad you wanna pad your resume, no matter how bad you wanna be, the thing you can't will that into existence. It's something that you earn by putting in the time. It's not something that you can just like go out and lobby for that position, right. You gain that experience and that being calm in the center of the storm by like being good at what you do. And the way you're gonna become good at doing this is putting in the time, doing the education part, doing the hands-on part, spending a lot of time in the emergency room, not being afraid to pick up the sickest patients, just getting there, getting your hands dirty and doing the thing. That's what I love most about emergency medicine. Like you, obviously you have to have the clinical knowledge. You have to know a little bit about everything. We have to be the second best in every specialty in the hospital, right?
Speaker 2:Which is unique about our specialty, we have to know a little bit about what everybody does. Also, we deal with undifferentiated patients. That's unique to what we do. But there's also like a hands-on something you can't teach aspect of emergency medicine. It's kind of just like you gotta be in the moment, take on the beast as it comes.
Speaker 1:I love the fact that you said the time that it takes, like he was making his whole point on how much time you spend in the emergency department, because that's really what it is Like the people that spend the most time you seeing the most patients.
Speaker 1:Those are always the rock stars, whether it's the nurse that's been there for 20 years For sure, or it's the doc. So you really gotta get in there and get your hands dirty. That's why I always love going into the ER for war when I was in medical school and even before, because half of the time you got to do a little bit more than you probably should be.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's one of those things that you gotta go take what you want right. Like you can sit there and sort of do the bare minimum and have people say, oh hey, dr Adne, you need to go do this or you need to go see that patient. But if you really wanna be like you said, you wanna kind of have the upper echelon, the way you get there is we're all gonna be there the same amount of time, like relatively, we all have the same schedule ultimately, right. But the way you sort of separate yourself from everybody else would be while you're there, don't be afraid to just pick up any patient, even if it's something that you know that you're not really good at, something that you're uncomfortable with. Just say, take the plunge.
Speaker 1:That's how you're gonna figure it out.
Speaker 2:You're gonna figure it out by seeing hundreds of different presentations of the same thing. Everybody's a little bit different. The chaos is always a little bit different. There's all these little factors that change, but just getting in the game is how you're ultimately gonna become better than the guy next to you. It's just about being there and not being afraid to just take it on. You gotta be willing to fail if you wanna get better at something.
Speaker 1:Dude, that's the truth and I learned my best from failure. That's the one good thing. I never guessed right the first time, but I always remember when I fail and I won't make the same mistake twice. So I know that there was a little mixup with the questions. We were rudely interrupted. I'm sorry, it's the problem when you have a wife. Now I do have to answer to everyone's call.
Speaker 2:We gotta be careful talking about the lines.
Speaker 1:Well, she knows. Hopefully she'll be the one editing this She'll hear it twice. So there was a moment, though you were talking about your mother was your inspiration. She got you wanting to get into the hospital early. That's where you get your time, that's where you get your mentality and, honestly, it's the strong women.
Speaker 1:Like, in my family there's a lot of strong women and they're all in medicine, and so it is funny because as a guy too, having a little lady check you on your medical knowledge, you can come in there real cocky in my house and then you're gonna feel like an idiot, leaving Absolutely man.
Speaker 2:I mean I really have enjoyed over the last decade or so. I remember when I was first in the EMT paramedic realm, like you, didn't really see as many women in the specialty, and over the last decade two decades women have really made a name for themselves in emergency medicine and I like to see it. I think that women bring a unique aspect to it. I think we all have certain things that we're good at and I think having an equal number of women and men there together just it's not gonna do anything but improve things Used to kind of be a male dominated specialty.
Speaker 2:But it's really not that way anymore.
Speaker 1:No, which I mean that's gotta be a good thing, because I mean, at the end of the day, women are kind of leading us around anyway leaving a guy? Yeah, absolutely, At some point that was why I had to answer the call. Sorry, guys, but this is an exciting month for you because you've got the baby, you've got the micu. So what? How? After the first couple of days, which you have all for whatever, for the implantation, what is the next couple of weeks like? Look for Lindsay.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, yes, great question. So pretty much how it'll work. So we're doing what's called an FET or a frozen embryo transfer, meaning that once we went through the initial half of the process, which is I kind of look at it as like the follicular phase where you're trying to stimulate egg production, get a good OO site, try to make good embryos.
Speaker 2:That's sort of the first half, and the second half is sort of building up the endometrial lining, kind of getting everything ready for an implantation. So I sort of looked at it as two different steps and we're obviously going to be on the second half. So the implantation, assuming all the laboratory testing comes back and the estrogen progesterone levels look good it'll take place on August 1st Tuesday.
Speaker 2:From there, implantation usually takes place one to five days following that. But you can't really reliably say because of all the hormones, it's sort of like convoluted things. So we will wait 10 to 14 days to do a serum beta HCG which, if that number comes back on 10 to 14 days later it's 200 or greater. Then we can reliably comfortably say that it took and that we had a successful implantation. That's sort of what we're looking for. So there's a lot of different advice out there.
Speaker 2:It's one of those things where there's not a whole lot of research on showing like what's better post-transfer as far as like these are the things that you need to do to increase success, or these things have been shown to have a negative correlation with success. All I really know and from kind of diving into the literature, obviously you don't want to run a marathon the next day. You want to keep your stress levels down, but honestly there's a lot of stuff that says you don't want to just lay in bed for the next two or three days. You kind of want to be up, moving around, you want to avoid, like extreme temperatures. That's one thing that's consistently pops up. But hopefully just she'll be off her feet for a couple of days I'll sort of wait on her hand and foot and then she can sort of ease back into her regular routine and come August 14th and hopefully we get that positive HCG and we can say that we're pregnant and go from there.
Speaker 1:Dude, I'm happy for you. You should see the smile on this man's face. But the funny thing is, lindsay was probably hoping that she could at least get some bed rest from the doctor. Yeah, doctor's orders she probably needs to.
Speaker 2:She just wants a break. She's a physician assistant working in the emergency room. So about my wife initially when she finished PA school she was in general surgery for five, six years. Love surgery Ended up just sort of needing a change, ended up getting a job in the emergency room. I'm going to de facto take credit for sort of helping influence that decision. She may deny that but I like to think that I influenced her to make that change. She really enjoys the emergency room as a mid-level. Pas are a relatively new thing here in Mississippi. There's a big nurse practitioner scene here in Mississippi but the PA thing was relatively new. So she kind of was on the cutting edge of how are we going to use physician assistants in the emergency medicine setting?
Speaker 2:in Mississippi, I know it's very common in other states, but in Mississippi PAs in the ER are a very new thing and my wife is sort of like on the cutting edge or the front lines of how that was going to work. So she mainly does a lot of triage, which is not her favorite thing, but then she also does Probably an equal number of rapid track shifts. She also works back in the what we call pods with the attendings Just in the main adult ED, and she loves it. She's learned a lot and it's something that we both are able to talk about, but it is stressful. It's not really one of the best, most conducive things for going through a feature fertilization cycle, and that's not my opinion. That was one thing that my position harped on. He was always like y'all have way too much stress, so I need to cut it down, you don't need to tone it back, but at the end of the day, how are we gonna do that? I can't just stop working.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just gave it work. Did you give him the speech about rising to the top? Yeah, why? That would have been a change. We're in it now, man.
Speaker 2:We got to keep going forward and we'll figure out a way to make it work. And one thing about both my wife and I's we always take the the difficult path to get places, so we were happy to take on the challenge.
Speaker 1:That's good. I'm excited I at least get to see you for the next three years before you leave us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can have the babysit for me a little bit. That's fine, I got a good babysitter.
Speaker 1:She also edits this podcast. A lady of many traits, but that's exciting. Yes, cheers to you too as well.
Speaker 2:Cheers my friend too, yes, sir.
Speaker 1:Being done with opium.
Speaker 2:So let me ask you a question, and again, this is something that, if you don't want to go down this road, we definitely don't have to. But are you and Mary best? Do y'all want to have children? Is that something y'all have considered or thought about?
Speaker 1:So yeah, we definitely considered it, but at this time we're not like particularly trying.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think it's definitely going to happen. It's kind of what I've been telling you about how we didn't need to see any strays Because we'll eventually end up with a right, right, right. I feel like that's supposed to happen. Now. That is only because that's how most of the children in my family are.
Speaker 2:They're coming about.
Speaker 1:Oops, we have a kid down there. So I'm kind of hoping for that.
Speaker 2:I definitely want them, but Right now, I guess in full transparency, I think she has an IUD, so if she got pregnant that would be a medical emergency. Yeah, that'd be a problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah. So not trying right now, but I assume, like in the future, maybe a little bit more stable. Yeah, I mean ultimately, I guess what I was asking you is you want to be as being a dad? Something that you kind of grew up thinking that that's what you wanted, yeah definitely, definitely, wanted to be a dad, which, so I mean, I come from a pretty big family to begin with. So I always wanted like at least a couple, because I know kids are also like all a little different.
Speaker 1:Yeah sometimes that's like the cute thing about it. Yeah, for sure, man, you know, you never know what you're gonna get. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And I grew up with a. I have a fraternal twin brother. His name's Chris. He's a geotechnical engineer, very boring, and Outside of Atlanta. He lives in a town called Marietta. But when you have a twin growing up, you always have a person. There's always somebody like not only did we share a womb upon intended, but also like we kind of went through the same stages of life together at the exact same time. So you know, having siblings was something that, in my mind, was indispensable with like the way my life played out going forward. My wife is Sort of an only child. She grew up with half siblings, but she doesn't have an actual full-blood sibling of her own, and that's something she always talks about, especially when we started talking about having kids. Is she definitely wants to? If we're fortunate enough to have a baby, we would love to have to, but especially after everything that we've went through, one is plenty, but I do think that Growing up in life with a sibling is something I would like for my future kid to maybe experience it for four.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah Well, dude, you never know like we I think we had even talked about this too sometimes, especially when it's just happenstance that it's not taking whenever one baby comes, another one. So yeah, yeah you may end up with more than you want, but that is a very, very exciting moment for you. I'm yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be great. At least she'll be able to have some bed rest and you won't even know about it because you'll be at the make, you, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:And then one of the things the older I get, I sort of have one thing that sort of consistently ends up being true that you realize when you get older is that the the times in life, when you are dealt something or encounter something that you were not expecting, like a unexpected difficulty in your life.
Speaker 2:Though, in overcoming those things, those are the things that end up being the most meaningful to you. So don't be afraid of taking a challenge. You know, being a parent is definitely a challenge, like a lot of people, especially medical people, when they're going through school and training they're. I can't have a kid, I'm in medical school.
Speaker 2:I can't have a kid. I'm going through residency and I keep just kicking that can down the road, but I'm just here to tell you that you can do more than you think you can. If, if a dumb meathead from Madison, mississippi, can uh, you know get in to an ER residency and potentially become an ER doctor, then you can do do more than you realize?
Speaker 1:No, dude, technically you are an ER doctor, so don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, I am an ER doctor, I'm still getting comfortable with that, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're your name sounds so similar to my last name that I now start thinking that even when you introduce yourself that you're referring to me. So when people are calling for dr Abdeen, I'm gonna be so confused.
Speaker 2:Yeah, abney abdeen, I didn't really think about that, but yeah, it does, it does kind of it does get confusing.
Speaker 1:So that's fun because I've actually never met somebody that had such a similar. There's been people that have had Very few people have a last name where they're above me on the list right. So just to that dude.
Speaker 2:ABD, abd. I mean the only people who beat me, or the AA ronds, for all you key and pill fans out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the, so oh shoot. What was I got to say? There was, uh, I don't know, man, I can't read your mind, I know.
Speaker 2:Oh well, I can interject here. One question I have for you is what is something that you are most, whether it be like a specific skill or a particular rotation, or maybe it's just the whole thing globally? What are you most looking forward to, or what do you want to get out of your intern year more than anything else?
Speaker 1:Ooh, that's a good question. I would have to say that the one thing that I want to get out from the intern year Is that I want to get really good at like procedures and making sure that I know, skill-wise, what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah, I know that some things are going to still slip my mind and stuff like that, but I want to get the hands-on experience over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:Now, that makes sense and if I can at least get that down, I feel like I might be worth a damn in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a huge learning curve and, like Rome wasn't built in a day, you can't do it all in a year, but that seems like a good goal to me, being there personally.
Speaker 1:after a year, what is your goal?
Speaker 2:for me, I guess the biggest my. I sort of have like a very I'm very goal oriented. I have to have very specific goals. It's just something I need to kind of move myself forward. So for this year I want to get to where I can reliably that's the key word reliably See at least one patient per hour. Reliably, um, so if you take the average over the time and I'm working in the yard, if I can, as an intern, reliably see a patient an hour every time I work, uh, or get to that point by the end of the year, I will consider that a success and anything above that or beyond.
Speaker 2:That would be fantastic. But at least one patient per hour, that's a goal. Another goal of mine is just to kind of there. One of the big things you have to make the transition from medical school to Actually being a doctor is your decisions actually carry a little bit more weight, kind of getting a little more comfortable in the role as far as like knowing why I'm doing something. So in the past, where it's like you're doing medical questions or board questions, you say oh, the answer is this we're doing this because you remember a buzzword.
Speaker 2:I want to be able to always say I'm ordering this test Because this, or we need to do this procedure because why? Like actually understanding the ins and outs of exactly why I'm doing something, exactly when I need to do something? That's also very important to me, so actually kind of learning the details that you didn't really or weren't expected to know as a medical student. Plus, see a patient an hour that's my goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that that patient an hour is good, that's good workflow. Yeah, do you think that your goal oriented like scheduling, like where you're you're going by goal by goal is because of the Fighting background that you essentially was it?
Speaker 2:did it start there like work?
Speaker 1:because for sure you were in high school, when you were Fighting right when you came out. Yeah, so were you goal oriented even back then?
Speaker 2:always I have to have. I'm just the type of person that I have to have A very specific set of objectives that I'm trying to meet. Otherwise it's very hard to direct my energy and focus Into like a productive matter if you're trying to focus on everything then it's very difficult to focus on anything.
Speaker 2:If that makes sense, you sort of have to pick some short-term goals, like you obviously want to have a long-term goal, like Eventually, I want to be an attending your physician who can handle whatever comes through the door, but in order to get there you got to take some baby steps along the way, right, and it's important to kind of keep those objectives in your mind because ultimately we become the things that we do and the things that we think about.
Speaker 2:So if you consistently tell yourself, my goal for this rotation or my goal for this year is to meet this objective, just by virtue of setting that whether you write it down, whether you just like set it firmly in your mind Setting that goal Is going to make you more likely to actually accomplish that goal, if that makes sense. It's a little woo-woo, but it does work.
Speaker 1:No, if you need a, if you need a pep up, that means for anybody listen. If you need a good pep talk, this guy's want to go to. He'll get you in your head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, I mean you were an athlete growing up too, so I mean I know you did this to some degree like you played football. Right, yeah, what position did you play in football? I played defensive in.
Speaker 1:You're defensive, yeah, and I played tight in like a little bit in college and then I also oh cool, I didn't make a good college football, that's the cooler man. So think about when you were doing that right, like when you're in the offseason. You.
Speaker 2:Whether you actually like thought about it consciously or not, you did have little small goals that you were trying to meet to eventually get you to.
Speaker 2:Whatever your end goal was, whether it be I want to start on the college team or I want to do x, y, z, whatever it is you have to take steps along the way. It's just something that, especially in mixed martial arts because the way I like to think about it is similar to emergency medicine in that they both of those things involve high level problem solving with dire consequences for failure. Right, and whenever you're going to be engaged in activity like that, that has a lot of you have to have a lot of skin in the game doing something like that. And in order to get yourself to a place to where you can comfortably take on that challenge, you got to start small. You got to say I can relate everything back to martial arts, like, okay, I want to make sure that my boxing is good. My goal for this month is to work on my boxing, get to where I can do three, three minute rounds just with the boxing gloves. On next month, I want to work on my jiu jitsu. I want to get it to whatever metric.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to meet same with wrestling and that way, when you have a fight, and in may fight in the distance, I can say I met this objective of my wrestling, this objective with my boxing this with my kickboxing and then that way if I knew I met objective A, b and C, then my global objective of not getting my ass kicked in the fight is going to be more likely to be met if I can say that I did this, this and this, as opposed to just my goal going in, being like I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna get good. Like what does that mean right?
Speaker 2:for me and again like you, may be a superhuman I'm not, but I have to directly focus on what I'm trying to accomplish in order to like make that progress, and for me it takes making a list of, like I want to do this, this and this. I know I've kind of harped on a bunch of times, but it's super important dude, I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, corey has one of the best like the icebreaker question answers when they say, hey, go around the room and just tell us something unique about yourself. And then Corey's like, yeah, my professional fighting career record is, you know, and it's something that you, you've got a solid record, it's something in the 20.
Speaker 2:I don't even like the sort of number on it, man, it's even hard to quantify it.
Speaker 1:We're jumping right back in, we had some technical issues. This is the first time that this, our new studio, has been in use. In the Jackson studio we still got some things to by taking real difficulties.
Speaker 2:He means that I clumsily knocked the microphone off of the stand, so this is his first time, you're really yes hey, you're doing great to start off with and I mean my difficulties.
Speaker 1:You should have seen us. When we first started I had I could not figure out the mic stuff at all one of the mics. One time we did multiple ones where only one mic was working. Oh, I can only imagine. And then it took me towards the end of the whole thing to figure out that there was an issue yeah, I'm a big podcast fan.
Speaker 2:Like you know sounds cliche, I guess some people will probably make fun of me for this, but I'm a big Joe Rogan podcast listener. Like Shane Gillis, I like all the comedian podcasts I'm super into, have grown up listening to him and sort of like my I've always had this like desire to want to do a podcast. In fact, my brother and I always talk about, oh, we should do one, we should do one, and I always hear a lot of people say that. But it's definitely something that I think a lot of people out there think that, oh, you just sit down and you talk. It's a lot more complicated than that.
Speaker 1:It's certainly it's just a different type, but sometimes you can especially on longer ones, like you can actually get to a point where you're just vibing or you're just talking, and that's sometimes when you get the best out of the conversation, and it's really just you were saying it right before we sat down. Back down is that we can me and this guy, we hit it off early because we could just talk about anything for like a long time, and so it really sometimes it just works out, but it definitely is a different, like skill yeah like I should my own voice.
Speaker 1:So having to hear my own voice, oh yeah, on top of that.
Speaker 2:I definitely don't like it's. I don't like seeing myself a video, I don't like hearing my voice and recording. But I'm sure I'm not alone in that. But I do like you, so I like talking to you. No problem, this is easy sick it is.
Speaker 1:Uh, the feeling is mutual and honestly I feel like, for your first time, and it's going good, it's gonna do. I mean, this is his first time coming out as a doctor, so you're gonna be literally right there on the floor and it's gonna be it's gonna be an exciting month. I do.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited. I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I am nervous, but more than I am nervous, I'm excited. I'm excited to finally. This has been like a big, long process in the making for me. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time. A lot of people, you know they get to get in the game early. They're. They start when they're 22. They start residency when they're still in their 20s. I'm 35 years old, so you know, at least in my medical school class I used to always joke that I was the class dad.
Speaker 1:Oh, he is now too. He's a. We've literally been talking. Yeah well, I don't even mean it's about to be the dad.
Speaker 2:I don't even mean it in like that, since I just meant that I was the oldest one in my medical school class by like significantly, um, but that's not the case in my residency class. I'll say our residency. Our group of interns is actually a very cool, unique, diverse group. We have people of all different ages, all different backgrounds. I know it sounds cliche to say that, oh, I love my co-interns and co-residents, but we do have a really, really good group in addition to our upper levels. They're all very cool people too, yeah.
Speaker 1:I you're not the oldest, aren't you? Yeah, not at all there's. I'm not naming names, I'm not trying to out anybody's age, but yeah, you know who you are, definitely not the oldest one, which is uh, which is different for me that was something that that for me.
Speaker 2:At the beginning, especially in medical school, I was very self-conscious about mm-hmm. I don't really even think about it anymore, but when I started medical school at William Carey, I had not been in a classroom in probably nine years, so that was a very huge adjustment, in addition to having to commute 90 miles every day because I was living here and the school I went to was in a different city. So but I mean, like again, I'm preaching to the choir you, you moved to an island and you traveled all over the country and we do what we got to do to accomplish the things we want to do.
Speaker 1:Dang right the good thing about medical school, too, is there is older people too. That I noticed, like even in my medical school, there was always like an older person too, which is awesome. You got to do what you got to do. You had a whole life. We were talking about it before the whole uh mic incident. But I mean, this guy, how long, how long did you fight for?
Speaker 2:long time. I mean I started doing um. I mean, if I was to go all the way back, I started doing martial arts when I was probably four or five years old. But I started doing Brazilian jujitsu and really getting into the mixed martial arts realm of it when I was 13 years old. I did that all the way through my, you know, mid to late 20s. Some of that time I was doing amateur mixed martial arts, professional mixed martial arts. A lot of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournaments Me and some of my buddies we competed on a national level with Jiu Jitsu went all over the country.
Speaker 2:A really good friend of mine and training partner of mine competed in.
Speaker 2:The two of them actually competed in the Abu Dhabi trials, which if you're a Jiu Jitsu nerd out there, you'll know what I'm talking about. We went to the East Coast trials and that's something that I got to do at a very high level and it was a very important and impactful thing in my life. It's a unique thing. It definitely made me the person that I am and then also kind of just having that experience of getting to live a whole another life before going to med school I think ultimately makes me a better doctor, and what I mean by that specifically is that I feel like I'm more able to relate to the common person as opposed to like just not saying anything negative about my colleagues that were smart enough and disciplined enough to like go all the way through. That's also super impressive, but sometimes I feel like the non-traditional students get a bad rap sometimes. But I feel like DO schools and the Caribbean schools do a good job of giving us a shot and I'm biased, but I think we make pretty good doctors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some would say the best doctors.
Speaker 2:Hey, you said that.
Speaker 1:No, dude For one, probably the best doctors, but we won't make claims. Yeah, but that whole life before that had to be so. Yeah, that just makes you a lot more unique. And the best thing is when he said his record in front of the program director and everything our program director was like yeah, I'm pretty sure he's a black belt. Nobody should mess with Corey. Yeah, because you're a black belt, right? Yeah?
Speaker 2:yeah, I've got a black belt and a few different things. I've just been doing martial arts my whole life and I do recommend anybody out there listening that has ever wanted to try it, whether even if you're an adult and feel like, oh, I'm too old to start, at the very least I recommend everybody out here listening go out and start or at least do some amount or some classes of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, just for self-defense purposes. I think that you will. It's a great exercise. Find a good gym, you won't get hurt doing it and it's also very practical. It's sort of designed for a smaller, like not necessarily professional fighter person to be able to take on a much bigger, much more even skilled opponent as far as like somebody who may be a kickboxer, but if you know the ground game, it's something that you can at least give yourself a fighting chance. I recommend that for women, self-defense and guys out there, go do it.
Speaker 1:I mean, I definitely need to start. I think we're going to start off with some little foxy boxing. Yeah, we should we definitely should, man, I was just, but I definitely am going to have to come and learn from you, or at least let you choke me out once or twice.
Speaker 2:I can do that, and since we're talking about that I want to give a shout out to if you're here in Jackson Mississippi, go check out no Limit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA under Jarrett Beck's, randall Powell, johnny Little and all his guys. Those are the big guys here in Jackson to go learn from Very cool people. You will learn a lot. I decided to put that plug in oh, you got to dude.
Speaker 1:and this guy trust me when your program director is working.
Speaker 2:Anthony Mitchell, clayton Pitts them also.
Speaker 1:So the one thing about your previous career he has one of the best photos of himself that will talk pretty much to anybody else's in their house where he's pummeling a guy's face and it's just like I think it was your debut or whatever, in the USC or something like that.
Speaker 2:It was a fight in Little Rock, Arkansas. Back in I think it was 2009 or 10, that picture you're talking about Pretty cool. That was when I was young and had a bunch of just ripped up muscles. I had youth on my side then, so it's a cool picture to have hanging in your house.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, certainly I'm working on getting one of those for myself. Okay, so first you were a fighter and then switched to paramedics. What was the transition like? Did you injure yourself and then?
Speaker 2:No, it wasn't even that.
Speaker 2:It was just one of those things that I knew when I was a little kid. I used to always say I wanted to be a doctor. I'm not one of those people who's going to say I wanted to be a doctor since I was five years old, because nobody really knows what they want to do when they're five. But from when I was old enough to kind of be cognizant of the world around me 12, 13, I knew that I wanted to be a doctor. It was just a matter of if I believed in myself to do it. What was it going to take to get there?
Speaker 2:I also really loved martial arts. That's like my other second big passion in life. I just knew that I wasn't going to do it for a career. And as far as you can train your entire life, you can go be part of a jiu-jitsu club or a kickboxing club for your whole life. It's very good exercise and it's that. But if you're going to compete, particularly in the mixed martial arts aspect of it, it's something that you need to at least be able to say to yourself I'm all in, because if you're not all in, you're probably going to fight somebody who's all in, particularly when you start getting to the higher levels of it. You don't want to lock yourself into a cage with another man. If you're not all in and he's in there fighting for his family, you're going to lose.
Speaker 2:I just knew it wasn't going to be my career and so I just decided you got to know when to hang it up and start focusing on the school and things like that.
Speaker 1:That's the exact same thing that happened with me for football. There was a moment in college where I realized that I wasn't going to do anything with this and then it felt I don't know. It all faded from what it was Because it used to be war. Oh, when your testosterone is high, everything is a perceived. You get your band of brothers and you go to war, and so I just it. Eventually, you just start making goals in a different direction.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 2:One good thing, though, is one of the things I miss the most when I kind of stepped away from full time doing martial arts, doing mixed martial arts, you did see was that camaraderie, that team aspect, and that's one of the reasons I was drawn to emergency medicine. It's one of those medical specialties where I really do feel like there is a very palpable team aspect of it. It's very similar to being part of like a martial arts gym. We're all going through a lot of hardcore things, seeing a lot of hardcore things, putting ourselves in vulnerable situations. We're all doing it together, and you can't do it by yourself. It requires like a whole team of people to be able to get the job done. So emergency medicine kind of really did help to fill that void. So that is one reason I kind of was drawn to the specialty. In addition to that, just as far as going back to my background, the transition once I sort of got out of competitive martial arts was my undergrad degree is in biochemistry from the University of Mississippi, ole Miss, hotty, toddy, hotty, toddy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're the rebels. Now, dude, yeah, the rebels, that's right.
Speaker 2:But I used my degree. My dad and I actually got a patent for wastewater treatment for chicken plants here in Mississippi. So we sort of came up with a process patent, which a process patent is not just like one specific thing you get a patent on, it's the entirety of the process. So we had a micro screen that we added chemical separation to. Sort of all the things together was our own unique process.
Speaker 2:Really, it all started because a local chicken plant in Canton, mississippi, was kind of ran afoul of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality regulations for like what levels of bacteria and oxygen demand and all these things of the water itself, and they were getting fined thousands and thousands, tens of thousands dollars a day. And my dad is an attorney. He had a relationship with him that way and then sort of segwayed into maybe we can help you fix this problem, and with myself with my degree in biochemistry, my brother who's an engineer, my dad, who's an attorney but also just one of the smartest people we've ever met, we all kind of banded together and sort of came up with a solution to this problem and implemented it. And that was a very cool part of my journey through this life, too, was getting to work with my dad and that. So taking that step and then realizing I need to probably start doing some more medical things, and took the EMT route and worked as a patient transporter at St Dominic's and I've done it all.
Speaker 1:Hey All White Co listeners. I hate to cut it short, but me and Corey talked for so long that I had to split up into two episodes, so follow us along next week for the second part of this episode. Thank you again for everybody that listens. We appreciate you and good luck to everybody that's going through the match process right now. We'll see you next week.
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