Urology resident · written from inside training
Most surgical teaching comes down from mastery. This is the other vantage — topics, essays, and research written from inside the climb, while not-knowing is still fresh enough to be useful.
Field card
Writing
An essay on the voice that says you got here by mistake. The Egyptians feared their own heart would testify against them at the final judgment, so they laid a charm over it asking it to stay honest. Most residents could use one.
Read essayAn autobiography, told through the oldest story about strength. Hercules was born strong, but strength was never what made him a hero — the labors were, and the service they were for. A life measured the same way.
Read essayAn essay on the solitude no one warns you about. The gods sentenced Sisyphus to roll his stone up the mountain alone, forever, and called it the cruelest thing they could imagine. I think they were describing residency.
Read essayA ureteric stent at the bedside — no fluoroscopy, done solo, and watched the whole way in. On taking an old operation apart and rebuilding it for a new room, and the seniors who hand you the reason instead of just the steps.
Read essayTeaching topics
A young man, sudden scrotal pain, and a clock that started before he reached you. Why the OR is the investigation and Doppler is the tiebreaker, never the verdict.
A rigid, painful erection past four hours is a compartment syndrome of the penis. One needle is both the diagnosis and the start of treatment — and the corpora are dying while the patient sits in the waiting room, often too embarrassed to say why.
Flank pain, a fever, and a stone the urine can't get past. This is one of the few things on a urology service that can quietly kill a ward patient overnight — and antibiotics alone are not the treatment.
Necrotizing fasciitis of the perineum, where the skin lies about how sick the patient is. Pain out of proportion, septic physiology without an obvious source — and a mortality that climbs with every hour you wait for a scan.
The patient who can't find a position that helps, a CT that takes four minutes, and a decision tree that hinges on two numbers: how big and how high. Most stones pass on their own — your job is to know which ones won't, and which 'stone' is an aneurysm in disguise.
Lower urinary tract symptoms are common, the prostate is the usual suspect, and the whole art is matching the size of the gland and the size of the bother to the right step on the ladder — without missing the cancer, the stricture, or the bladder that has quietly given up.
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189 pages · 25 chapters · 88 board-style questions · 50 pimp questions
PDF · EPUB · Anki deck · Audiobook
126 pages · 24 chapters · 80 board-style questions · 50 pimp questions
PDF · EPUB · Anki deck · Audiobook
36 pages · 50 stations
22 pages · 40 prompts
26 lectures · 5.1 hours · captions
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Software
Tools I built for the work I do every day: logging cases, handing over a ward, keeping up with the literature. One account covers all of them.
Log a case in a minute, from the OR door. EPAs, autonomy, on-track projections against your program minimums, and a fellowship summary export in the format each application asks for.
PHIANo patient identifiers. A case is the procedure, your role, and the approach, and notes are checked for identifiers like MRNs, health numbers, and dates of birth before a case saves.
Open the case log
The handover list that survives the night: one live list the whole service shares, with consults, discharges, prophylaxis, and a print that still reads at six in the morning.
PHIABuilt to hold patient details for your own team only: stored in Canada, encrypted at rest, names and MRNs encrypted a second time, seen only by people you give your list's join code, and a PHIA acknowledgement before anyone enters a patient.
Open handover
A daily literature feed you triage like a card deck. Pick your topics once, swipe through new papers in a spare minute, and export what you keep to Mendeley or RIS when it is time to write.
PHIANo patient information. It holds papers and your reading list, nothing else.
Open ResearchPrivacy, app by app
The case log and Research hold no personal health information: no names, no MRNs, no health numbers, no dates of birth. Handover is the one built to hold patient details for your own team, so it is locked down: stored in Canada and encrypted at rest, names and MRNs encrypted a second time, seen only by people you give your list’s join code, and everyone signs a PHIA responsibility statement before entering anything. Use it where your hospital allows it. The full notice is at hippomedicine.com/legal/phia.
Peer-reviewed work
Original research, systematic reviews, case series, essays, and surveys, in plain language. Two are in press at CUAJ.