Alex

Today is your birthday. 23. And you are stuck in the hospital. On a clear liquid diet. Waiting to have your colon taken out because this fucking ulcerative colitis just won't stop ulcerating. Food leaves you doubled over in pain, bleeding.

You are supposed to be out, celebrating with friends. And in five days, you are supposed to move up the coast to start medical school. The best laid plans of mice and men...

At midnight, I crept into your room to leave balloons and a card from me and Blake, the other intern, on your bedside table. I snuck back out quickly. If I had lingered a second longer, I'm afraid I would have cried.

I truly believe all those things that I've told you. The moment you step foot onto that med school's campus, it will not matter how long it took you to get there. You will come through this terrible experience a stronger woman and a better doctor than can ever be made in the classroom.

When I wrote you that prescription for Walt Whitman--From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines--I meant for you to fill it.

But still, I imagine how incredibly disheartening this must be. To be five days away from moving to medical school. Five days. And to have to postpone it all for a year.

I know how scared you are, too. No matter how I reassure you that you'll still be a gorgeous woman who will live a normal life, you're the one who has to face going into that OR whole and coming out with a bag on her stomach. Nothing Walt Whitman or I say can really make that okay.

It's times like this, people like you, that make me understand the pull of primary care medicine--the doctor who knows you through the years, who will get to see what I'm confident will be this story's happy ending.

When Blake and I give you our contact info and tell you to keep in touch, to let us know how it all goes, we are both really hoping you do just that. This time next year, call one of us to bitch about how you can't get that nasty cadaver smell out of your nose after anatomy lab.

We'll ask how you spent your 24th birthday. Tell us you went out with your friends, that you had one too many drinks...and that you ate cake.

Jungleland

It makes cleaning the apartment so much more enjoyable.

On call

"Transport came and picked up the guy in 12. He's officially discharged."
"Is that the one who called me a fucking whore when I said he couldn't leave the floor to smoke?"
"Yep, that's him."
"I'm going to miss him."


"Uh...I think the guy in 14 might be having a little heart attack."
"Well, as long as it's just a little one..."


"I need you to specify a calorie count for this patient's diet. The admitting doctor forgot to do that."
"It's 3:30 in the morning...are they bringing the patient a meal tray right now?"
"No, but you know, breakfast will be here before you know it."

Saturday morning

I woke up at 8 feeling like I'd gotten to sleep until noon. Are all these 5 am mornings turning me into a morning person? I never would have thought that possible, but I think that's possible.

A short walk to the neighborhood cafe and on the way, a chat with Lee, the Italian woman who lives on the corner. One of these days, I'll take a picture of her backyard for you. It is just the cutest old lady decorating with flowers and sea shells project you ever did see. I say project because the whole yard looks as though it belongs in a shoe box, on display, as a diorama of itself. This morning she was standing in the middle of her work of art, right next to the bird bath that is the centerpiece of it all, screaming and clapping at the pigeons perched on the wire overhead.

"Good morning, Lee."

"Good morning," she said, sounding unconvinced.

"Are you trying to scare the birds away?"

"Yes. They poop. They poop everywhere. On de flowers. On de shells. On de chairs." (Strong emphasis here, as few things are more offensive than defecating on a sweet old woman's lawn furniture.)

"They want to come and take a bath, that's fine. But they are not allowed to sit up on dat wire and poop in my yard. Take a bath here and poop somewhere else!" she yells, waving her hand at somewhere else.

"Is it working, the scaring them away bit?"

"Naw...look at them. They couldn't care less."

Indeed, they looked exactly as though they could not care less, as though they had no intention of holding their bowels until they got to the suggested somewhere else.

Pooping on a perfectly lovely diorama.
Some gall, those pigeons have.
Some gall.

A good gig

Long time, no post.

Sorry about that. I've been a little busy with work. Like 100 hours a week busy. (In truth, that actually sounds a lot worse than it feels. As the people in the Phoenix say, "It's a dry heat.")

This won't really be much of a post. I should have been in bed an hour ago because I'm on call tomorrow night. I'm off this weekend, though, so hopefully a lengthier diatribe is soon to follow.

For now, in brief...

There have been some incredibly amazing gratifying moments--times when I think, damn, this is good gig.

And, there have been some incredibly exhausting frustrating moments--times when I have to remind myself not to chuck a chart at the wall.

I have had some really good doctor moments.
I have had some really crappy doctor moments.

(This is starting to sound like the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities... It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.)

At some point last week, as I was hiking up the stairs between floors, it suddenly hit me...this place is beginning to feel like home. That may sound a bit depressing, considering the aforementioned "this place" is a hospital, but in fact, it was a rather comforting realization.

I still don't really know what I'm doing most of the time. I can find the call rooms and the cafeteria but never made it to that code yesterday because hell if I know how to get to cath lab.

But, the nurses seem to be on my side. The case managers help me blow through my discharges. The attendings don't care that I'm the only resident who doesn't wear her white coat. And every day, I meet someone new that I genuinely like.

Much more often than not, I must say, it's a really good gig.

Week one

So far, so good.

I'm sure my radio silence made more than one of you wonder if maybe, just maybe, my patients and I hadn't actually made it through my first week as a doctor. But, so far, so good.

As I was leaving the parking garage tonight, I was actually thinking about just how much I've learned in the last week. Five days ago, I called a resident to ask if I could give a patient Tylenol. Yesterday, I got an abnormal lab result, adjusted a patient's anticoagulation, and casually mentioned it to the attending a couple hours later.

I was on call this weekend. While I wouldn't describe that as the best 30 hours of my life, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it might be. There was a moment at the end there when I thought my head might blow right off my shoulders if I had to answer one more page. But then, two of the three pagers I was carrying went off, and my head somehow managed to stay attached. I think it was just too damn tired to catapult itself from my neck.

I was sort of hoping I'd have some interesting patient stories to tell...
They called a code on one of my fellow interns on Saturday morning. (I suppose that's interesting, eh?) It was a hell of a way to start call. The poor guy had a seizure and then stopped breathing. The surgery team that responded to the code looked at him, lying on the floor in the medicine team room, still a little blue, and said, "Wow. And we thought our rounds were tough."

The intern is fine now. He was up walking the halls on Saturday night in scrub pants and a gown, letting himself into the supply room with his badge so he could steal more toiletries. Today, he was back at work, covering patients in between having an MRI and an EEG. Apparently, there's no rest for the shaky.

And so it begins

An intern medicine year (required for anesthesiology) starts tomorrow at 5 am.

You can do anything for a year.
One foot in front of the other.

You can do anything for a year.
One foot in front of the other.

You can do anything for a year.
One foot in front of the other...

Just keep telling me that.

The rest of the story

After my last post, Maria and Madame asked me to tell the rest of that story. I have hesitated, as I don't want to say too much about less than wonderful dates. It seems sort of unfair. Sometimes, when two people aren't well matched and it's apparent from the start, it just doesn't bring out the best in them. That may well have been the case here, so I'll try not to be too brutal.

The movie - Lemon Tree - was good. The sushi was fine. And frankly, the company wasn't awful. In a town where I don't know anyone else, it was nice to have someone sit on my couch and talk. Nothing he said was patently offensive or terribly gross.

But...

My dad once told me, "If you want some insight into another person's character, ask him questions about himself. His answers are important, but even more important is how long it takes him to ask a question about you."

In this case, it was clear...my date was very interested in my date and not all that interested in his. Hours later, he hadn't asked a single question. He didn't know any more about me than he did at the start of the evening. And honestly, I don't think he cared to.

He did pay me a few nice compliments - "beautiful eyes, great smile" - but that kind of thing has never really done it for me. I'm more interested in someone who will still like me if my eyeballs pop out and my lips fall off. Yes, physical attraction is great. "Nice eyes, cute smile," these are lovely things to say. But...not nearly as lovely as if you told me that you, say, find me witty.

So at the end of the evening, there was no kiss. I don't typically kiss on a first date anyway, but in this case, I didn't have to remind myself of that policy.

In the meantime, I've had a little email correspondence with a person who seems to know exactly how to compliment me. (I don't think anything is going to come of it, but the correspondence has been nice.) He's a psychiatry resident with whom I used to work. One day, I consulted him for a patient with conversion disorder. When we were done discussing the patient, we talked about how work was going for each of us. He was frustrated with his program director. I bitched a bit about the shit I was getting from a couple of medicine residents who thought I was "too opinionated." I told him the corresponding story--what happened that led them to say that.

He said, "Well, in this case, you're not opinionated, you're just right. But, you know...the strong, independent woman I know you to be wouldn't care what these guys thought of her." And then, he smiled at me and walked away.

Now that...that is a lovely thing to say.

Give a guy some wine and let him talk about himself for two hours, and he'll give you a reason not to kiss him.

Picture, one of 800

It's been so long, I don't really know where to start.

The apartment is starting to feel like home. The bleach helped. When I moved in, the landlord said, "The previous tenant was really pretty clean for a single guy." Apparently, that's a bit like saying, "It was really pretty quiet for an explosion."

The next step will be to hang some pictures. I have hesitated to jump into this project because I see its potential to quickly get out of control. I have 800 pictures of Logyn and Lucy. I picked out only those I really thought I'd want to frame and put them in a folder on my desktop. The folder has 93 pictures in it. I could wallpaper my apartment with those babies. Except, you know, that would be weird.

Speaking of pictures (speaking of a lame transition)...



I never post photos of the adults in the family, what with this being a super secret anonymous blog and all, but I thought I'd make an exception today. If, after looking at this, you have suddenly figured out who I am, kindly keep it to yourself.

This is my grandpa with Logyn. The picture was taken over Memorial Day weekend. My grandparents came over, and we all sat around my parents' backyard talking about how great it would be to have a cookout. No one wanted a cookout enough to get up and cook out, though, so it was really just a topic of conversation rather than a meal.

But anyway, back to the picture...this is the same man who thought he was dying this time last year. They wanted to take out a lung and start chemo. He decided he just wanted some steroids to boost his appetite. They thought he was nuts. He thought he was entirely too old to care what they thought.

And here he is.
Tanning his cancer.

He gets tired more easily than he used to. He's occasionally a bit confused. But, he'd tell you that most of the time, he feels pretty good.

He'd also tell you that my grandma has finally (mostly) quit bothering him about his clothes. If it were up to him, he'd wear Adidas from head to toe, as they are the official sponsor of his old age. If it were up to her, he'd wear business casual, as you never know when you might run into someone from church. They compromise. Business casual on the top, Adidas on the bottom. He knows it looks ridiculous. He doesn't care.

I trust that he also wouldn't care that I've posted his picture here. I'd ask him, but that would require me to explain the internet to a man who doesn't understand the answering machine.

The move

I writing to you from my new couch in my new living room in my new apartment. I would post pictures, but that would require me to take some, and God only knows where my camera is packed. (Truth be told, he may not even know. I asked him earlier and didn't get a response. I thought he was just ignoring me, but it's possible that he was avoiding the question because it was just too hard.) I'll describe the place, though, and you can use your imagination...

Picture your lovely, put together home.
Now picture it after a tornado.
That's exactly what my apartment looks like.
But, when I get done cleaning up after the unnatural disaster that was my move, it's going to be great.

Speaking of the move, I was awake for forty hours straight. It poured down rain most of the day. By the time it was all over, I looked like this...


And that's all I'm going to say about that. Except, my parents were so incredibly helpful during this whole process that now I think I'm going to have to care for them when they get old. I was planning on paying my sister-in-law to do it, but after this move, changing their adult diapers is probably the least I can do.

Under the pier, a storm brewing overhead

Three weeks ago tonight

I got back from Florida on Sunday afternoon. I should say, we got back from Florida... Graci joined me during the second week of my three week stay.

I was going to write some long, rambling post about vacation, and moving plans (the living room looks like we're trying to construct a topographical map of Colorado with cardboard boxes), and my Memorial Day.

I spent seven hours in student loan consolidation and repayment hell today, though. So...no long, rambling post. Short and sweet instead.

It was about 6:30 in the evening. I was sitting in the backyard, drinking a Blue Moon. I'd just spent a few hours walking on the beach. I planned to spend the next few reading Midnight's Children and admiring my budding tan.

The backyards in the neighborhood are surrounded by vine covered walls. On the other side of the wall, the neighbor man was grilling and singing along with Frank Sinatra. The neighbor man, George, is an old Italian New Yorker, and he can carry a tune. He has always been one of my favorite things about vacation in Florida.

I laid my head back on the chaise, watched the palm fronds rustle over my head, licked the sea salt left on my lips by the breeze, and listened to George sing...

I've got you under my skin
I've got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me
I've got you under my skin

To whom it may concern

So far, the sun has not singed me to the point that I've been driven indoors. So...no blogging.

I thought the rain may send me inside today. But, the screened in porch is a lovely place to read a book during a storm. So still...no blogging.

I just thought I should stop by to say that I haven't run off with a cabana boy or been washed out to sea.

Prepositions

I thought that maybe I should pop in to say that I am out. In Florida. On the beach. Under the sun. With a good book. And a cold beer.

At some point, I'll get a little too well done in the all that sun. Crispy around the edges, I'll come back in to bitch about my sunburn to you--an unsympathetic audience, I'm sure.

In the meantime, though, I'm out...