Grown

This year, more than any other, I feel grown.

I have realized so much about life this year. Mostly, about how hard it is.

Today I did my second-to-last standard patient. I prepared for it extensively, spending precious hours on it when I really needed to learn, oh, I don't know, everything about cardiology that I've learned in the past 4 weeks instead. Despite this preparation, it was such a challenge. I barely finished, and that's despite the fact that I completely forgot to look up the lady's nose OR in her mouth!

Oddly, she did not even comment on these things. She gave me what I could tell was very generic advice, the kind of advice she gives to every one of us she sees (and that's a lot, given that there are 260 of us and only 25 actors like her). It was, you know, "Be sure to be gentle, your touch wasn't rough but could've been gentler...Be sure to keep the conversation going by asking open-ended questions"...etc.

Overall, I was relatively pleased with how I did (I got most everything palpated...but man! Feeling around boobs without copping a feel is harder than you think!). Yet it was still so far from "perfect", if there is such a thing. And, as I said, I spent a good number of hours (6?) preparing for this, when I have like so many (758?) hours of lecture to go over.

Thus: life is hard.
Try as you might, things are never going to go exactly as you imagine. You're always going to forget the nose or the mouth (or the posterior tactile fremitus, damn that's another!).

Yet, I am doing well. When I come home, it's often hard to slow down enough to eat, relax and gather myself. While this is annoying, I still manage to do it; I ultimately calm down enough to start studying again, and I work hard. I do go to class. I do still exercise every day, and I am, more or less, more aware of my emotions than I've ever been.

So, I guess I will just keep that in mind. I am doing well. The world is well. I am getting by.

Hallelujah.

Questions

I have many questions about the world. For instance:

Why do you park in a driveway and drive in a parkway?
Why is my cat currently battling with a rolled up pair of gloves as if they recently threatened him?
Why does FiberOne cereal put its boxes' contents into two bags instead of the traditional one?
Will a cereal that is 57% indigestible cellulose really curb my hunger, as the box purports?
Why do people say "amidst" and "amongst" when they can just say amid, or among? Amongst = archaic, according to literary people.
What is consciousness like when you're in the womb? Do you have dreams in there? What are dreams? How come I could control my dreams more as a kid? Why do I dream about the apocalypse? What is consciousness like when you die? What is consciousness? What is reality?
Why do men in public restrooms insist on wildly urinating all over toilets with unraised seats, thus leaving yellow-speckled disasters for the next poor schmuk to find when he's gotta sit down?

ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE ARE PERFECTLY GOOD URINALS NOT FEET AWAY?!?!?!

They must take some fabulous glee in it. The joy, however, is lost on me. (Ladies--we find this in our bathrooms all. The time. So far from rare it's charbroiled. I want to find this segment of our male population and cauterize their parts.)

These, and many other questions, remain a mystery to my mild, indolent medical student mind. What are some questions you wonder about? Post them as a comment!

So I'm reading another fascinating book by a surgeon. Not sure if I told you about the first - it's by Kate Firlik, one of the few female neurosurgeons in the US (>90% of them are male) and a very good writer. This one is called "Complications" and is by Atul Gawande, another exceptional writer. I've done nothing but read it all day. (I am fully enjoying my quasi-three-day-break from school -- we start a new semester in renal/pulm/cardio tomorrow). He writes about the fallibility of doctors, and the mysteries and uncertainties of medicine. These books give me heart that can one day write books like I've always wanted to, even though I didn't major in English.

So, you should read those books. But don't buy them they're too pricey just call me and I'll mail you my copies, if I still have them.
Talk to you later compadres.

So Far, So Good.

We had one professor who, halfway through a particularly arduous lecture, always transitioned not with the typical "um" but with the gloriously novel, "So far...so good."

I liked him.
He talked like Dracula.

Anyway. Sorry. Basically, if you wanna know about anything other than transferrin or cerumoplasmin or hepatolenticular degeneration, you've come to the wrong place. Because those are the only things I have left in my life to talk about.

Except.

I went home over break. It was very mentally refreshing. I thought about life a lot, and saw friends a lot. I've realized a few things:
1.) I've been lonely my whole life, and I hate it.
2.) My father was a dick for leaving me.
3.) I need a girl. ASAP.

Anyway. Want to know about med school? Here's an abbreviated list:
1.) Love-hate relationship with it
2.) Tons of bullshit
3.) LET US OUT PLEASE ANYONE!!!!!!!!!!!

I talked to my nurse friend today; I can't wait till I get real patients.
And a girl. I can't wait till I get a girl.
Cheese and crackers.

Sloshing

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...what I've been studying.

Lately, I've been sloshing through my days. My dreams have been bad -- mostly consisting of me having some huge responsibility, like driving my Grandparents home across several hundreds of miles, and me being unable to do it because I'm tired, or weak, or lazy. My grandma yelled at me in one - she's never yelled at me.

Ahh, the frame of mind medical school puts you in.

But yes: sloshing. The days sort of stream by, and I feel very purpose-less.

God, how did I get here?

I am gladdened by the prospect of break, which occurs in a week. It's odd: I wanted so badly to get away from home, to get out on my own and start building my new, way super-successful wonderous medical school life, and now that I'm finally here all I want to do is go home.
Psh.
Yeah, I really don't have anything else to talk about here, unless you wanna hear about UDP-pyrophosphorylases.

Tyranny of the Shoulds

There are so many things I should do. Dr. Scott Peck wrote about this in his book on psychiatry, and called it the tyranny of the shoulds. Somtimes in my head I think of it also as the tyranny of the shouldn'ts.

It breaks down like this. A person always feels like they should be doing something else. That is, they feel like whatever they are presently doing -- what. ever. they are presently doing -- they should be doing something else. However, as soon as they begin doing the something else, they (again) realize that, in fact, they should be doing something else, and the cycle goes on and on. A Stephen King novel (Insomnia, by the way. You should read it. Great book.) quotes some poet regarding this. The quote is, "Each thing I do, I get through, so I can do something else." After the character in Insomnia recites this bit of someone's poem, the other character says, "That's horrible!" and he replies, "I know."

Anyway, care to sample my thoughts as they occurred this eve? They go like this:
5pm: Done with lab. Gotta find John to get my keys back, since he watched my cat over Thanksgiving.
5:04 and several seconds pm: [While entering the room John is in, which happens to be the room with the ENT Grand Rounds on video (which last a bunch of hours, and which I had been pondering attending earlier in the day, as I've been trying to start going, as I know that if I do any surgical subspec, it will be ENT, but which I know I shouldn't go to, since I was up till 3am the night before and thus slept past morning classes and need to review their content)]: Shoot, three guys are here, I'll look rude if I just take my keys and leave, plus I really wanted to start attending these things.
5:04 and several more seconds pm: But I have to do laundry! I have no food at the apartment! I need to buy chapstick cause my lips are chafing like Neil Armstrong's bike shorts! AND I CURRENTLY OWN NO WEARABLE PANTS!
5:05pm: [Sitting in ENT room] Well I guess I'm here for a while.

The meeting was actually really enjoyable, I knew I was gonna stay, but seriously -- I need to buy jeans ASAP. I ended up ordering Chinese, too -- gonna havta work on that groceries situation pronto.



PS: I really need to learn to STOP BEING GENEROUS IN THE CITY. I just gave this guy a 5$ tip on a 13$ meal.

I'm bad at life.

Man, I hate this word!

So, often, I feel like the times when God talks most directly with me are when I'm considering big life things. Contrarily, whenever I want to hear from God very directly I hear Bob's-your-uncle; e.g., "But life sucks!" **silence** "But what can I do about xyz little problem?!" **silence**

But then I'll find myself being like, "Maybe I should go against my post-college morals and study like crazy to become competitive enough to be an otolaryngologist/orthopedist/ophthamalogist"--post-college, I decided I was done trying to be the best, cause you barely get to even LIVE that way--"...I mean, I could theoretically do that. Or maybe I should be a general surgeon, even tho it goes against my interest in primary care. Or what about psychiatry or neurology, I mean that's what I entered college being interested in, the brain, yeah, blah blah blah..."

And then God's says, "No. You're becoming a pediatrician. So there."

Example: The other day I am thinking these above-thoughts as I enter the apartment. I get on an elevator with an ethnic lady and her two ethnic boys. The boys are giggling madly and crashing into each other and being loud. She says sternly, "Shh!", and they keep laughing. They keep laughing, in part, because they see that I'm almost laughing with them, and they like that. The lady again says, "Sh!" but now she's only pretending to be stern, seeing that I'm smiling. Finally I gesture to communicate, "Aw don't worry, they're fine." Now the (mom) lady's smiling with me, and the boys are smiling with us, and we're all smiling together as I get off the elevator.

Example 2: Last night I volunteered with the pediatrics club, and we went to this home for quasi-homeless African American boys of Philly for a "Thanksgiving Party." We had activities like cup-cake making (which they were all bonzai-stoked about) and story reading, which I helped with. Basically the kids all got pieces of paper with parts of the Thanksgiving story written on them, and we let them go around in a circle and read their papers. I get one super young kid sitting by me. He rushes up to me and asks me my name or something, and then for some reason I push on his nose, and then he pushes on my nose, and then goes around to all the helpers and pushes on their noses, and then comes back to me and puts his arm on my shoulder while we do the story activity.

Then, he tries to steal my watch.

He flashes me a mouthful of tiny white teeth when he unlatches it and I say, GIVE ME THAT! Later, when he was reading, it was SOO AWESOME--he could barely read, but all these other older kids broke from the circle and rushed up to him to help him read by covering parts of words with their fingers so he could sound stuff out. When he got to the part about the Pilgrims dying cause they were shitty farmers (shitty = not in the story) he found he couldn't read "died" cause he thought the 'd' was a 'c' and an 'l' as, 'cl.' We kept re-reading this part, and he kept not getting it, saying, "Man, I hate this word!"

It was generally a great time. The moral is, how can I not do something I'll be so good at?

Got Up Today

I didn't wanna get outta bed this morning, but I did.

My cat went crazy over the weekend for a while. It was prolly cuz I gave him catnip. Hah.

Well, I go home in a week and a day. Wow. That's soon. I'll be a changed man: beaten down, weak and delirious.

Ha.

But, I plan to buy a book before I get on the plane, and read my time away. I read something about stories tonight. I read that stories are a lot like eternity: while you're in them, you're sortof lost, held aloft. It's a good metaphor, I think.