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 really 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...

And that was that

Dr. G,

Attached please find my final paper.

Thank you,
T


With that email, I just finished medical school.

Kite

Yesterday, I flew a kite. And, as you can see here, spent a good bit of time staring directly into the sun. (These retinas aren't just going to burn themselves.)

This was actually one of the better moments, preceded by 20 minutes of running around an open lawn yelling, "Fly, damn you!"

Filling out residency paperwork

Graci just turned to me and asked, "When did I get my polio vaccine? And what year did I have chickenpox? Was that 3rd grade?"

"I don't know," I said, "because I didn't meet you until 17th grade."

I'm switching from Verizon to AT&T next month. Graci won't give up her iPhone, and I refuse to pay overage charges to answer these questions after we move.


Update: Five minutes later, she asked, "Am I allergic to latex?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "Let's stick a condom on your head and see what happens."

The apartment

It's a little hard to write with this cat on my lap. But, you know, there is something about that little motor purring on my arm...

I've been to Baltimore, and then back, and then online for days. Just not here. If I had been here, it would have read as follows...

First... I found a studio. It's tiny, but it will work. Plus, it's cheap. (Of course, I too may look a little cheap as any invitation to my apartment, is, in essence, an invitation to hang out on my bed--the only furniture that fits in the room.)

Then... I didn't get the studio. Some other guy who saw it the week before I did actually got all of his paperwork together just after the landlord finished telling me, "I don't think this other guy is going to get his paperwork together." Damn you, some other guy. Damn you and your responsible behavior.

Finally... Across the street, with the same great landlord, a one bedroom. A beautiful apartment. Or so I've heard. I haven't actually seen it. It's more expensive. For the first year, it will be a little tight. But, it will be fine. (She says, looking over her budget. For the 746th time today. Because she's a freak.)

Through all of that, I've been looking for a way to furnish an apartment on the aforementioned budget. I'm moving away for the first time. I mean, really moving away. I won't be a two hour drive from that family that makes me so crazy, that I'm so crazy about. I won't be living with my best friend.

So, I'm putting a lot of thought into photos (I have no shortage of photos) and other things that might make this apartment seem like home. It helps that I've seen the place now. I finally know what I'm furnishing.

Cherry floors, French doors, original moldings. It is beautiful.
Now, I just have to make it feel that way.

My GPS thinks I'm an idiot

My mother and I drove to Baltimore on Sunday afternoon with my dad's GPS. He got it for Christmas. It was all he really wanted, as he is inexplicably drawn to electronic devices that talk.

My aunt and uncle bring small, cheap gifts for everyone at Easter. I got a plastic wind up chicken that walks and shits out gum balls. My dad got a key chain that records a short message and then plays it back louder and more obnoxious than it was originally spoken. He spent an hour recording ridiculous things like, "My key chain is cooler than that chicken" and then playing them into my mother's ear. She eventually wrestled it from him to record, "You're an idiot."

Somehow this ended with the two of them shamelessly canoodling on a corner of my grandmother's couch and me recording, "Remember back when mom was going through menopause and you two weren't really touching each other? Ahh, the good old days."

But I digress.

My mother and I drove to Baltimore on Sunday afternoon with my dad's GPS. Sitting in my parents' driveway, we plugged in our hotel's address. When we got to the stop sign at the end of the street, the GPS woman's voice yelled, TURN LEFT. We couldn't seem to figure out how to turn down the volume, so this was the start of six hours of an electronic woman screaming at us. There were several long stretches without turns when we would practically forget that we had the damn thing. Then she'd interrupt our otherwise pleasant conversation to yell, KEEP RIGHT, and we'd both jump and swear at her a little.

At one point, we stopped for gas. The GPS, noticing that we had veered from the prescribed route, screamed RECALCULATING... meaning it was going to come up with a way to get us to our destination even though we had gone off course. My mom said, "Oh, that reminds me. Did I ever tell you what happened when Grandma and Aunt Shirley used one of these?"

Grandma is my mom's mom, and she is crazy. Aunt Shirley is my grandma's sister, and she is bat shit crazy.

"First of all," I said, "who in their right mind would give Grandma one of these? The last thing that woman needs is a distraction while she's driving or an excuse to go anywhere she doesn't already know how to get to."

I say this because my grandma is an awful driver. Awful. The woman rolls down her window and hangs her head outside the car to look behind her as she backs out of her driveway. She whips back into the vehicle as she approaches the lamp post at the end, so as not to give herself a concussion. If you back out of her driveway, she'll warn you about it... "Be careful at the end there, honey. That lamp will take your head right off." If we could get the GPS to say, GET BACK IN THE CAR, that may be helpful. But, I think a device that simply yells KEEP RIGHT is only likely to distract her into driving RIGHT into a pedestrian or a pole.

My mom continued, "The GPS belongs to your Aunt Shirley, who, I imagine, drives about as well as your grandmother. Anyway, you know how neither of them listens to a word anyone says? Yes, well, this was no exception. They plugged in their destination, the GPS showed them the route, and they both immediately decided that just couldn't be right. It didn't look right. The woman in the little gray box must be mistaken. So, they went their own way, and the GPS said recalculating. Except, they never liked the looks of the route it recalculated, so they never followed it. And the voice kept saying recalculating. At one point, your Aunt Shirley leaned over and whispered to Grandma, 'You know, this happens to me all the time with this thing. I never follow the route, and then I worry a little that the GPS woman thinks I'm stupid.'"

Aunt Shirley is a therapist. People come to her for help.

I said, "Can't you just see it... A patient says to her, 'Sometimes I worry that people don't like me' and Shirley says, 'Oh, I know just how you feel. I'm afraid my GPS thinks I'm an idiot.'"

My mom and I laughed about this for several miles. The voice eventually interrupted us to suggest we EXIT LEFT. We wet ourselves a little and told her to STOP FUCKING YELLING. And then, we exited left. So as not to appear stupid.