I had the best 2 weeks of love, beauty, family, friends, freedom and rest at the lake. I truly don't think it could have been more perfect. The perfection started as soon as I walked through the doors through customs into the terminal... there was my mom, J-bird, Becks, and my lovely Nash kids all holding "welcome home" and "we missed you" signs, and running to saturate me with hugs. Epic.
Non-stop laughter with my crazyass cousins. Laughter from my soul, laughter so deep from the belly your stomach hurts, laughter until tears stream down your face with my kindred-spirit AJM. AJM and I also fulfilled our tradition of milking the crap out of spa amenities... spending over 10 cumulative hours in 3 spa pools, 7 different themed steam and sauna rooms (may or may not have included "european hour"), 4 themed showers (like 'thunder storm' or 'tropics'), lounging in the 'tea room', and lounging in the 'serenity room'. Oh my stars. It was truly a heavenly dream.
Back to reality.
Now living in Baltimore. I am on my last 'core' rotation!!!! Internal Medicine. Which is what it sounds like... really the core of medicine. The bread and butter so-to-speak.
Which is proving to be a great struggle for a girl who can't eat bread and doesn't really appreciate butter. Plus 'core' makes me think apple core, and God knows only weirdos would enjoy eating that and if you *were* to attempt to eat it, it surely would not go down the esophagus easily. That's pretty much how I feel about internal medicine.
This bloated, crampy, painful feeling about IM is really 3 fold.
1. IM consists of a shitload of talking and not a lot of actual doing. These people can spend an hour talking about elevated potassium levels, or debating on the meaning of one specific wave pattern on an EKG. Don't get me wrong, this shit is important, which is why I'm thankful people exist that truly enjoy this type of excessive-analyzing conversations. It's not as bad when I'm actually seeing patients and working through the differentials and plan with my resident, however, the program here also includes daily afternoon conferences with lectures, images of the week, EKGs of the week, and case-presentation after case-presentation after case-presentation. All afternoon. Sitting there. I can tolerate it until... I can't. Then it is just painful to sit there when my mind is all, "stop talking stop talking stop talking!! move the fuuuuuuu on!!!!!!" So in summation, one could say I may not have the ideal personality to go into IM.
2......... confession: I started writing this like 5 weeks ago, and now that I come back to wrap this crap up and just post it, I really can't exactly recall what my other '2-folds' were. So if you don't follow me, don't feel bad, I can't even follow me sometimes. Although I'm pretty sure my 2nd point was about how I am taking Step 2 CK (next usa board exam) and MCCEE (canadian board exam) Sept 14 and 25th respectively, so finding time to effectively study has been quite challenging. This just makes me resent the long hours and non-stop talking.
3. let's just make this simple and refer back to #1.
Some 'highlights'. Or 'lowlights' depending on how you view it I guess.
- had a 400lb patient with severe heart failure because his little heart had to work so hard to supply his huge body, as well as a big ol' fat infected leg because he is huge and diabetic. I had the pleasure of seeing him every morning for a week and listen to him whine about one thing after another, the best being a bitch fest to me over what a terrible place this was and he was getting poor care because we didn't have an MRI machine that he could fit in. I wanted to say, 'sir do you realize that theoretically we take people like you to the zoo to be imaged? If you don't like our care maybe try checking in there first next time.' But instead, I just had to fake empathy for 3 seconds and then examine him --- putting my stethoscope on his hairy. sweaty. oh-so-sweaty. body. Then spend the next 10 mins disinfecting and questioning my life choices.
- 61 year old black lady in the ED. I was admitting her for chronic diarrhea. She was a chatty one, and I could just tell this is someone who has no one that will listen to her stories, so I did. She gave me her life story, the highs, the lows, and included a particularly fascinating story about how she used to work on the pipelines in Alaska for several years and then she moved to Vegas. She started out as a waitress, but then through some friend-of-a-friend ended up going to a go-go dancing club. She's all "oooooh honey... I had never seen anything like it. The girls tiiiiitttys were right in front of the man's face!! But noooo touching! Back then there was a no touching rule." She told me how she grew up dancing. She told me how she really needed to make money because she wanted to finish her education. Which led to - telling me about the first night she danced at the go-go club. She's all, "oooh honey... I got up there and the music started playing and I started dancing - but the regular type of dancing I was used to, ya know? I got so into the music, the next thing I knew my song was over, and I realized I forgot to take off my clothes! The men started yelling 'take of your clothes!!' Then they started throwing money. And honey, I looked at that money and thought, 'ooooh mmmmy!' So I took off my clothes and graaaabbed that money! Then the men started yelling, 'take off your panties!!' And honey, now they started throwin' more money! Sooo.... I took off my panties."
- What. A graphic story full of imagery.
- Keep in mind - all of this was told to me as she had continuous burst of diarrhea in her diaper with me standing next to her bed, reassuring her it was okay and we would have her cleaned up.
