One of those days

wherein a series of unfortunate events befell our hapless heroine as she sets out for her first day of family med...

What was originally supposed to be a 24 minute drive turned into a nightmarish, head smacking against dashboard in frustration two hour and 15 minute ordeal. Jason had called me in the morning to inform me that I-76 was really jammed up. So what to do? I thought cleverly, never fear, GPS is here! But wouldn't you know it? I sat in the car for 10 minutes trying to get the GPS to work and feeling stupid when it just won't register that it's in PHILADELPHIA. I kept thinking I must be doing something wrong, when in fact, it was just the GPS being lazy and not wanting to report to duty. Since I knew no other way to get to this particular hospital, I resigned myself to the bumper to bumper traffic of the jammed interstate.

Then...while I proceeded to go on the interstate, the GPS woke up, realized it was in Philly and began directing me to my site. I was overjoyed, my friends! I quickly put into place the directions of avoiding the freeway and took an alternate route. I thought surely now, I can circumvent the monstrous traffic and navigate my way through local roads easily and breezily....or NOT.

Very soon, I found myself in a single lane road that appears to stretch to infinity, and despite never seeing signs for construction, repair, or catastrophic accidents, everyone is travelling at the hair raising speed of 0-10 mph. I just couldn't fathom the reason for the traffic!! I hated myself for entertaining the brief fantasy that it was indeed some major accident up front, so at least there is a CAUSE and REASON at the root of my suffering. By this time, I was running quite late and it being the first day of my rotation and all, I thought grimly of the evaluation I would receive. "Student reported late on her very first day. Shows lack of professional dedication to duties and personal sense of responsibility." Yes, my thoughts turned black, my friends, and a tad melodramatic, as I tend to do.

So after further delays, including having to wait for a freight train to pass, and additional detours when one of the roads was completely sealed and yet another road just ended for no good reason, I began to wonder if God wanted to keep me away from my site for some mysterious divine reason. In any case, I finally dragged my stressed and haggard self to the site, hungry (skipped breakfast) and in pain (my butt was starting to hurt from being in one position for two hours), and still tried my best to put on a bright smile to greet my new coworkers.

My first patient case went relatively uneventfully. I mostly watched, since I didn't feel comfortable sticking 18 guage needles in people's knee joints yet. When I got to my second patient, a cute 1 month old boy here for a well child visit, it all hit me at once. Things began to swim in front of my eyes. I feebly told the doctor that I was feeling a little lightheaded and she told me to sit down right away. So here I was in the patient room, and suddenly I felt like I had turned into the patient, the sickly one. I sat down, and felt nauseous, and feverish and with chills all at once. I ran to the bathroom, but owing to the fact that I had no breakfast, I only hacked up air, very miserably. Just before I ran to the bathroom, I remembered seeing three puzzled faces looking at me, the mother and her son and her little daughter. And I also remember feeling a bit concerned that I might get the baby sick if I was coming down with something, though I knew it was more likely just my blood sugar dipping too low. I also remember I was feeling too sick to care too much also.

In any case, I decided to go home early because I felt like under the circumstances, I seriously doubt I would do much effective learning. I also felt like, though the macho thing to do was to stick it out, dizzy and in pain as I had felt, I didn't see any point in such show of bravado. In the long run, I thought it would be kinder to my body to just come home and rest it off. And so I did. I came home, ate lunch, took a long delicious nap and woke up feeling a million bucks.

Tomorrow is another day and will bring its share of challenges, for sure, but I've definitely had my fill of stressors for today!

I'm back!!!

I definitely took a looong hiatus from blog writing didn't I? And I used to enjoy this ever so much, so in the interest of bringing back something I enjoy, I've resolved to begin anew.

So lots happened in the last 9 months! I encountered and slayed the Step 1 Beast in June!! Well, maybe "slayed" is a bit of an overkill. I somehow managed to sneak by it, is how I really see that. And the big nasty troll somehow did not squish me to smithereens in the process. Sigh of relief.

I began my foray into the third year of medical school, aka junior clerkships and I started my clerkship with psychiatry. With few exceptions, I have actually thoroughly enjoyed myself at the rotation and really got into learning about the biopsychosocial aspects of the patients' lives. Most of the patients were sad sad sad. There was no question about it. Their lives were absolutely derailed by their psychiatric illnesses and other comorbidities. Still while I admittedly on occasion do feel a little critical, thinking to myself "why can't you pull it together already?" my overall sentiment towards these patients run more along the lines of "There but for the grace of God go I."

Now I'm on OB and finishing up in a week. It's been an interesting rollercoaster ride. One week I'm convinced I hate OB and I'm never ever ever going to go near a pregnant woman about to deliver ever again. Then the next week, I get to see really cool procedures or just even a really nicely done C-section by one of the hospital's coolest Ob-gyns and I'm smitten with the possibilities. Most of the Ob-gyn residents I've posed the question "Why OB?" gave me the answer that they liked the mixture of medical and surgical. And it's true, there is definitely a lot more hands-on procedures to be done as well as medical management. In that context, I can see why it's an attractive field. But I'm still struggling with my own inner convictions of where my true strengths lie. And whether or not I want to limit my patient population to only women.

Anyway, thankfully I have a little more time to chew on this dilemma but I shall soon settle on something I'm sure.

In other news - my good friend Viola got married last week! It was a rambunctious wedding chock full of entertainment and food and games and laughter and merriment all around. It was your typical Chinese banquet. That said, I also had a little interesting anecdote from that wedding. I caught the bouquet on the second toss, after it fell limply to the floor on the first try. Then later, Jason caught the garter among the single guys. How cool or how lame is that? You can decide. But then Jason had to do a funky dance to put the garter on me and I have to give him some credit, because he really pulled out some moves. I don't think I've ever seen him move like that, I hope it was caught on DVD. Kiss! Honey. It was one of my personal highlights at the wedding.

Alrighty, that was a whirlwind of words upon words. I'll be more concise next time, but it's so nice to be working the keyboard again, over a breakfast of fruits and a pomegranate green tea. A lovely morning and now off to hit the books!