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!