I know I've been quiet on here lately. With multiple major life transitions all converging on the month of June, I just gave myself permission to totally slack. In this respect, anyway.
It turns out that there are a myriad of i's to dot and t's to cross as residency comes to a close.
And it turns out that moving into a house (that we own!) takes a considerable amount of time and planning.
And it turns out that taking your last set of boards takes some effort.
And it turns out that I can still find time for 'So You Think You Can Dance.' Ha!
And with all the madness, I've been waiting for my thoughts to coalesce and make sense. Usually, I go about my day with thoughts swirling around. Suddenly, they come together in a flash-bang kind of way, and I go write them down. It hasn't happened recently.
So, yeah. I've been quiet.
But then the juices have started flowing as I've been sifting through the pieces of my life in the packing process. Oh the nostalgia!
Last night I finally decided to conquer my medical bags. Over the last several years, I have basically lived out of the pockets of my white coat. Trinkets, books, paper, drug company paraphanelia all weighed me down as I walked the halls of my hospitals. And every time I washed my coat, I would empty my pockets into a safeway bag. And when I put it all back, I usually selected only the important items to go back in. Which meant that I had scads of bags full of old medical junk/treasures. And I couldn't quite throw it all away. So I ended up with something like this:
And sorting through it proved an interesting walk down my medical lane.
I found this:
My very first pager from med school. It looks so old school, now, seeing as it is not a text pager. But it was my first one...the one which seemed impossibly cool at first blush...only to seem impossibly unbearable a thousand midnight interruptions later. It woke me up for transplants and sick babies and ER admissions. It introduced me to medical life. It sat on my hip through my first two years of life-changing, oft-terrifying, humbling hospital training. And now it sits unceremoniously among trinkets, like it never did anything very important at all. Dear Pager: I won't ever forget you.
And I found this:
I could still have free lunch at a hospital! But the thought of eating the same foods I lived on as an intern, appeals to me less than free food. And that's saying something.
This:
Cause even tired doctor's need sassy lipgloss?
And a way to make sure there's no lettuce in your teeth? Heaven knows every other bit of vanity goes straight out the window.
This:
My on-call notes. I have so many of these pages! Sometime illegible scrawlings with phone numbers to call back, symptoms to evaluate, and sometimes angry remarks at the unfairness of the on-call universe. This is practically my journal! My record of my labor! How do I throw this all away? (Don't worry, Mom, I did.)
This:
Parking passes for garages I'll never visit again.
This:
A list of vital signs looked up for our census of patient's during my surgical 'Acting Internship.' These were hard-won vitals signs, as I had to arise at 4-something to gather them. Isn't that worth something? This piece of paper is not a piece of paper. It is a badge of honor
This:
My notebooks of 'beginners pearls'. Little notes about important things I might want to remember. Tips from those who'd gone before. My first attempts to keep track of the seemingly endless line of facts to be learned. I think I'll want these when I'm 90.
This:
Cards of questions I'd written down...things to look up at a later date. And how amazing! I know all these answers now. In fact, they seem like second nature. So I think: I guess I'm really a doctor. Those index cards show me how far I've come.
And finally, this:
Okay, so she wasn't in a Safeway bag, but how lucky am I to have picked up this treasure during my medical training? I never dreamed I'd graduate Residency with the most joyful little girl at my side. And it was the greatest gift of all.
So here we are.
11 days from the end.
11 day from the beginning.
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