fourth first day

I have made it through my first day and my first call of general surgery at St.Paul's Hospital. That always makes me feel like I've accomplished something. Technically, I am half way through my surgery rotation, the first two weeks I was doing radiation oncology (which isn't really surgery at all) and then I did pediatric surgery at Children's Hospital. Now I will be at St. Paul's until Christmas.

Some observations:

It is very festive downtown these days. In other circumstances, I might find such holiday propaganda obnoxious, but it just makes it so much cheerier at 6:30 in the morning. St. Paul's has this huge, crazy light display as a part of their fund-raising campaign, and every morning, I walk through a tunnel of lighted stars to enter the hospital. It is quite magical really, and then I get to the other side, and instead of Narnia or a Secret Garden, there is a hospital full of colons that have cancer, or are blocked, or bleeding, or dying, or non-existent.

I quite like surgery, but am pretty clear that I don't want to be a surgeon.

I got new work shoes last week. Clark's unstructured - I don't know what the other 9/10 medical students say, but this one highly recommends them. I only wished I had known sooner about these wonder shoes. Wow.

Surgery as a medical student requires physical and mental stamina, in roughly equal parts. Pediatric surgery (which is my only other comparison) is small, and clean, and the retractors are just tiny little things. Open abdominal surgery in an adult on the other hand, is big, and messy, and the retractors are huge, and require a considerable amount of force. And, it is our job to hold them, strongly, and blindly, for sometimes hours. In between trying to mentally direct more oxygen to my burning muscles, pumping my calves to prevent blood pooling, and trying to decide whether it was my breath or the inside of my mask that smelled so funny, I took small trips to my happy place (which is where I think of crochet projects I would work on if I had time, or my bed - mostly those two things). The surgeon thanked me for my hard work and acknowledged that I couldn't see anything, and I really appreciated that. It's nice to get thanked.

another cinderella.

You know when you have been waking up at 5:00am each morning in order to take a very precisely coordinated schedule of two skytrains and then a bus, which in total takes about an hour, delivering you at the hospital at which you are working at 6:37am, and then one morning you wake up and look at the clock and it is 6:34am. Then, once you confirm that this is indeed the correct time you run around the house like a crazy person, and then just before you are supposed to be meeting at 7:00, you call the resident, and wake him up from his comfortable sleep at home, because you are uninformed of the fact that he just happens to be taking the day off for his daughter’s birthday. So then you try and page the other resident, which you don’t know how to do from outside the hospital building, so you have to call the switchboard and get them to help you, and then eventually you show up at work an hour late. I hate it when that happens.

But then sometimes, the next day, the very same resident that you woke up the day before tells you at 9pm that you should just go home for the rest of your call shift and he will call you in for anything interesting. And then the bus driver lets you on the bus even though you can’t pay him (rather than making you go to the Safeway and get the right change and then wait in the cold for the next bus).

And life is good. And it almost doesn’t matter anymore that your new professional pants are kind of itchy.

weed wacked

So my nostrils, and the rest of my head did indeed emerge from the waters of internal medicine if not triumphantly, at least intact. Then they filled up with snot. The point of sharing this information is not to whine, just to make an excuse for not posting before today.

I have wonderful family and friends. That's mostly the point of this post. So much of my energy this year has gone to working and studying and thinking about those two activities; and not much as gone towards relationships with the people who are really important to me. I have been a really bad friend in many instances - taking weeks to return phone calls at times. I have been an absent grandaughter, a lazy girlfriend, and a boring sister - and yet everyone has been patient with me. Friends just keep calling back, grandparents remain grateful for any contact, sisters persist, Kyle understands, and parents fly across the continent to freeze 19 single servings of homemade soup.

Thanks guys.