Weekend in the Desert

This weekend I'm at a conference in Palm Springs. I drove out today after work. I expected the trip to be all interstate, but I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the drive was two lane highway though the mountains with an amazing sunset. I probably would have enjoyed the drive more had there not been other drivers on my tail the entire time. I have trouble driving in the dark. I don't see well, and so I need to drive slower that I normally would. Apparently other people can see better, and thus are able to drive narrow two lane mountain roads in the dark at about 70 mph. But I survived unscathed. Palm Springs is an odd place. You drive for hours with nothing other than a few scattered Indain reservations, come down out of the mountains and there you have it--high end strip malls as far as the eye can see. Tomorrow I will spend the day exploring the Hyatt Grand Champions Resort while learning about various aspects of internal medicine. Yeah, sometimes what I do with my freetime is a little boring. Perhaps when I get back to San Diego Sunday, Adam and I will go flying. He's been wanting to that, and it would give me something more interesting to write about. :)

Finally...

...a day off! This last week was a long stretch. I worked 8 days without a day off. Which wouldn't be too bad, except during those 8 days I worked 115 hours. Needless to say, I had to skip out on the Cure cover band Adam had tickets for and I slept for 13 hours Saturday night. Sunday we went to Kobey's Swap Meet. I hadn't been to a swap meet since I was a kid and we used to go whenever we'd come to San Diego to visit Grandma and Grandpa. It was great, we went with the goal of getting some art work for our living room, and within 5 minutes we had found the perfect pictures. I was all set to use my bargaining skills to convince the guy to sell us both pictures for $5, but when I asked how much they were and he said $2 each, I must say I was actually disappointed as I handed over my $4. I would post pictures, but I have lost the cord that connects my camera to my computer, so my pictures are stuck on my camera for the time being. We also found some mixing bowls, a tape measurer, a grill brush and a fish bowl. I found a sleeper sofa that I think would be very nice in our guest room and I'm trying to convince Adam that it is a good idea. But it is hard to justify spending money on things while we are trying to pay for a wedding. Speaking of the wedding, we are making headway on the planning. We have a venue, a photographer and a band. We should have a caterer by the end of the week. And stay-tuned, the wedding website is in the works and will be unveiled once I have more than 3 entries on it.

This is my last week in the ICU. While I really enjoy working here, the call schedule is killing me. I spend a few hours a day at home, I miss Adam, and I am falling way behind in my knitting! There are babies being born, and I have at least 3 different baby gifts in the works. It would be nice to finish them before the kiddos arrive. As of Friday I have two months of research, which I am really excited about. I can't wait to get back in the lab, and it will be nice to have weekends free. The rest of this month looks to be pretty busy. I'm going to Palm Springs on Friday for a conference. I need to submit my licensing application. I need to finish my fellowship applications. I need to find a wedding dress. But I will get to sleep in my own bed every night. And I can turn my pager off for two whole months. Yay!

Fishing

I am on GI consults for the next two weeks. We are the ones you call when your patient is in the hospital and for whatever reason, needs a colonoscopy. Or, as was the case for the poor man we consulted on on Monday, you swallow your dentures and need emergent upper endoscopy. We (by we I mean our fellow and attending, I stood in the corner and watched) spent 90 minutes trying to fish the dentures out of this man's esophagus. I'm not sure how he got them down in the first place, because they were very poorly designed for passage through the GI tract. It was a partial, so there were two teeth on one side, with an acrylic bridge on the other side. There were two opposite facing metal hooks on either end to secure the thing in place. Unfortunately, the hooks were also perfectly positioned to snag on the mucosa as we tried to pull it up. We ended up pushing it down into the stomach and leaving it there for the surgeons to work their magic.

It's actually really cool stuff. If I didn't hate all of the body fluids involved in this specialty, and hadn't already committed myself to a life without overnight call or any emergencies, I'd be all about GI. It's like playing video games involving people's colons. Luckily for you all, there will be no pictures accompanying this post. But if you are really curious, try looking up "endoscopy foreign body removal" on google images. It's amazing what people will swallow.

Randomness

I'm 3 days into my new role as "resident" and I'm exhausted. We have 14 in-patients that our team is responsible for (a team consistes of two interns, one resident and one attending, plus a couple 3rd year medical students and one 4th year medical student). The patients are divided up between the interns who are responsible for the day to day care of the patients--making sure the right tests are ordered, following up on results, calling all the consult teams to help us out. I supervise the interns, make sure that everything we have discussed gets done, and I help come up with management plans. The attending basically makes sure we don't kill anyone. But my interns had the weekend off, so I had to do everything for the last two days. Plus I was sick yesterday so was not really functioning at 100% (more like 25%). But today is my day off, and so far I'm enjoying it. Coffee, knitting, KEXP.

Interesting (perhaps) things occuring in my life currently, which you may hear more about at later dates:
1. getting my medical license. I passed all 3 steps of the licensing exam! Now I get to fill out a 22 page application and pay $900 and will soon have the ability to write prescriptions.
2. applying for fellowships. I want to be an endocrinologist when I grow up. And I want to go back to Seattle.
3. vacation! I'm off to Austria in about 6 weeks for a 10 jaunt through East Tyrol and Vienna.
4. Yosemite. Potentially--I have 4 days off before I leave for Austria, so Adam and I might take a little road trip.
5. knitting. I have about 6 works in progress. I keep hoping to get all my knitting crap organized, but it's just not happening.
6. Books. I need recommendations for what to read now that I have finished Harry Potter.

That's my life. I like it.

Cleaning House

I returned from a short trip to Seattle/Portland last night, and spent the day trying to get my life in order before year two of residency begins on Monday. Annoyingly (is that a word?), I could not do half the tasks I set out to complete since I do not know my employee ID number. Apparently my social security number is not sufficient for identification, so now I have to track down my employee ID number before I can get a new ID or a parking pass.

But frustrations aside, I also spent the day unpacking, doing laundry and finally downloading the pictures from my camera. Today we have something of a hodge-podge post.

First, why I love California:

Produce! Isn't it lovely? Strawberries are nearing the end of their season, and I bought some gorgeous ones at the farmers' market last week:

They made for some tasty shortcake.

On the knitting front, I finally finished what is affectionately known as "the ugly sweater." It was a gift for Michelle's 30th b-day. The green turned out to be, well, a lot more green than I had thought. But I still think it turned out quite nice as far as hand-knitted sweaters go. For my next one (Kate has asked for one, but not in green) I think I'll take in the waist a bit more and make the body a tad longer. Michelle says she will actually wear it, which is why I made it for her. Of all the people I know, she is most likely to wear a hand-knitted sweater (that's a compliment, really!).

And finally, doctoring. For those of you keeping track, I have now finished my internship. I am officially a resident. I will be a resident for two years. Then I will be done. The main difference between internship and residency is the type of responsibility. As an intern, you deal with the day to day details of patient care. You order the medications, you deal with nurses and patients and families, you deal with the logistics of patient care. As a resident, you are in charge of the interns. You do more of the decision making and management. Most importantly, you get more out-patient months which do not have over night call and have weekends off! I start with out-patient allergy, so I will not yet have the full resident experience until August, my first in-patient month. I'll let you know how it goes.

Adventures in Felting

I know I haven't had much to say about work lately. That's because I've pretty much had it with being an intern. I just finished a couple of blocks (month-long rotations) of in-patient, which entails admitting patients to the hospital every other day, figuring out what is (or more often is not) wrong with them and sending them home (unless it is the VA Hospital in which case we send them to a nursing home or to a homeless shelter because anyone who has a home usually has health insurance and does not come to the VA hospital for healthcare). Next month I'm on ICU, which is basically the same except the patients are sicker and we never send them home. We just send them out of the ICU and the the in-patient teams send them to their home/nursing home/shelter. And as of June 22nd, I will be done with this year, and I will get to be a resident and (hopefully) life will be good.

Meanwhile, I knit. My latest adventure: felting. You take a nice non-washable wool. Make something about three times larger than you want it to be, then throw it in the wash and wash it in hot water until it shrinks. I recently made a felted hand-bag:

All it needs is the handles and voila! So much more fun than being a doctor.