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.

Freedom!

For the first time in awhile, I had an entire weekend off. So I cleaned the house, and now can finally show off where Adam and I are living. After a few attempts at various furniture configurations, I give you the living room:

It's a nice living room, very bright and sunny. And yes, we finally bought a television. I've become a big fan of PBS in HDTV. This week I've learned about the building of the St. Louis arch, Mark Twain and traveling in Amsterdam. Gotta love public television.

Upstairs we have two rooms--the bedroom and Adam's office/my yarn and book storage room. And an interesting consequence of building a house on a hill, our garage. Enjoy a slide show of our lovely house:

In addition to cleaning, we visited the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla and attempted to attend a free concert downtown. The Flaming Lips were playing. The show was sponsored by Southern Comfort, and there was no charge for admission. We failed to predict that a free concert = lots and lots of people and ended up watching the early part of the show from the parking lot. Eventually though, enough people left that we were able to get in. Although a large part of the portion was the lead singer professing his distaste for the Bush administration, the music was good and certainly can't complain about free concert!

Today was more mellow. Laundry, grocery shopping and more PBS (today we are learning about Typhoid Mary). And next weekend? Adam wants to go flying.

Getting hitched!

After 3 years (and approximately 25 days), Adam proposed! He tried so hard to surprise me, and I tried so hard to let myself be surprised, but given my inherently suspicious nature, I made it very difficult for both of us.

He had been in Seattle the weekend before, so we hadn't seen each other for a few days. Monday morning was my day off, and before Adam left for work, he asked if I wanted to meet him for dinner. My suspicions were immeditately aroused, as Adam never asks me to go to dinner. I usually have to drag him kicking and screaming on anything resembling a date. To his credit, he always claims my cooking is so much better than anything we could get in a restaurant, so why should we go out? As the day progressed, I went about my errands. I was taking our recycling to the appropriate drop off site (can you believe we don't have curbside recycling? And given that it was ingrained upon us in Seattle to recycle anything and everything, we collect our recyclables in the garage for periodic trips to the recyling drop-off sites). I went to put something int he back seat, and found a bag with some of Adam's clothes in in. Since I had picked him up at the airport the night before, I initially thought he had just left it in my car last night. But that didn't make sense, why would he be carrying a change of clothes in an Ann Taylor bag? When I got home later that afternoon, I IM'd him, asking why his clothes were in my car. His reply: "I don't know what you are talking about." Now I knew he was up to something, but still didn't know what. But I decided to let him have his surprise, and I stopped asking questions.

That evening I met him at work, and we walked to a very nice seafood restaurant down the street: The Fishery. It was a very nice dinner, and afterwards we went for a walk along the beach taking in the sunset:

We continued onto a pier, where there is a hotel out over the water. As we were walking, Adam was telling me of his new plan: to be more romantic. As he told it, he had realized that he would never be able to do anything romantic without arousing my suspicions that he will be proposing. He had decided to be more romantic in order to catch me off gaurd when he did finally propose. It seemed reasonable to me, and at that point I decided whatever he was up to, he wasn't planning on proposing that night. We were walking back up the pier towards the car, when Adam turned towards one of the hotel cottages. "Where are you going?" I asked, "you can't in there!" as he walked through the gate marked "PRIVATE." "Yes we can," he said. "We are staying here tonight." I reacted in a way that I'm sure Adam was not expecting (or was expecting I guess, given my dislike of surprises): "What are you talking about? I can't stay here! I need to be at work at 7am!" Eventually however, he was able to convince me to stay.

As I looked around our cottage I saw a small box sitting on the bed. I opened it, and found the perfect ring:

Adam asked, I said yes, and there you have it. We're getting married!

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.

La-La Land

Saturday morning Adam and I headed off to LA for a day of history and music. After several hours touring the Nixon Libaray in Yorba Linda (interestingly enough the Watergate exhibit was "closed for renovations"), we then headed off to the Hollywood Bowl for a concert with the Decemberists. The Hollywood Bowl is a beautiful outdoor amphitheater up in the Hollywood Hills. They let you bring in your own food and bevs (including alcohol!) so we had a lovely picnic up there prior to the show.

The show itself was fabulous. The Decemberists are doing a series of shows on this tour with orchestras, and last night they played with the LA Philharmonic. While there were a few times when the orchestra overpowered the band a bit, it was a great show. I got some pretty bad pictures of the event, but I'll post them anyway:

The amphitheater. If you had the ability to magnify the picture, you'd see the HOLLYWOOD sign up there in the right middle, on that distant hill.

This is a picture of the audience after the band asked everyone to pull out their cell phones and wave them around as if they were waving around lighters. The effect was pretty cool (or silly as Adam put it) but the picture doesn't really capture it. I think the band was having as much, if not more, fun as everyone at the show.

UPDATE: someone got video of the cell phone thing. It's actually the entire encore, when they seemed to be having a great deal of fun. Cell phone thing is about 4 minutes in.

A few You Tube links to songs from the show (I did take some video but it's not worth trying to figure out how to get it online because it's just not that good):




Plus more at You Tube

Words

100 words high school students should know.
I know 70%:

abjure abrogate abstemious acumen antebellum auspicious belie bellicose bowdlerize chicanery chromosome churlish circumlocution circumnavigate deciduous deleterious diffident enervate enfranchise epiphany equinox euro evanescent expurgate facetious

fatuous feckless fiduciary filibuster gamete gauche gerrymander hegemony hemoglobin homogeneous hubris hypotenuse impeach incognito incontrovertible inculcate infrastructure interpolate irony jejune kinetic kowtow laissez faire lexicon loquacious

lugubrious metamorphosis mitosis moiety nanotechnology nihilism nomenclature nonsectarian notarize obsequious oligarchy omnipotent orthography oxidize parabola paradigm parameter pecuniary photosynthesis plagiarize plasma polymer precipitous quasar quotidian

recapitulate reciprocal reparation respiration sanguine soliloquy subjugate suffragist supercilious tautology taxonomy tectonic tempestuous thermodynamics totalitarian unctuous usurp vacuous vehement vortex winnow wrought xenophobe yeoman ziggurat

I knew the words in white; I did not know the words in red. In total, I knew 70 of 100.

How many do you know?

Urban Hiking

My last weekend of vacation so we tried to pack it all in.
Saturday night, a return trip to the fair for some fair food:

and a Pearl Jam cover band. We tried to win me a goldfish (we were going to call him Finn) but $1 later, we still hadn't sunk any balls and figured we could buy one at a pet store for another dollar, so we called it a night.

This morning we tried to get up early to get a hike in at the Mission Trails Regional Park. Given that temps inland can hit 90 by noon we wanted to get an early start. We did manage to get on the trail by 8:30 am. We climbed Cowles Mountain, the San Diego equivilant of Mt. Si. Hiking here is very different than in the northwest: no trees, no water, smaller mountains and very urban.

Adam and the chaparral:
Lovely Santee:
Some distant mountains:
Where the Pacific Ocean would be if the fog weren't there:
Then spent the remainder of the afternoon cleaning, potting plants and finally feeling settled. Tomorrow, it is back to work.