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27th September 2007

please let this be the last

Schedule for tomorrow:

6:30 alarm clock will go off
6:30.05 snoozer will be depressed
repeat every 9 minutes for next hour
7:30 awaken in a panic
7:35 shower in a panic
7:50 dress in a panic
7:59 shove papers aside in a panic looking for scheduling ticket
8:10 leave house ten minutes later than planned on, hope testing location is easy to find
8:30 arrive at testing center after missing a turn, not being able to find building and driving around in a panic
8:35 hand over cell phone, backpack, all papers
8:40 listen to instructions about how to click buttons on a computer and to keep my identification number with me at all times.
9:00 start multiple choice questions. 7 blocks. 50 questions per block. 60 minutes per block. I’ll be done with each section with approximately 10 minutes left. This amount will increase with each section.
11:20 Ten minute bathroom/water break
12:30ish Lunch break
4:30 Finish with test. Have major migraine. Neck stiff. Brain beyond dumb. Can’t tell you how I did. May have passed. May have not. Don’t really care anymore.
5:00 at home. Will splurge and call my friends, who I haven’t spoken to in at least a month. Hope I don’t cry.
And Saturday, I get to wake up and do the whole day over again! Yay!

No magical ball or fortune-telling here. Just exhausting, repetitive experience. It’ll be four blessed years before I have to go through this (officially–I’ll be taking “in-training exams” that are oh-so-similar twice a year for the next four years, but thankfully, those don’t count for anything), and that’s what’s keeping me going.

Wish me luck?

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27th September 2007

infamous

So, my little hometown apparently has two escaped convicts on the lam. Murder convicts at that. Luckily, it appears they have left town and were spotted 40 miles away, so I can stop freaking out about my parents’ safety. It’s a town of about 250 people, where nobody locks their house or car and we live out away from town–not the best combination with unsavory people around. The sheriff’s department is receiving a lot of flack about the escape (and they should receive some criticism about safety concerns as this is not the first escape and to the department of corrections who should have never put such dangerous criminals out in a county jail to begin with), but I’m really getting tired of reading all of the news articles, editorials and comments from people who really have no idea how small towns work and how truly small my little hometown is.

*grumbles*

In other news. I have the day off tomorrow. What I really, really want to do is get in my car and go driving up into one of the nearby lakes, have a picnic lunch and take pictures of the gorgeous fall leaves. Instead, I will be cooped inside studying, because I take Step 3 on Friday and Saturday (2 days of 8 hour testing! YAY!) and since studying during my ICU month wasn’t nearly as productive as I had hoped, I will be doing some major cramming. I’ve found it very difficult to study on my own–for the past how many years, I’ve had a partner, and even if we did most of our studying separately, at least you knew there was equal suffering and if you had a question, then you could bounce it off and come up with the answer. I’m horribly distracted when I’m by myself (I watched the entire first season of Friday Night Lights in the last week. Not good. For my studies, that is. The show is awesome and I’m addicted and I promise, it’s not really about football and I’ll stop now). Also, I haven’t found a good study place–I found a coffee house just around the corner that showed promise–until I saw that it closes at 4 pm!! I miss my Beehive Teahouse or Coco’s Cafe (yeah, I’m a little homesick right now).

All I need to do is pass, because retaking this thing would be nightmarish.

I return to the neurology department on Sunday. Which I’m not exactly looking forward to. I really had a great month this month (even if I didn’t get the number of procedures that I wanted: 3 central lines, 1 that was a failure, 2 arterial lines and I missed both of those. No intubations. Bugger. Oh, and not one real code. Still useless at ACLS.) and any change isn’t going to be as good. I’ve been away from neurology for so long, that I really don’t feel like a part of the department–I’ve been left out of social invitations, I haven’t been able to go to the business meetings, etc. Plus with all of the drama recently over call schedules, well, I don’t want to get sucked back into all of the (pointless) drama.

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16th September 2007

Anne girl

2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. 100 years, can you believe it? Wow. Prince Edward Island, in continuing their traditions of pandering to the tourists, is celebrating the occasion with year long festivities. There’s a big part of me, that pesky, sentimental tourist (I do realize that I’m a hypocrite, but not so much that I can embrace the idea of “meeting” Anne and Diana in the streets), that really, really wants to be in PEI for the festivities

Of course, equally verbal in the inner dialogue is the frugal, money-panicked me who is trying to calculate airfare, lodging and transportation costs and wondering how I can possibly save up the money plus get the snow blower that I so need to make this winter more bearable.

Choices, choices.

Anybody inclined to tag along?

***
Today was my day off; 16 days without any time off is a very, very long time to survive. I was getting a wee bit punchy by the end. I only accomplished one thing today… I slept in until 11, which was exactly what I wanted to do. 🙂 I got up in time to prepare my lesson for church (on marriage, which everybody groaned when I mentioned the topic, but I think I pulled it off well–got a few laughs and some good discussion until the end where it veered off into pointless tangents), went to church and then have spent the rest of the afternoon and evening on the couch, doing absolutely nothing. It’s been great. Unfortunately, I’m on call tomorrow, so the reprieve was very short. Hopefully, this call will go a little nicer than the last, and I can actually get a few minutes or even better a couple of hours of sleep. Last one, I came home so exhausted that I went straight to bed and woke up around 3 in the morning. Hence the reason for no posts recently.

I take Step 3 of my boards in 12 days. I’m starting to get nervous now, because I really have had little time to study. And I still can’t tell my dermatologic diseases apart. All of this schooling and training and I still don’t know half of what I really ought to know.

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9th September 2007

they do not pay me enough

I hate the neurology department. I am so close to just walking up to them and just quitting, because it’s been a long time since I enjoyed myself and I’m sick and tired of the laziness of the senior residents. The only part of neurology that I like is the neurocritical care and I can do just plan critical care from the medicine side and be done almost 3 years earlier.

“If a senior is delegated intern work from another junior resident because of a lack of their in-efficiency or work-ethic then perhaps we should re-evaluate who we are accepting into our program.”

Bastards.

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3rd September 2007

itunes love

My iTunes is in a sappy mood. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Phantom of the Opera, Vienna Teng, Eva Cassidy, Josh Groban all have rotated on in the last hour. Hmm. I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me.

All I know is that I’ve been reading about some of the discussion in reducing resident work hours from 80 hours to 72, and limiting it to 24 hours straight, rather than 30. Half the posts are about how all it does is train physicians to be sloppy and less dedicated and less educated. And that’s enough to make me cry. There’s a nice post here about Labor Day and resident physicians. England is going to a 48 hour week for its residents. 48 hours. I can’t even imagine.

More blogs:
http://fatdoctor.org/2007/09/03/doctors-labor-day/
http://www.hourswatch.org/
http://pandabearmd.com/blog/2007/08/23/in-which-your-uncle-panda-rips-off-the-lid-rolls-it-in-a-tube-and-places-it-politely-where-the-sun-doesnt-shine/

My program is quite good about getting us out within the 30 hours. I usually am out in 29 hours. And I usually only feel exhausted and overworked when I’m on call and unable to claim more than 15 minutes of sleep with my head on the table. Those are the hard nights and it depends on the rotation of how frequent they are. My last two calls have been unbelievably sweet. No new admissions. I went to bed by 11 pm and didn’t leave my room until after 6 am. Saturday night, I didn’t get a single page all night, until 4:30 am. But I sleep with a light on and I wake up every 20 minutes or so, worried that I am missing something. I still go home in the morning absolutely exhausted.

I worked today. In the hospital by 7:30, didn’t finsih until after 3. And it was a holiday, but I didn’t get paid extra. I don’t get time and half. My paycheck states that I work 46 hours a week, isn’t that nice.

*sigh* Sorry for the negativity. I came home from the hospital after spending over an hour trying to get a foley catheter into a man with prostate cancer, with a bad migraine and my smoke detector beeping every 3 minutes because the battery was dying. So I’ve never gotten rid of the headache. And sometimes, it really depresses me that this is what my life is like and it won’t ever get better.

I’ve got a date tomorrow night. I’m a dating machine, I guess. Either that or a masochist. Different guy, one that I find conversation with to be somewhat stilted and painful, really. But he was the medical student on the neuro wards and my friends were raving about how great he was (which he is a very nice guy) and they all seemed to enjoy talking to him, so I decided to give him another chance.

We’re going to a baseball game. I apparently don’t learn my lesson. Luckily, it’s with about 40 other people, so there will be a chance to engage others, if we decide there’s nothing to talk about and the game goes into extra innings.

And I’ve got clinic tomorrow morning and have to round on my patients before rounds. Oh, and did I mention that it’ll be another 14 days before my next day off (16 days total)?

Okay, iTunes is now playing Enrique Inglesis’ “Hero”. It is definitely time to go to bed.

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1st September 2007

Tardus Semita

Title: Tardus Semita
Author: Julia (jcd1013)
Characters: Ten/Rose, Eleven/Rose
Rating: All ages
Warnings: General spoilers for Doomsday and Gridlock. Character death.
Summary: Living the slow path means facing the fact that someday, he’ll lose her.
Author’s Notes: Written for the Anywhere But Cardiff ficathon. My prompt was: Blackpool, England, 21st century, which turned into a rather “blink and you’ll miss it” mention. Sorry about that. Especially big thanks to shirerain for looking over it and reassuring me that it wasn’t terrible and valancy_s for the last minute editing job.

Humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone you…
~ Doctor Who, School Reunion

She’s twenty-five when her family convinces her that she needs a vacation.

posted in Uncategorized | 85 Comments

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