First of all, it's freaking hot outside. I mean, just in case you didn't notice. Is it always this hot this early? I swear it's not. That hike to the parking lot in pants, closed-toe shoes, and a jacket is less than awesome in the afternoons. (I know what you're thinking: "take off the jacket, stupid." Well, then I lose things out of my pockets, and then I'm searching my car and retracing my steps in 110 degrees for my reference notebooks and penlights and I'm sweating and... it's just not worth it.) I think I'm going to get one of those tacky windshield reflector things so my car isn't so hot after baking in the stadium lot for 9 hours. Sorry if I've offended any proud windshield-reflector owners, but let's be honest... those things are not cool. They're tacky. Don't kid yourself.
Anyway... we are finally out of that stupid classroom! We had a "Clinician Ceremony" before we started this year. They gave us new coats with our names embroidered on them to make us feel special for a second before we spend the rest of the year feeling like incompetent dumbasses. We all went to Julep afterwards, and, well, 8:00am orientation was pretty miserable the next day. Here's part of the photo shoot.
SO. Finally! I spend time with people and not textbooks as of a couple of weeks ago. I am starting out on Pediatrics, and I love it! Pediatricians are nice people. They don't yell at you. Thank God. Feeling stupid is bad enough; getting yelled at out loud for being stupid is ten times worse. I'll take passive aggressive over borderline verbal abuse any day. Our team sees general peds patients and a couple of specialties, including pediatric neurology! IMAGINE my nerdy excitement. It's been awesome, but we were pretty clueless for a while. Ok... who am I kidding... we're still clueless, but it's getting better. The first day of our rotation, we were on call. The first freakin day! I didn't even know where to find the charts, let alone what to write in them. I remember getting on the elevator, looking at Morgan, and saying, "That was like the 6th dumb thing I've done today." We laughed at ourselves. Yesterday, I said, "I only felt like an idiot once today!" I dare say that's improvement.
When I started this blog, I said it wasn't going to be a "med school blog." Well, it has occurred to me that med school pretty much IS my life. It's really all I have to talk about, much to the dismay of Matt Newman. I think his stomach is getting a little stronger these days, though. He doesn't cringe quite as much when I casually mention graphically detailed, interesting-only-to-me pathologies that I've discovered. Lately, he even lets me tell him about things at the dinner table, which was "against the rules" for the last couple of years. "Laura... for the love of God, let me eat first." Haha.. poor guy. He's getting more into it. It takes us 2 hours to watch "House" because he asks 200 questions, which results in way too much use of the pause button. Thank God for DVR, right?
Fortunately, my stories are getting a bit more exciting. Usually the best ones are about the crazy things people say and do, not the medicine part of it. For example... A couple of days ago, a well-meaning lady comes up to me and says "Let me ask you a question. Mamaw always told me that insurance pays for the pillows in here. Is that still true? Or do y'all re-use 'em nowadays? Mamaw always said if you go to the hospital, you get to take them pillows because you paid for 'em anyway. So I was just wonderin'. The reason I'm askin' is 'cause I been needin' some new pillows. But I didn't wanna walk outta here with all them pillows and y'all thinkin I'm a-crazy." Too late, lady. Good grief.
Some of our stories are a little too R rated for this blog. (Ob/Gyn at a University hospital gets pretty exciting, apparently.) John got attacked by a psych patient. I would've given anything to have seen that one go down. One of the peds floors had Morgan's pager number down as "housekeeping." Housekeeping gets paged at all hours of the night, apparently. There's been crying and fainting and near-vomiting. Batson, the pediatric hospital, is under construction, so our "student lounge" is currently a cleaned-out former housekeeping closet, complete with washer and dryer hook-ups. About 3 people can fit comfortably in that room. There are 17 of us.
So anyway, it's pretty great, excluding the 5:00am alarm clock. Someone remind me why I didn't want to live in Belhaven...? Oscar Bob hates me every morning for waking him up before the sun. Speaking of which, I think it's bedtime. Have a happy Wednesday!
Mamaw is mistaken about that whole pillow situation, but I highly enjoyed the dialog and read it in a " Sweet Southan Darawl", which lets be honest gets me every time. Oh, and that coat looks good on ya girl!
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