Tomorrow!

Last day of school EVER.

I mean, all right, residency is an endless learning process and there's still tests and such, but this is the last time, unless I invest in some adult education classes down the road, that I have to pay for work. With the exception of a few lulls, I've been in school since preschool. And since I was about 13, I've wanted to end up, well... here.

If all the paperwork goes through on time, I should be a doctor-fo-life as of April 8th.

I keep thinking a truck's going to hit me or something. It can't all be over with so little... whatever after literally decades of going at it. I mean, tomorrow, I'm probably going to go in, watch my attending round, have her forget about me for an hour, so I'll watch the rest of Wall-E on my iPhone, and then I'll follow her around a bit more, ask her to fill out my form, run the last paperwork up to my clinical coordinator, take my short white coat off, stuff it back into my Urban Outfitters bag (I threw up in my Trader Joe's bag; more on that in a second) stick my headphones in my ears, and take the train home. Same as any other day. Except I never have to do it again, and then I'll move to South Carolina where the weather is warm, the rents are cheap, and the palmetto bugs are terrifying.

To hinder my celebratory airs a bit, I got quite suddenly attacked by what seems to be a rollicking case of either norovirus or adenovirus. I was out at Other-Job, which is WAY the heck down on Long Island. Great job; long commute.

Suddenly, intense nausea, like run for it nausea, and I end up the one with my face against the tiles in the bathroom, because that seems to be the best medical treatment for vomiting - bathroom tiles to the face and a friend outside the door going "you okay?".

The problem? I'm an hour an half from home. There is NO easy way to get there. It takes over an hour by car when the weather has not been yet again set to "Apocalypse", so I'm forced to make a last minute run for the only train for the next hour.

It required four years of college and four years of medical school to bring me to this conclusion but:

Running + Extreme nausea = Bad

The doors close on the train with the characteristic Boooomp Boomp! Which is precisely how much time I have before freeing the beast into my grocery bag onto my white coat.

Sigh.

I had just been planning on burning the thing, but I suppose covering it in bile and partially digested peanut butter crackers works toward the same goal.

I collapse into the big bench seats with my feet up (not allowed) and I'm starting to get a good fever on by this point, so I'm lying there shaking and periodically vomiting and just REALLY hoping that the conductor will just take my ticket and not kick me off the train into the thunder-snow-hail because he thinks I'm drunk.

The train wasn't that crowded (thank goodness) but I became truly appreciative of the polite indifference of everyone in this city... The conductor took my ticket like normal, without comment, but didn't make me sit up, pull my feet off the seat, or... stop throwing up on his train. Other passengers left me alone pretty much entirely. Benevolence by indifference. I'm for it.

It still may have been about the worst 90 minutes of my life though. I've seen commercials for reality shows that seem designed to embarrass fat people into not being fat, and there's always a clip of a 300 pounder collapsing after her 10th sit up, and a personal trainer is yelling at her, and she's just going "I can't.... I can't" and crying?

I now have more sympathy for those people because when you're still retching uncontrollably LONG after all fluids have left your body, that's how it feels. Your abs are contracting against your will and you're weeping and going "I can't!!! I can't!!! No more involuntary sit-ups!"

So that was fun. But I did manage to get home and now I'm trying to brush it off in time for my partying to begin tomorrow night. Let's see how it goes.

One more day!