And the beat goes on...

Things that have happened since August...

Well, now I'm halfway through my final year of residency, hurtling toward fellowship.  I have, as of last week, registered for my AP/CP board exams with approval of my license and medical school diploma.  The registration relieved me of 2200 dollars from what is thankfully my now dwindled educational fund.  I spent my last thousand (minus what the hotel costs will be) on a cute small collection of books from the "Biopsy Interpretation of" series, because I know how to have fun.

Thank goodness for that educational fund, man.  When you're interviewing for residencies, find out how much it is.  Even if your salary is higher, that salary is going to be taxed, and if you're doing income based repayment for your student loans, that'll shave it right off, but the educational fund is free of all that.

So between May and June, my colleagues and I will be flying to Tampa to take this heinous double part test, which means I'm in the beautiful time of the year where fourth years begin to prepare for hibernation and become utterly useless for everything else.  And I'll be returning to studying once I complete this blog post, actually.

So the training journey is nearly at an end, minus that whole cytopathology thing.  At that point, there will be *another* licensing exam and I will hopefully stumble out of this whole mess as a triple boarded pathologist who will then be swimming in job opportunities (please?).

It's still a bright scary world out there.  Texas provides at least a stopping point on the road to "being grown" but after that, it's a big black hole.  The man and I kind of fell in love with Denver during the Great American Beer Festival, so maybe they'll open a spot for a youngster in a year and a half.  But still, everything is sort of winding up, and so much faster than seemed possible.  It seems like yesterday I was "covered in bees!" panicking to Grenada, and now I'm trudging toward an exam so far beyond the scope of the Step 1 that it makes the Step 1 look like SAT prep.

I have a weekend left of call... this weekend actually, which I traded for a lovely weekend in Asheville back in August.  Then I can finally do what I keep saying I'll do which is retire the scrubs.

I now have my permanent license in South Carolina.  One is necessary to apply for boards, and that lovely educational fund covers it, so it's official.  State law varies, but in South Carolina, IMGs such as myself cannot apply for permanent licensure until they've completed three years of training, so with that finally behind me, I have the unrestricted medical card.  Of course, I let my DEA license expire in the way back so I can't prescribe any of the fun drugs with my unrestricted license, so sorry guys, no illegal scrips for you.

Really feeling the whole "last of" tour of Charleston.  I've been steadily moving things off my bucket list (carriage ride, rooftop at Vendu, go to the Macintosh) and feeling the kind of "last Christmas here" sadness.  I've also been kind of wandering through apartment listings in Houston, and they seem nice.  Gotta make the commitment at some phase, and I will definitely need to get a bike.

When I'm not buried in microbiology lectures, I've been on kind of a health kick that was initiated by both getting cooking bling (Kitchenaid from last Christmas and NOW an overly expensive Vitamix blender) combined with getting suckered into running a half marathon in Florida in February despite nearly being killed by the bridge run, which was less than half the distance.  Still, I'm running for Save the Children, and they're a good cause, so if you want to toss a couple bucks my way in the name of securing me a permanent knee injury, the address is here.


You even get to see me dressed up like Alice, and I'm contemplating wearing the costume if I can make it without dying.

Running is an insidious creature.  It's been my go-to exercise off and on because it's cheap and easy, and kept me from going crazy (er) in Grenada.  Most of my running save for in Grenada has been on a treadmill, for years even, and it's only been lately that I've been pushing into the great outdoors, and I have to say, I kind of like it.  But I keep getting sucked farther in.  For years, I'd run on the treadmill, go all out for the first mile as fast as I could, and then walk/jog the rest in gasping bursts.  No strategy, definitely a no no for accumulating injuries, and thought a 5K was really all I was ever going to be able to do.

Well, and then a 10K, because the Cooper River Bridge run is a quintessential part of charleston, and why not, right?

Now I'm following my NikePlus trainer and arranging happy hours around when I can get the best mid-dusk run on the waterfront and working toward the half marathon.  Where I'll stop, really.  I won't get sucked into a marathon.  Well, at least I won't get sucked into an ultramarathon.  Check with me in two years.

Doing the training correctly has been helpful though, and now I use the first mile to actually warm up rather than suddenly sprint as fast as I can until all the bits and pieces holding my lower legs together start to snap and pop, and it's allowing me to really again appreciate how beautiful Charleston is (and how dangerous its drivers are).  My longest run so far without stopping at all is 6 miles, and the long runs are starting to feel better and better or at least "not as terrible as before".

And then with the work hours decreasing and the study crunch requiring more "can't sit around or will go crazy" ness, I've been cooking up a storm lately.

Few things... I've been poor for a while, and the story of the last ten years of my life has been accumulating things that 16 year old me would have scoffed at.  150 dollar running shoes?  Please, shoes are shoes.  Yeah... but the glycerines really help my plantar fasciitis.  Artwork for the wall?  So long as Rolling Stone still has full centers of Trent Reznor, you're just a few pieces of tape away from home decor!  Yeah... but frames.  Frames even make counter culture stuff look nice.  Cookware??  I mean, you can get a hand mixer from a store for 5 bucks.  What's up with these stand mixers?  It kneads dough for me.  Well, at any rate, I can tell you I'd *never* pay 500 dollars for a damn blender.

Sigh.  Last year, when I got my kitchenaid, a friend of mine said "The two things that changed my life were my kitchenaid stand mixer and my vitamix blender".  I trust said friend's cooking opinions, so I went home and googled vitamix blenders since I was poor (see above) and had no idea what they were.  My first response was laughter, obviously, because who would pay that for a blender?  In my defense, my blender is a combo gift from my dad and my boyfriend, if that justifies it.  All that's left for my Martha Stewart kitchen is a set of expensive knives and a set of expensive pots/pans.

But I'm liking cooking a lot, and I'm loving the fresh ingredients, though I'm being careful not to be one of "those" people.  "Yes, I'm making a smoothie with pomegranate seeds and chia seeds but I will absolutely *not* refer to either as a "super fruit/food"".  I'm finding a lot of fun recipes and enjoy challenging myself with them.  When I completely run out of medical school/residency related themes for this blog, I'll just start posting recipes.  I'm also having fun making my own flour.  The boyfriend is diabetic so I'm trying to keep the glycemic index low, and you can pretty much grind up *anything* and make fake flour.  There's about three cups of chickpea flour now occupying my cabinet because I found a bunch of dried ones on sale and went "Ooh!!!  This will be like magic!" because I have never had a good blender before, thus the art of changing the state of something (like beans to flour) still stirs a certain sense of magic and wonder in me.

The whole foods approach is also making it easier to make absolutely anything without needing to scrap around for ingredients.  No salsa?  Tomatoes, cilantro, peppers, and onions.  No guac?  Avocado, tomatoes.  No pasta?  Flour, egg, and water through the pasta maker.  No ice cream?  Milk, ice, frozen berries.  No rice flour?  Rice in blender.  I'm a year out from killing my own chickens.

So that's the update.  A six month crunch to boards and moving, punctuated by the growls of "pulse mode" when I'm making my morning smoothies.

The holiday tweener

I'm not a huge Thanksgiving person.  I think it's because I like neither turkey or pilgrims a whole lot.  I generally only whine about Christmas stuff before Thanksgiving because that's about the level of Jingle Bells I can take without shooting mall Santas.

So roomie and I found ourself in the odd predicament of having our apartment fully decked out for Halloween, but then she and I are taking turns leaving through November, and her boyfriend (re: manual labor) was visiting last weekend, so for practicality's sake, we took down the vampires and tombstones and bloodstained "help" messages on the mirrors and replaced them with a fake Christmas tree, glowing lit up presents, and santas.

I'm oddly okay with it.  As long as there's no music.  It's an odd nostalgia.  I know I said I wouldn't talk about the fire anymore (mentirosa!!), but this was post fire.  I've mentioned before that due to the loving embrace of my colleagues and friends, it took at least a week for the whole business to even sink in, and this is part of why.  I got back home, I believe on the 29th, and new roomie picked me up from the airport and I moved straight in with her.  When I got to her house, not only did I have unexpected furniture, unexpected linens, and unexpected scrubs, but my new abode was completely decked out for Christmas, and these are all the same decorations that greeted me when I first arrived.

So I'm degrinched... but one too many Jingle Bells, and I'll snap.

Speaking of holiday stuff, I carved this pumpkin, and while likely inebriated, sent a picture of it to Poe's Tavern with the message "You make good burgers so I made you a pumpkin", not realizing they have an annual Poe themed pumpkin carving contest which I would have been able to enter had I waited until Thursday.  Ah well.

Halloween was on a Wednesday mid surgical pathology this year, so I did my festivities on Saturday, which included a joint work party/Skinful festival.  I was initially worried my costume was going to be inappropriate for the first, but arrived to the new chief's house to find the entire dining room done up as Dexter's kill room complete with a plastic wrapped blow up doll and her husband, convincingly dressed in the apron and holding a butcher knife, so I worried less about being family friendly.

I was initially going to go as one of four birds, others represented were a flamingo, a peacock, and a bjork-swan, and I had the brilliant plan of being a parrot with a pirate strapped to my shoulder, but upon further evaluation, since I can't sew, this plan was looking at costing me over 200 dollars, but this get up:

was 40.  I am so very cheap.

I got my fall cooking on.  I discovered how to make pumpkin cheesecake, which is the best trick ever, and then followed it up with some pork and squash and a pumpkin risotto.

October was also breast cancer awareness month, otherwise known as "the worst month to be on surgical pathology".  It also was "surgical chiefs go out of town leaving their underlings to attempt horrendous resections that involve five thousand frozens for no specific reason.  But I'm still getting a better hang of it from last year.  I'm starting to get comfortable with my own language on reports rather than desperately grasping for others over the course of hours "how do I phrase 'benign skin and granulation tissue with hemorrhage, acute inflammation, and edema'??"  I'm getting the hang of our very own Halloween trick, the introduction of a new and likely evil computer system, and the rest of it.  I finally found the answer to the question "what if a biopsy shows cancer, and you take the specimen, and you can't find any cancer, but you also can't find the clip or biopsy changes?"  The answer is "first, take all the wax filled cassettes you've put samples into and x-ray all of them at a less-than-thrilled cancer center.  Then, when you can't find it, take the formalin soaked remainder of the specimen, in small color coded pieces back to the even less thrilled cancer center, take countless x-rays of that until you find a clip the size of the head of a pin, and then resample that.

Oh, making friends.  And apparently when we're on surgical pathology, our specimens and us have such a combined aroma that we can be detected through the funk we leave on *other* people's clothing.  I've personally gotten so used to formalin that I don't really perceive the smell unless it's up against my face making my eyes water (it burns!!!) and a vague sense of hunger since it has that disturbing side effect, so no early med students, being hungry after anatomy lab does not make you a cannibal.

Still, clinical chemistry this month is providing a nice break and one that allows me to defect up to Virginia for a hiking trip for my birthday since Christmas will be at the beck and call of my pager.  I'm then going to turn around and go back for that Thanksgiving day and hopefully con some fondue out of the situation because blah, turkey.

Clinical chemistry involves relearning some chem, which is always a treat for me, but my daily activities consist of answering calls, mostly that involve mislabeling or not labeling specimens and I get the daily sob story for why I should allow blood that I don't know came from the patient to be assigned for the patient, and I get to read electrophoresis gels and calculate hemoglobin percentages to catch various hemoglobinopathies (sickle cell, thalassemia, SC disease, etc).  The gels are for a lot of things, but mostly I'm trying to find bands that could correspond with multiple myeloma or any other monoclonal blood cell proliferation that isn't supposed to be there.  It involves peering at a light board and interpreting a wavy graph and tables and then writing a series of important looking codes while signing it all illegibly with my doctor scrawl signature, so it feels very professional.

My lecture attendance is getting better; always a plus, despite having a series of 28 Days Later dread dreams where un-fun zombies chased me through the New York City subway system while killing all my friends.  I'm not exactly sure who did what to my subconscious, but it gets temperamental this way.  It's that thing where you show up at work either mad at your friends for dream-slights or panicked for your friends because you had a dream where they were standing drunk in a black evening dress and then they fell down the stairs and twisted their head all the way around like in Death Becomes Her.  Thanks brain, you sick freak.

Skills to learn...

For the past four years, I have not regular access to what people would conventionally call a "kitchen". Not that I was an exceptional cook before that. In Grenada, after a semester on campus with a stove top, I got my wonderful little apartment that featured a propane stove that my former Peace Corps working friend had to show me how to use, the oven was too small for almost anything, and two of the burners worked. The settings on those burners was "large open flame" and "No large open flame". Could make the hell out of some old fashioned popcorn though.

Moving onto Brooklyn, I graduated to a surprisingly similar gas/two burner functional half kitchen, which my roommate used enviably, but I mainly lived off of takeout, both as a function of kitchen size and laziness.

Now I live in a large three bedroom house that has a ginormous kitchen with an electric (gasp) stove. Roommate 1 cooks like a mofo. Like "Oh, these peaches are about to go bad and bazam restaurant quality pastry." I also have a yard now so the first thing I did upon having access to a vehicle was buy a grill because if there's one type of cooking I can do it's "Char things over fire" (thanks, Grenada!).

So I'm finally trying to cook quality food. I am pretty pleased with my blackberry cobbler and tonight, upon being too lazy to stop at the Piggly Wiggly (yes, really) on my way home from work, concocted a stir fry out of rice noodles and pale ale (no sherry) and it (drumroll) didn't suck!

I consider this further evidence of my whole "medical school delays maturity" hypothesis. By next year, I'll be buying car insurance and all matter of other things that most people master around age 25.