Wow, that was dark

See title. Goodness.

So, sorry about that last one folks. I contemplated deleting it and as I said at the intro to that post, didn't even initially post it, but then left it for the sake of honesty and completeness I suppose?

I asked my mom for her opinion, and it was like, med school/residency is the ups and downs, which is a point for leaving it up. Then I'm like, this is a very specific situation for which it's hard to imagine anyone looking for advice. Grenada's rock fever with study darkness with fulminant breakdown? Sure. That's at least half the student body and everyone that has a medical school related meltdown feels like they're alone in it and everyone else is succeeding. Same with residency. Normal stuff. We laugh about it now at work because we were all in various stages of it without knowing the others were suffering it. Doctors seem to be bred with a specific blend of arrogance and self doubt that starts a spiral of "I'm smart and med school/residency shouldn't be hard. I am struggling. Therefore, I am stupid and everyone around me is smart and ohmigod."

This peculiar blend of impotent rage I feel intermittently in this really specific situation? Not so much relatable. At least I hope not.

But enough of that. Tonight was really really good. We had a mini spontaneous surgical pathology girls' night bitch-a-thon, and it was a bunch of fun with great people that did, I admit, involve some poking fun of surgeons. Lighthearted, I assure you. My mom sent me a hard drive that I got today that has all of my diving pictures and California pictures and the like salvaged so I did not lose those, and that was really incredible. The response of you guys, as I've mentioned, has been fabulous, and it helps me quite a bit. Surgical pathology ends in three working days (but who's counting) and I'm pretty excited about it. While being the bread and butter stuff, it's really work intensive, so it'll be great to have a break working more normal hours. I am getting a lot more of the diagnoses and have a general idea of logic and workflow, which I've mentioned before.

Good stuff. I'm planning a trend of increasingly positive blog posts to follow, but right now, I'm crazy tired. Night all.

A good few days

I'm kind of cautious about characterizing my days, because there are some spectacularly good ones to spectacularly bad ones and it's not always easy to tell which they are.

This weekend, new Roomie made chili qualified as "f'ing amazing". I got my Xbox, which was my "thank goodness this was belated" Christmas gift, so we set up with work friends and played Just Dance 3 for an embarrassingly long time. Which was awesome. Last night, Rock Star contacted me to see if I wanted one of his guitars since my beloved Takamine solid top got turned into firewood, so I met him downtown for tea and now I have a guitar so I can start work on the "Ratboy blew up my economy car" blues. It's gonna have four chords, all of which are 7s, and start with "I woke up this morning". Wait for it to show up on Pandora soon.

I've been putting off and rehashing an HLA presentation for about two months now. Pathology is difficult and studious and such. Blood bank is confusing, immediately consequential, and has a lot of letters and numbers. HLA beats up blood bank every day and hangs it on a locker by its underwear.

So I had a five minute presentation that was killing me. I did a first version of it about a month ago, which was extraordinarily bad, and I didn't know any of the case details. I got last minute belled out of doing it, and then was hacking some stuff together (which also sucked) which then got burned up by the fire. This last one I did on an extended weekend sleep deprivathon that was more my MO in college.

Unless my colleagues are being really forgiving, which is likely, it didn't suck. Despite my rambling it on 4 hours of sleep. So then I had sign out, but my attending got detained at the main hospital for over an hour and I didn't have many cases anyway...

So I propped up a chair to put my legs on in the sign out room and threw my sweater over my face. The accessioner pops her head in at some point where I'm halfway to Edward Norton's house, and I startle up a bit and act... I dunno, normal?

Her comment? "You know these lights have a dimmer switch?" and dims them.

Guys, that is as close to authorized naptime as you can get without having a yoga mat on the floor.

So nap at work. Frigging awesome. And almost no real work to do in the afternoon so I could get caught up on my other stuff. It's going to get me back tomorrow though. I'm getting all the breast cases in the land.

What else... music at work is interesting because a lot of us listen to music while we're grossing because we can. I'm included in that. It gets weird when we need an attending to come help orient a specimen, but we don't turn the music off because I am not laying a greasy Hep C liver covered finger on my precious iPhone.

Leading to this:
Attending: Okay... the stitch is here, so... this.. yes, this is anterior
Shirley Manson: I'm waiting... I'm waiting.... I'm waiting
Attending: So if we whip this around like this, I'm thinking this is the uncinate process
Shirley Manson: I'm waiiiiiiiting. I'm waiiiting.
Attending: And we can dissect the pancreatic duct from this axis.
Shirley Manson: I'm waiiiiiiiiiiiiiting
Attending: She's waiting.

Greasy finger exceptions are for F*** You, White America, and ANYTHING by Tenacious D. Jack Black is killing me. An hour of Pearl Jam goes by but the second I need an attending, I start to hear the beginning of "Ya don't always haveta f*** her hard..." and I'm going "Excuse me! Hold on... gloves off... fast forward!" "What was that?" "Nothing!"

I do really like my new car guys. It's all RRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrRRREEEEEEEEE when I take off in traffic.