Monthly Archive for April, 2008

one week down, 47 more to go

Published on 1 year, 10 months ago in medical school. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

So I’m done with my first official week of third year. And it sucks. I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel this way, but I kind of hate it. Maybe it’s because I’m on psychiatry adult consult and all I’ve seen this week is malingering, delirium, and dementia, all of which involve pretty hard to interview patients. I suppose my malingering patient wasn’t that difficult, except for the fact that he was a prison inmate and kind of scared the crap out of me. But I definitely didn’t figure out the malingering part, which makes me an idiot. I’m so tired that even 10+ hours of sleep last night wasn’t enough to make me not feel dead tired today. And this is just psych. It’s not medicine or surgery. I wake up at 5 in the morning so that I have plenty of time to preround on my one patient (I have two now, so I’m not quite sure how I’m going to pull it off on Monday). That’s how slow I am. At this rate, I might as well not leave the hospital when I’m on medicine and surgery because there’s no point when I’ll probably have to come back in an hour or so since I’m so slow. Not only am I slow, but I don’t know shit. My fellow psych consult-ees all claim they don’t know anything either, but it sure doesn’t sound that way when they present their patients. I’m just waiting to get yelled at because I’m so incompetent. In fact, I’m surprised I haven’t been yelled at yet. I figure they’re just holding it all in until next week, when they can safely assume that we should know what we’re doing.

I know I complained to no end about grad school sucking, but I think I almost prefer that now. At least I’ll have plenty of sleep and not be exposed to people with Hepatitis B and C every damn day. Nor will I be living in constant fear of getting yelled at. I hear it’s inevitable. My fellow psych consult-ees have all already gotten yelled at. It’s just a matter of time before it’s my turn.

like a prisoner being given his last meal

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago in married life and medical school. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

That’s what I’ve felt like these past couple of weeks. Everyone keeps telling me to enjoy everything while I still can as if I’m some prisoner enjoying my last meal before my execution. Sad how that statement is pretty much true. It is so unbelievably hard for me to accept that I’m going to have to give up everything that I enjoy indefinitely. Simple things like lounging around the house with my dog, playing Rock Band, cooking, blogging, sewing, tennis…all the things that make me me. All those things will no longer have any place in my life as I enter the abyss that is the third year of med school. Having these things then having to give them up again makes me almost wish I’d never done a PhD so that I would never have tasted such freedom because it is now so hard to let it all go. Well, I think you get my point. Enough whining.

I’ve been MIA for quite awhile now because I’ve been enjoying my last meal to the fullest extent possible and was on a last-minute vacation. It was fun, but the spectre of third year was never far behind so it wasn’t quite as fun as it could have been. But at least I won’t regret not taking a vacation later. I don’t do much on vacations besides eat and shop and this one was no exception. And for some reason, I was obsessed with finding a perfectly functional handbag because I was finally tired of my small yet not-so-functional collection. Not one to cheap out on such things, my husband insisted that I only look at designer bags. I had a Marc by Marc Jacobs in mind, but it ended up looking way better online than in person. I guess handbags just can’t be functional and fashionable at the same time. I then found a Burberry one that I could live with and had settled on it (and was planning to buy it once I got back home) when my husband insisted we check out the Louis Vuitton store on the way out. Now I don’t like LV stuff because I don’t like the monogram and how it’s everywhere, but I decided to humor him since he had already humored me way more than he had to with my great handbag search of 2008 and I figured he deserved it. I really hate going to these high-end stores because the people are just so snobby and act like I don’t even deserve to be in their store. One day, I swear, I’ll stroll in in my scrubs and white coat just to see if I get treated differently. Suffice it to say, I was trying to get in and out of there as quickly as possible, but my husband made me look at their bags, theorizing that maybe so many people have them because they’re functional. Well, he was wrong. But he also found the perfect bag for me while he was at it. And even though I don’t like LV stuff, I caved in and bought it.

There was no way I was going to be able to resist my special shade of purple. And besides, it’s a really nice bag. And it doesn’t have that ostentatious LV monogram all over it. And I’m now $900 poorer. I figure I won’t be shopping much once I start rotations again, so it’ll be okay.

So I start tomorrow bright and early. I still wish I could freeze time and be a slacker forever…or at least until I master every instrument on Rock Band on expert, but I have no choice but to forge ahead. I might disappear for extended periods of time, but not forever. You’re just going to have to be patient and you’ll be rewarded with stories aplenty, I’m sure.

And to those who responded to my Dear Reader post awhile ago, I haven’t forgotten you and will be getting responses up as soon as I stop admiring my new LV bag find the time.

ack, my dog is fat

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago in married life. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

So I took my dog to the vet today for his annual checkup and vaccine boosters in anticipation of not having the time to do it later in the month. Now I’ve been noticing that he’s getting a little chubby, but my husband doesn’t believe me and has not cut back on how much he feeds him. Of course, my husband has not once gone to the vet with me and has never seen the charts they have in the vet’s office showing what a healthy dog should look like and my attempts to describe these charts and my concerns to him fell on deaf ears. I knew that my dog had filled out a bit, but nothing could prepare me for how much weight he actually gained: a whole 10 lbs! He was 50 lbs before (which was his ideal weight or “ideal dog” in the chart below), so that means he gained 20% of his original weight! If I were to gain 20% of my current weight, I would have to gain almost 20 lbs! The vet now classifies my dog as “overweight” bordering on “obese” according to the chart below!* Talk about embarrassing. I spent the remainder of the vet visit trying to blame my husband (rightfully so, I might add) for my dog’s condition. But it didn’t change the fact that I was the one who got lectured instead of the person who deserved it. And to add insult to injury, my husband just keeps saying, “we can fix it” and “all we need to do is make him exercise more” instead of admitting that he screwed up and that it’s going to be hard to fix (and that he should have listened to me, as always). If obesity were so easy to fix, would we have such an epidemic going on right now? Hardly. So I really want to shove his stupid everything is fixable attitude somewhere where I’ll never have to see it again. When will he see that it’s much better to just not break things in the first place?

*You may wonder how I could possibly have not noticed that my dog is about to become obese, but it is rather hard because he’s super furry and I was in denial.

Image from: http://users.tpg.com.au/choclab/img/dog_weight_chart.jpg