first post!

First post of 2011!

Hahaha

Whoops.

Ho Ho HO

I want this for Christmas.

hello

So...maybe somebody hasn't updated in a while.  Whoops.

Well...what should I talk about?
-How huge and adorable and crazy my sweet little puppy has become?
-How awesome our house is?
-How the latest cake/baking project is going?
-How many lives I have touched while caring for patients?
-How many patients have touched my life?
-How much I dislike working nights and love love love clinic?
-How I'm sort of excited for Christmas but I'm sad I'll be working through it then taking Step 3 on my break?
-How about funny quotes from patients/nurses/residents?

I think that's a little too much.  Here are a few things of note:

Bailey is awesome.  She is super smart (too smart for her own good, really) so it's fun to teach her new tricks.  The basic ones (sit, stay, come) she's pretty good at, so now we're working on "Beer me" where she opens the fridge and gets us a beer and "Bang!" where she rolls to her side dead.  Our dog is going to be the coolest.

The house: also awesome.  Christmas lights are up.  Christmas tree is up, with wrapped presents under it! (Amazing what a month of averaging only 40 hours a week will do!)  Muddy pawprints are EVERYWHERE, but they're cute, right?

Prayers would be appreciated for my sweet mom, who fell last week and somehow exploded her humerus bone into her shoulder.  She had surgery earlier this week and they placed a metal rod in.  She got discharged home today, but still going to need a lot of prayers and a lot of patience for healing!

It's true, I'm working through Christmas then taking a 2-day (!!) exam...which isn't really my idea of a good "holiday break."  Thankfully, I will have a few extra days off after that, 2 weeks of clinic, then on vacation to PERU!  Super excited.

You know what else happens on Christmas?  My first payment of my student loans are due.  ON CHRISTMAS.

So in essence, I'm alive and well.  Alert and oriented times...uh...well times two at least.  Maybe you'll hear from me again before the next 5 months rolls around.  I'd like to put up more funny patient stories but the effort to make them completely anonymous seems a bit daunting, and I definitely don't want anyone to find me out!

Mission to Marzipan

I don't feel that I have the mental capacity to write a gushing narration about the amazing few weeks that I have had.  Instead, I'll shorten it to bullet points...maybe to elaborate later. :)

• I've been learning.  A lot.  You think you learn a lot when you're in medical school but it's an entirely different thing when YOU are the one making decisions.  Ordering tylenol for a patient becomes a big deal - "what if they have an allergy?"  "what's their liver function?"  "are they on other medicines that will react with it?"  "what dose is best for them?"  I've re-learned an insane amount of physiology too.  Awesome.
• With all the knowledge I've been gaining, I am feeling much more confident in myself.  When I get called about things I can handle - it's amazing.
• I miss my family.  Especially my puppy (who has grown so much I can hardly recognize her!) and Chris.  Chris has been unbelievably supportive, like always.  I'm so grateful for him!

• I might be making a wedding cake!  With my mom!  I don't have all the details yet, but making a wedding cake has always been something I wanted to do...so I'm very excited!
• Another thing that is going to be awesome - I'm entering a cake contest!  I just made a cake for Patrick's 21st birthday that I'm going to submit to Threadcakes.  Threadcakes is a cake competition run by a T-shirt website, threadless.com.  The idea is to make a cake that represents one of their shirts.    It's hard to describe, so I'll just put up pictures.  I know I won't win, but entering in itself is exciting.  :)  If I get another long weekend I may have to submit another! 

That's about all for now.  I suppose I should go read about "sick sinus syndrome" or how to treat people with congestive heart failure AND kidney failure.  Or maybe I can go hand-wash my dishes that have been sitting in the sink all week.  Maybe I'll just go eat some more ice cream that Chris bought me.  (Thanks, Christopher!)

Knowledge

Do you know how fast your brain can learn things? I don't know exactly, but after this past week it sure seems pretty fast. Nothing I learned in medical seemed quite so applicable until now. Now I wish I remembered more, and that I had understood the basics better before moving on to more advanced topics!

I started as "Dr. Twist" about 10 days ago, and man what a 10 days it's been! I can't even summarize how happy/sad/scared/proud I have felt because I feel like my emotions have been on a crazyride. I actually spent my first couple days writing about how I was feeling and, well, let's just say they aren't very happy posts! They may get posted here someday but it will be the "someday" they refer to when they say "someday you'll look back on this and laugh." Although things are going well now, I'm not quite there yet. :)

I've had plenty of lovely patients (and only a couple I would have preferred not to have) and I think Morehead's hospital is great. Everyone is SUPER nice (which is very much appreciated), and things are actually efficient. Here, if I want something done -- no matter how dumb or useless it may be -- I just write it in the chart and put it on the secretary's desk. No begging for consults, no calling the lab to do tests, no nothing! I just write it down and it magically happens. It's awesome! I never thought I would do hospitalist work and though I still don't love it I think I could do it in a place like this where everyone actually does their job (and does it pretty well, I might add!).

My patients have been good. The only really scary one was my first. I had no idea how anything worked - and my first patient had altered mental status (=completely out of it) and acute respiratory failure (=not really breathing). That isn't really a good combo, and especially for a brand new doctor like me. I walked into the room to check in and the respiratory therapist handed me some blood gases. "Here's his gases since we've had him on oxygen. Let me know if you want me to change any of his vent settings." Um, first of all, I thought the respiratory therapists were supposed to know how to do that!? Either way, his gases didn't look good and I had absolutely no clue what to do, who to ask for help, or where to go. I found some help eventually but let's just say it was a pretty traumatic experience!

Since then, things have been much, much better. My mom came up today and we went to Cave Run Lake and got some strawberry cake from a local bakery. I realized that (with the exception of the first day), I'm really, really happy. I'm actually helping patients get better. I like being in the hospital. My decisions matter for the first time. It's scary, but exhilarating.

I'm home for a few days now which is really nice. Chris is on a MD-PhD retreat, though, so I can't wait for him to come home tomorrow to have the family together again! :)

I'll try to update soon but...well...you know how it goes. I'm busy saving lives!

terrabul

You know what? I'm Terrible. (I always imagine charles barkley whenever I say terrible. An example here)

Terrible in the sense that I have somehow become too busy to write even though I still haven't started working! I might as well sign off forever once intern year starts...

Anyway, to recap, we finished all our "orientation" for school. It was overall pretty boring, occasionally helpful, and did not once remind me again how to work those acid-base problems and read EKGs. I suppose I should break out the dusty textbooks before I start.

I start on our one off-site rotation of the year, in Morehead, KY. It's about an hour away but I will not be commuting - they have housing available for us. I hear that I will get off more days than a usual rotation, which I hope is true...but we'll see. I don't have an official schedule yet but maybe it will come Monday! Let's hope! Chris and I are in a bit of a pickle as we are a one-car family right now (and that one car does not have air conditioning!) It's going to be tough to only have one car if I am not in the city.

I've started on too many "home improvement projects" - after we bought out Ikea, we also bought out Bed, Bath and Beyond and are working on Lowes. The house still looks a little bare but it's improving - we've got some blinds and curtains at least! I started the daunting task of taking off wallpaper from the bathrooms...gah. The guest bathroom was super easy so I thought that it would be similarly easy to do the bathroom downstairs. I was sadly, sadly mistaken.

Um...Oh yes! Also I had a cake decorating party! How awesome is that? A few girls (who are upcoming 4th year med students) asked me to teach them how to play with fondant and other cakey things, so we got together and made cakes! They all turned out SUPER cute, I can't wait to post pictures!

Bailey is getting huge! (probably 20 pounds, but that's over twice her weight when we got her 5 weeks ago!) She's into EVERYTHING and whenever I think my house is finally puppy-proof she finds something else that's not. She's a chewer, too. I don't mind that she chews on my stuff it's just annoying that she chews on me and my friends! It's a good thing she's adorable.

She is a smart pup, though, and under the right circumstances (meaning: few distractions and lots of dog cookies!) she can sit, stay, lay down, come, get in her kennel, and give me her paw to shake! Awww...sooo cute. She also fetches but not because I know hot to teach her to do that - just because she's a retriever and that's apparently what they do.

Well, I'd better try to get back to stripping wallpaper while the puppy is asleep. If you don't hear from me ever again, I ask for your prayers beginning July 1!

busy busy bee

There has been way too much going on for me to even start writing.

1) We got the house. It's so awesome. It's a lot of work, but awesome. I will upload before/after photos once we have some "after" to take photos of. We also went to Ikea. Oh.my.gosh. Awesome. We brought a U-haul to Ikea. Haha...yep. We also bought a giant television on super sale. We're living like I actually have a job! It's pretty fun!

2) Bailey is still chewing but is as cute as ever. Gah! Need more photos. :) I got a new phone (because my other one was going crazy for a couple months) and am currently trying to upload pictures to no avail. I hate technology sometimes!

3) Lots of lovely weddings. One more next week then done for a while. Photos and stories to come...someday!

4) Chris got into a car accident on Friday, thank goodness he is OK but his car isn't! :( I was out of town (and out of cell phone reception, actually) so I didn't even know - it was a traumatic experience but I suppose if anything good came of it it got us thinking about our own mortality and we're much more conscious of how much we care for each other. The house and puppy and everything else were getting in the way...now we're making plenty of time for each other! Unfortunately he's now out of town at a conference now...so it's just me and Bailey!

5) We start residency orientation on the 15th (I think?) It's coming up so fast and I am not ready!!! I want some more vacation! My house isn't done! My puppy isn't completely house trained! Oh man I need to fit in a lot in the next week.

Sorry so short. I need to focus on this dumb phone!