update: of puppies, chanel, and iphones

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mylifemypace
4 days, 16 hours ago
in lab/graduate school, married life and medical school
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Yes, I’ve been MIA again. It’s really hard to write when I’m too busy being a blob.

I deferred my second rotation because the ghost of my dissertation just would not stop haunting me. Translation: my asshole major professor kept demanding a draft from me despite the fact that no one really expects us to pump out a dissertation during our third year of med school. It was a tough decision, but it was just something I had to do in order to make sure that I could focus completely on my rotations so that I don’t fail. One can skate by with only half a mind on Psych, but not while on Peds or Medicine. And I’ve been making good progress so far.

This whole deferment has allowed me to enjoy life a bit more, which is good because I’ve learned to appreciate the little things, like watching my adorable corgi puppy sleep in my lap all day long. It’s also bad because I will have to learn to live a shadow of a life once I return in August. I’m not yet sure how I’ll deal with that yet, but my preliminary plan involves large amounts of Prozac.* Speaking of my puppy, he is absolutely awesome! He’s the cutest thing ever! I always thought that I would miss him having a tail (my other dog has a really fluffy tail that has a tendency to knock things over quite often), but I now find my puppy’s little nubbin to be quite adequate at expressing his emotions and quite cute to boot. From behind, he looks like a bunny hopping when he runs. He’s a handful, but nothing compared to the horror stories I’ve heard about other breeds. I definitely cannot imagine my life without him and can see why Queen Elizabeth II has a bunch of corgis.

What else is new? Well, say hello to my new acquisition:

Isn’t it pretty? It better be because it costed $1000 more than our 52″ LCD TV. I could also have bought the Macbook Air with the amount of money I spent on this purse. Or that Canon 40D DSLR that I’ve been coveting for a year now. But, no, because I am a woman after all, I instead blow my money on a Chanel purse. And all because it’s purple and shiny and super-limited-edition. It was supposed to be my reward for finishing my first draft of my dissertation. I was just at the boutique to try it on so that my husband could then later buy it for me when I fulfilled my end of the bargain, but we ended up buying it because Chanel newbie that I am didn’t realize what incredible good fortune I had to even be able to find it at this late juncture, but at least had the good sense to know that I would forever kick myself if I passed it up. So I possess this purse that I wasn’t planning to buy for another 10 years now and I am quite broke. It is also still all boxed up (my husband was kind enough to let me take it out for a few hours to take pictures of it) waiting for me to finish that draft before it can come out and play. And now you know why I’ve been so productive as of late.

And lastly, somehow beyond all reason, my husband was able to convince me to wake up at 4:30 am the morning of July 11th to head out to our local Apple store to wait in line for the iPhone 3G. Because, of course, I just had to have it. So that’s what we did. And it was quite the interesting experience. We were, of course, not the only crazies as there were already 50ish people there by the time we got there and the line grew to well over 100 people by the time the Apple store opened. I thought I would feel really lame about waiting in line for a phone, but I have to say that I was glad to have experienced it. Of course, my shiny new iPhone 3G was defective and I had to go back a week later to get it replaced, but at least I have one now. By the way, it’s also all sorts of awesome.

*I kid. Sort of.

speaking of psych hospitals…

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mylifemypace
3 weeks, 3 days ago
in medical school
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So I’ve been done with my psych clerkship for awhile now. I’ve just been too lazy to write. But this article about a woman collapsing then dying in the waiting room of a psych hospital and then going unnoticed despite the activity there for an hour or so is appalling enough to make me break my silence.

You see, I was at a psych hospital myself for the last four weeks of the rotation. It was made out to be quite a scary place, what with all the warnings of, “always watch your back” and “take staff with you to interview your patients.” Not to mention the crazy long self-defense class they forced us to sit through on orientation where all I retained was to always yell, “STAFF!” if I got in trouble. Thankfully, I survived my four-week stint there unscathed and quite intrigued by these patients.  Sure, some of them are pretty manic and psychotic (at the same time, an awesome combination) and others have quite scary histories of assaulting family and staff, but I grew to be fond of most of them. Except for my super antisocial patient for whom I always made sure to have staff present. And except for the manic guy (who wasn’t even my patient) who had an Asian fetish and managed to trap me in a room (thankfully, I was able to shut the door on him before he got in, but then I had no way out). This same guy then made friends with another psychotic patient who also had a thing for women (not just Asian, but all women) and they teamed up to harass me. But I wasn’t groped or assaulted, so I was happy.

But back to the article that brought me out of hiding. From the rest of the story, it seems that this particular psych hospital has a history of not treating patients so well. This latest incident seems to be a sad and extreme example of the type of behavior that can occur at psych hospitals. I was always amazed that fewer incidents are reported of things happening between patients because they’re all allowed to mingle with each other. You would think that putting a bunch of psychotic/manic/depressed/personality disordered people together would not be a good idea. But it seems to work. For the most part. Things do happen. Patients do get into it with each other. But it works remarkably well. And in the case of the hospital mentioned in this article, what happened to this patient was not a result of other patients, but of lack of concern from the staff.

Even though nothing even remotely close to what happened in the hospital mentioned in the article happened at the facility I was at, I can see how things can deteriorate to such a point. There are not enough staff members to provide the kind of attention these patients often need. Staff is spread quite thin and many of these patients are not exactly easy to work with. They take a lot out of a person. I was always happy to retreat back into the residents’ room after spending just 15 minutes or so out in the patient area. Staff members cannot retreat. They must be out there all of the time, dealing with these patients. They also have their share of difficult patients. And, unfortunately, their dealings with these few difficult patients color how they deal with everyone else. They have to stick to strict regimens, such as not giving patients snacks if they miss snack time so that patients will adhere to their snack schedules. I understand that. But at the same time, there are patients that come into the facility on legal holds who are not psychotic and who are pretty reasonable who just happen to miss snack time or need an extra snack. It breaks my heart when these patients go ask for a snack and get sternly turned down when they could have been denied more gently. That kind of treatment of these relatively reasonable patients causes them to feel that they are not being treated as fellow human beings, which then leads them to become irritated and possibly get into altercations with other patients, even though they are not normally violent people.

I do not blame these staff members for how they approach their patients. Of course, I’m not out there everyday dealing with all of these patients, so who am I to tell them how to do their jobs? But what I can say is that the system is not perfect. Our resources are spread thin and patient care suffers. Perhaps, if there were more staff members, they would not need to be so limiting to everyone just because of a few bad apples and would be able to get to know their patients well enough to decide which ones are reasonable and which are not in order to better customize how their care. Oh, if only we lived in a perfect world…

i am so going into radiology

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mylifemypace
2 months, 1 week ago
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After 1 week of psych consult, I learned that I do not, under any circumstance, want to go into Internal Medicine. How anyone can stand the smell of someone else’s diarrhea is completely beyond me. And I’m from psych consult! I probably had to smell it for, what, five minutes? Yeah, well, five minutes is far too long. I cannot imagine being on Medicine and actually having to do a physical on someone who stinks of poo. Let’s just say that I was actually glad I hadn’t eaten before seeing this patient because I would have surely vomited otherwise.

We get a lot of consult requests from the various Medicine teams in the hospital. So I’ve had the distinct pleasure of visiting many Medicine areas in the hospital. And they all have that distinct hospital smell that I have now grown quite sick of. Sometimes, this smell is intermingled with the distinct smell of poo. The people in these areas tend to be pretty sick with multiple problems. And MRSA. I guess I should be glad I’ve learned how to gown up for such situations. But, really, I just don’t like it.

At the end of my second week, I learned that I don’t like talking to patients. Or their family. Or anyone else, really. Sure, I already knew that, but I thought it would change when I started wards. That something inside of me would magically change and I all of a sudden wouldn’t be socially awkward anymore or hate talking with people. No such luck. There’s nothing like knowing nothing to really make you not want to open your mouth when speaking to patients. Patients who expect you to know everything.

By the end of my third week, I decided that I’m going into Radiology. Over the weekend, I debated whether it was really what I wanted because I never really liked what little Radiology I had been exposed to in my first two years of med school. And it’s also 4 years on top of an internship year. Plus I’d want to either do a Neuro or Interventional fellowship, which would add another 1-2 years, making it 6-7 years total, far too long a time for someone who has already wasted 4 years on a PhD that she’ll likely never use. So I had my doubts.

Then, yesterday, my attending insisted on watching me interview a patient. These kinds of situations are particularly painful for me because of my social awkwardness and nervousness when being watched by other people. Of course, I get a psychotic patient. Which I’ve never seen before. So I really concentrated on making sure I asked the right questions on the timecourse of his symptoms as well as things to rule out depression and mania and the like. And because I was being watched and didn’t want to waste the attending’s precious time, I directed the interview more than I usually do, sometimes cutting off the patient’s rambling answers to interject my own questions, but never too brazenly. I also took this approach because I’ve gotten quite a few delirious/talkative patients who would talk and talk and talk without making much sense, making for really long pointless interviews and I was kind of tired of it. Also, I was modeling the interview style of the other attending, who I’ve worked with more than this particular one, who keeps things nice and short. Well, at the end of it all, this attending called me an unempathetic information gatherer. Now that might sound painful to those who aren’t used to hearing themselves being described that way. But it didn’t surprise me at all. I actually wanted to respond by saying, “Tell me something I don’t already know” because I didn’t find that assessment particularly useful. I know that I suck at empathy. That’s because I suck at social interactions, period. Sometimes, I think I have Asperger’s. And the sad thing is that I was actually trying during this interview. Though not as much as with unwatched interviews because I always feel so fake doing such things and didn’t want the attending to call me out on it. Yeah, that plan worked out well.

So, that’s how I’ve come to decide that Radiology is for me after just 3.5 weeks on rotations. The only thing that might change my mind is Surgery. But I doubt it. And I’m sure my attendings will be glad to know that I won’t be spreading my unempatheticness wide and far.

one week down, 47 more to go

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mylifemypace
3 months ago
in medical school
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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
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mylifemypace
3 months, 1 week ago
in married life and medical school
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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

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mylifemypace
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in married life
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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

our prayers have been answered

Published
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mylifemypace
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in married life and sand people
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Or not. I’m ever the cynic, so although I’m hoping against hope that what I hear is true, I’m prepared for it to all be a sham. “So, stop stalling and give us the news already!” you say?

Well…

*drum roll*

Not-so-dear brother-in-law finally broke up with his super-psycho-super-fugly girlfriend!

Yep, your eyes are not deceiving you. Against all odds, it has finally happened. So why am I still so pessismistic about the whole thing? Well, for many reasons.

1. Not-so-dear brother-in-law claims they broke up in December. Yet we only hear about it now. Even though he got into a big fight with my husband over her and not-so-dear brother-in-law could have easily ended it by telling my husband that she was out of the picture. But since I have no idea when exactly they broke up, it could have very well happened after that fight (though not likely based on the double entendres that were coming out of sister-in-law’s mouth during another visit around Christmas). Now, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he broke up with her after the fight. Then why didn’t he tell my husband sometime before now knowing that it was mainly her being such a pervasive negative part of his life that led to the destruction of my husband’s and his once quite close relationship?

2. They are still living together. Not in the same room, but in the same condo, in rooms that are right next to each other. Not to mention that it took them breaking up before he finally admitted that they were living together even though it was more obvious than global warming. And we all know that continuing to see and talk to each other everyday doesn’t really constitute a break-up, does it?

3. They’re still doing stuff together. Albeit it seems that it’s because they have so many mutual friends since she didn’t allow him to make any friends of his own. But still, in that situation, I’d make new friends. Again, just like reason #2, doing stuff together after breaking up doesn’t really constitute a break-up.

4. She seems to still be pining away for him (thank you, Facebook). Which makes the fact that they still live together and do stuff together extra scary.

5. I really cannot believe that this crazy psycho bitch actually let him break up with her without forcing him to stay by threatening suicide or some other crazy thing. So, really, it could all just be a big fat lie.

I think I have some valid concerns here, don’t you? I believe that when you break up with a person, you should always cut all contact for a period of time so that both of you can process the break-up and move on before resuming a friendship if such a thing is so desired. Somehow magically flipping a switch between doing the nasty every night to being just mere friends doesn’t seem too realistic at all and is just asking for failure and more drama. Not to mention the fact that no new love interest is going to be willing to date you with your ex looming so close, which then makes you think you’re undesirable, leading you to fall back into the arms of your ex.

Despite all these reasons, I try to remain cautiously optimistic because not-so-dear brother-in-law’s bout with this batshit crazy girl has taken him down a notch…or five. Two summers ago when he was here with passive aggressive cousin-in-law, not-so-dear brother-in-law acted like he was the shit and that he was better than me (we all know that he’s not even close to being in the same league). But now, he’s actually having to take an extra year to finish school because he needs to raise his GPA to be competitive for optometry school and because he needs more time to study for the OAT. Seriously?  Not to be a total snob, but optometry school is nowhere near as competitive as med school and his GPA is too shitty even for that?! And we all remember how he claimed many times over that he needed to go back to school during summers and breaks early to study for the OAT, what, TWO years ago?! And after more than two years of “studying,” he still hasn’t taken the damn test?! Again, the OAT is nothing compared to the MCAT. I know plenty of people who sucked at the MCAT but aced the OAT. What does that tell you? Of couse, that super-fugly-super-psycho girlfriend totally dragged his ass down. The kicker here is she did just fine and is graduating on time and has gotten accepted to professional school. Gotta love that, right? Anyway, my point is that hopefully, if I am right, the reason he finally dumped her ass was because he finally, now that all of his peers are moving on and he’s not, has realized that she fucked him over badly and realizes that if he doesn’t want to become a complete loser, he has to get rid of her. If this is, in fact, his reasoning, then I have hope yet that he won’t end up back with her because there’s nothing this guy hates more than failure. That and the prospect of mother-in-law finding out her golden child is a failure must scare him more than anything. But do these things scare him enough to counteract all of the things he has going against him listed above?

What do you think? Will this break-up stick?

dear reader

Published
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mylifemypace
4 months ago
in lab/graduate school and medical school
. 3 Comments

I’ve noticed that there have been quite a few new user registrations on my blog as of late, but no new comments (which is pretty much what registration is for). To those of you who have registered lately and to my loyal readers, is there something more that you are looking for here? Would you like to better be able to interact with me and/or each other (e.g., a forum)? I’m open to mixing things up a bit, so feel free to leave me any suggestions or thoughts in the comments here or privately by sending me a message here.