Funny story of the week

I had a 73 year old patient yesterday, and he told me, "You're a doll...you know, if I was 20 years younger, I'd sweep you off your feet." To which I thought---not likely, because at 53 you'd still be older than my DAD! But I had to grin, because it was kind of cute. The same patient went on to tell me, "I am putting together a show to raise money for the Para-Olympics, and I'll teach you a sexy hip-hop dance so you can be in my show!" Right. What do you say to that, so as to not burst out laughing right there? I just smiled, thanked him and went on my way.

Psych

Psychiatry is keeping me busy, but its a different sort of busy. I still havent mastered being in more than one place at a time---really must figure that out before becoming a resident. My preceptor is giving me lots of assignments---read about this tonight, assess this patient sometime between morning rounds (which take all morning), noon teaching rounds, and afternoon clinic time, and I am busy preparing to present at journal club next wednesday. Have I mentioned I have never even BEEN to a journal club before, let alone do one before, so I really dont know what is expected of me. So I spent two and a half hours this evening reading papers, researching the background info on the internet etc, followed by a chunk of time devoted to reading about benzo withdrawal. I cant complain really though, because I am learning. I just sometimes forget how tiring it is to be on the very steep part of the learning curve---welcome to the next 16 months of my life!

The trouble with psych though, is if I am not the one doing the interview with the patient, in the office that is a thousand degrees, it can very quickly become me being very drowsy, as I sit motionless for hours at a time, observing someone else conduct the interview. Man I hope I get to do more of the interviewing as the weeks go on, or I am going to be fighting the sandman every single afternoon in clinic.

Other than that, life is good, and largely uneventful. Tin is staying with me while she christens her first elective block doing O&G in Regina. I think she's crazy for wanting to do O&G for a living, but different strokes for different folks. Its enjoyable to have her here in my appartment, it makes the days go by more quickly. We had a little dinner party one night this week, and wound up feeding a total of five hungry JURSIs. Grand fun.

Rotation #2

This week marks the beginning of my second rotation: Psychiatry. In doing so I have realized the following:

1) I actually passed O&G relatively unscathed, and I obviously didnt really tick anybody off. Phew.
2) I am so excited to NOT go to the OR! I am in a humane rotation where I get to where nice clothes everyday, round at 8:30 in the morning, go home by 4:30 or 5 at the latest, we see about one patient per half hour, and when I am on call I can sleep in my own bed! (Psychiatry and Family Med are the only two services where you dont have to stay overnight at the hospital when you are on call).
3)Psychiatrists are inherantly nice people.
4) I like having a preceptor who wants to teach me things.

Yay for not being on O&G!

Lively tales

It just wouldnt really be my life if crazy stories didnt happen.

Ray and I were over at Eddie and Mark's appartment studying on Thursday evening, as we both had our Obstetrics and Gynecology exam the next day. We were diligently going through the material, when a loud, piercing alarm went off---yes the fire alarm. The other lovely pieces of the story: it was -40 degrees outside that night, and we were on the sixteenth floor. ARG. We waited for a few minutes to see if it was a false alarm, but then decided we'd rather not risk dying of smoke inhalation on the 16th floor, so we gathered up our textbooks and coats and tromped down the 16 flights of stairs to the lobby. Its scary how few people actually left their appartments--had there been a real fire it would have been very bad news. So there we waited in the lobby for half an hour until the alarm turned off. The good news is I still managed to pass my exam the next day!


The other humorous tale of the week is from this weekend. I went home for my sister's 19th birthday, and going home is always an adventure. We had the usual crew over for supper---grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, close family friends, etc. Well it turns out that my aunt convinced my uncle to dye his hair a few weeks ago, and when my other 'uncle' saw this, he decided to get his hair dyed. So we went out, bought a box of hair dye, and he got his hair dyed in my parents kitchen! It was SO FUNNY! Mostly because this uncle is a total man's man, and NOBODY ever expected him to color his gray hair---his daughters had been trying to convince him for years to no avail. Then at the drop of a hat, on a whim, in our kitchen, he gets his hair dyed. Hilarious. And it turned out really well, didnt look fake, very believable, and it took 10 years off his appearance. Definitely made for a lively evening!

A wall plaque hanging in the Women's Clinic at the Regina General Hospital:

"We believe what we want to believe".


That about sums it up doesnt it.

Lessons from a children's story

" Real isnt how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "Its a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you dont mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
" It doesnt happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesnt often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things dont matter at all, because you are Real you cant be ugly, except to people who dont understand."
~The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams.

Living to the Full

Here are a few highlights from my few days off in January/February in the Queen city....

Tim and Erin hosted the Regina CMDS contingent for supper and Bible Study at Tim's mom's house. I am so at home with this crew, even in a city that is foreign to me.








My real-life version of Seinfeld, minus all the sexually charged humor of course....









Science Center Adventures with Camille, Eddie and I....SO MUCH FUN!!! Watch out for the sharks...they are deadly.










Camille is totally Bubbalicious....










Vancouver 2010 here we come!





What Saskatchewan girl doesnt swoon over hockey players?







Perogie making night with the girls from Hillsdale Baptist---good times, going back to the Ukrainian roots....







Erin and I---what a doll. Love this girl SO MUCH!!!

Unwelcome Messanger

I had to tell a woman that she had lost her baby tonight. It was my first time having to give really bad news. There is no good way to do that--but I suppose there are a multitude of BAD ways to do that. The gravity of the moment hit me very suddenly, almost as though it had snuck up on me, as I realized I wasnt just working up her vaginal hemorrhage, and that we had to take her to the OR to save her life, but that I also had to tell her she had lost her baby. I felt like utter crap as I left that room, having broken the bad news, and that is an understatement. I know that me telling her didnt cause the situation, I was just having to inform her what the situation really was. Ugly situation. The good news out of the situation is that we did operate, and we did save her life so that she didnt bleed to death, and we did transfuse her blood so she didnt get worse.

These are the moments when the raw humanity of medicine is blatant and in my face, refusing to be ignored.

Weekend Whirlwind

Its amazing how a visit to the place that feels the most like my adulthood home, seemed to be a swirling whirlwind. It simply was not possible to visit everyone I wanted to see--there were not enough usable hours in the weekend. To everyone I didnt get a chance to see, I am very sorry, please know it was not for lack of desire to be in your company.

That said, I did enjoy myself tremendously. I stayed at Kelly and Sarah's--and after everytime I visit them, I leave with my soul refreshed, and not surprisingly, this time was no different. The boys clamoured all over me in greeting and play, Charis cooed and smiled and was delightful, Sarah was hilarious and also encouraging, Kelly dazzled us all with his wit, and the three of us engaged in a series of thought provoking discussions around issues we have all been considering. They also hosted having some of my favorite Kadesh-ites over for visiting, and we all roared with laughter on Saturday evening, rejoicing in fellowship, and sharing each other's stories that we had been sorely out of date on.

The OSCE (a practical clinical exam, although I use the word practical loosely), on Saturday was an event. I learned somethings, but that was really superfluous. It was wonderful to see the faces of my classmates that we have left behind in Saskatoon. Seeing them is more familiar, more comfortable than almost anything else in the world. I know their faces almost better than I know my own, as they are who I have seen every single day as I looked outward on the world for the past two and a half years. It is a comraderie that runs deep within our class, and I hope that even if this fades with time that it never dies.

I received another injection of wisdom paired with encouragement from the Terry and Sheila this weekend, who graciously found time to spend with this tired, weary medical student. I said to them, "I dont know why, but I am just so tired lately," to which Terry replied, "You know why, and get used to it, this is what the next ten years of your life are going to be like! It will get better when you have children". He was serious and teasing me, all at the same time, as per usual, and as always, they gave me sage advice on several issues that I am wrestling with.

The other great part of the weekend was the potluck hosted by the lovely Camille. What a girl. Addicted to fun she is. Camille also spent Wednesday and Thursday night with me in Regina, and wow did we have adventures. A little incident with my outside door on Wednesday night, that precipitated Camille having to stay in the call rooms at the hospital with me that night as I was on call, along with returning to my house the next day to find my door knob removed. Yah, just a day in the life of mine, but Camille got the joy of experiencing my stranger that fiction life first hand. We also went to a girls only perogie making night at the Young Adults pastors house here in Regina while she was here. Grand fun. Let me also give an official thank-you to Camille who filled my fridge and freezer with homemade food that she whipped up while I was at work on Friday. What a woman of Grace who knows how to bless people. And so of course, the potluck at her place in Saskatoon on Sunday was fantastic. Sadly I had to leave earlier than I would have liked, but again this is life.

What is this thing called love?

I thought this was really great...

enjoy, ponder, reflect--and love.

What is this thing called love?

Jan 31, 2006
by Maggie Gallagher

...there's the experience of being on the receiving end: "I saw you there, one wonderful day. You took my heart and threw it away. That's why I ask the Lord in heaven above, what is this thing called love?" Sing it, Cole.

I knew Pope Benedict was a brilliant intellect, a German academic theologian of some note. But nobody told me the man has the soul of a poet. This pope writes of our longing for the "apparently irresistible promise of happiness" glimpsed in the love "between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings."

"All other kinds of love," Pope Benedict acknowledges, "immediately seem to fade in comparison."

How can we trust ourselves to love? How can love ever be commanded (as Jesus commands us) or even promised (as we all do in marriage)?

The classic Catholic answer is to say that love is an act of the will. We can choose to act in loving, faithful and benevolent ways even if we do not particularly feel like it. In this sense, love can be both commanded and promised.

But that is not enough for this pope, because it is not enough for the human heart. Nobody wants to be loved as an act of the will. Yet the promise of eros is notoriously unreliable. One currently popular solution is to downgrade our expectations, to pretend that our sexual desire is merely bodily appetites, "enjoyable and harmless." "An intoxicated and undisciplined eros" is not ecstasy; it is instead "a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified." Evidently.

Yet selfless love is not possible for human beings. "He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift."

Pope Benedict is a poet because he can name the deepest longing of our soul. He's a prophet because he writes like a man who knows the answer: "God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation -- the Logos, primordial reason -- is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love."

We can love because we are first loved. Love is the cause of our being.

Knowing that, the pope tells us (convincingly, like a man who knows) we can still believe in hope, faith and charity.

But the greatest of these is love.

This article is from TownHall.com columns. Link to the orginal article at:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/maggiegallagher/2006/01/31/184660.html