Bizarre

Another week gone. I can't believe I've finished nine weeks of this twelve week term already.

Somewhere in there spring happened and things bloomed and bees came to deal with it.

This week was two days of classes and two days of clinicals. I have a new patient to take care of, who does not speak English or Spanish, the two languages I have some small amount of competency in. This should be fun.

The seven other students in the group I'm in are all fairly good. There's one woman who makes me a little crazy, but she's not overtly unpleasant, just sort of generally, quietly unpleasant and it's easy enough to avoid her. The others are really hard-working and capable, which is a total dream come true.  There's no one that people resent because they are not doing their share of work. We are mostly independent during our work day though, as our clinical instructor chose not to pair us up (unlike other clinical instructors whose students work in pairs). It think that was a good decision. It means that we are forced to work on our own and to find and ask for help when we need it.

I am at the clinical site on Thursdays and Fridays/ We are technically supposed to start at 6:30, but I am always there a few minutes after 6 a.m. (I'm chronically early, no matter the situation.) And, given the length of my commute, being there at 6:00 means waking up at 4:00 a.m. Lucky me. Our group meets from about 6:20 until about 7:00 a.m. Then we go onto the floor and either start going through charts (the place still uses paper charting, which is insane) or start dealing with patients who are just starting to wake up.

We work until around 11:30 or 11:45, when we meet again and do a short debriefing before we leave.

I'm exhausted when we leave. It feels like a much longer day than it is. We'll eventually work up to 12 hour days (in a few semesters), but I'm glad to start with six hour days.

When I come home, I usually have some homework or online task I need to submit, so I work at that for awhile before I take a nap. (Getting up at 4 a.m. is for the birds.) Others in my group are starting to feel tired, too, and things are slipping; this week three people in my group missed submitting online assignments that had hard deadlines. Missing points at this stage is not a good idea. In some ways the program is pass/fail (we do get grades, but the gist of it is that we need a certain percentage to continue in the program, period) and we're coming down to the wire, so mistakes are costly.

I'm lucky that The Brain keeps track of these kinds of things fairly well, but I'm worn down enough that it's not hard to think that my turn may be coming.

One of the interesting things to me personally about my clinical group's dynamics is that we range in age from 22 to 49 and, at this stage, the people in their early 20s are as exhausted as those of us in our 40s are. In some ways, we in our 40s are holding up even better because we have some idea of where and how to conserve our strength and where our efforts are best spent. We don't run around wasting a lot of energy. Mostly that's because we don't have energy to waste, but however it works, it works.

One of the 22 year olds texted everyone this picture of how he studies while in the bath.

The other people in the group are interesting in other kinds of ways, too.

One of the women in her 30s has a 12-year-old daughter and recently reported to us that she had had The Talk with her daughter complete with visual aids from our textbook: photographs of patients with advanced cases of sexually transmitted diseases. (Those photos traumatize me, so I can't imagine how a 12-year-old would react.) She also showed her daughter a picture of a penis, saying, now if any boy asks you if you want to see his, you can say, no thanks, you've already seen one. Two days later, her daughter asked if she could get a crew cut. Then she basically shaved her head.  I told her, "You know you're raising a baby gay, right?" She said she and her husband have actually talked about that and it's fine with them.

I was telling Dave the story later and he said she'll probably become a gynecologist. Or maybe a nun. Either way, right?

HomeLife

In other news, Saba has now pulled out or nearly pulled out her feeding tube twice in the past couple of weeks. This morning she pulled it out completely and Dave put it back in. Then he took Saba to the vet and had it checked to make sure it was in the right place. The vet put a stitch in, too, to hold it in place.

She's continuing to get better, though. She's put on nearly a pound of weight, no easy task. Dave has been feeding her 6 times a day and she's looking less skeletal now, thank goodness.

In other pet news:

I've been sitting with this little pup and her brother for the last several weeks. This is her trick for trying to entice you to play fetch with her after dinner. She brings her bone over and balances it on your leg. Then she waits.

She and her brother are getting a bit chunky, so in addition to feeding them their modified diet, I  bought them mini MilkBone treats. When they say mini, they mean mini. That's one of the treats next to their usual kibble.

You practically need a pair of tweezers to hand these out!

I have a quiet day today. I have some homework to get done, then I'd like to sleep for a few more hours. I've not been sleeping at night and when I can't sleep, I've been watching episodes of "The Great British Baking Show" on Netflix. It's an oddly compelling show. It's a competitive cooking show like so many on American TV, but it's got that British twist of people being super polite and encouraging to each other rather than being back-stabby like Americans would be. Bizarre.