Dave has been away visiting with his family since Sunday but he comes home tonight. Thank goodness.
I had two exams this week. I got an A on one (that I wasn't expecting to pass, so I was surprised) and a C on the other. I didn't study for either one, just rolled the dice. I'm tired and unmotivated.
Today in clinicals, I dealt with a lot of blood. It was...disturbing. It was the first day I've been at this hospital where I felt like I needed to come home and leave my clothes on the patio and scrub myself clean. Awful.
I've been keeping a list of things that I meant to write about clinicals but haven't. For example, I forgot to write about the guy that they found dead in his car (suicide? heart attack?) out in the hospital parking lot. That happened a few weeks ago. I forgot to write about the patient who called in a bomb threat ("I heard ticking") that put the hospital on lockdown. That was the week after dead guy. I forgot to write about my instructor asking if I were Hispanic or if I had taken Dave's Hispanic name. That was almost a month ago.
Seriously.
That last one is something that I've been dealing with all my adult life, starting when I was about 16 and got a job waitressing. People would ask my last name and when I told them, they'd say something like, "You seem awfully young to be married." It took me awhile to realize that they thought I was a white girl married to a brown guy.
Today on my way home from the hospital, I stopped for a giant fizzy drink and tater tots on the way home from the hospital.
In the morning, I don't have to go to the hospital. I do have to go to the distant campus and probably do CPR on a mannequin. I'm not bitter, much.
I'm feeling this comment, left by someone on an article about racial stereotypes in medical textbooks:
Going
to the doctor as a woman/minority has always been an exercise in
humiliation. There is nothing like being told that the reason that you
took time off work and trekked across Manhattan in the snow is all in
your head. My last attempt at a PCP was so plainly on the spectrum that
I decided to have a frank talk with him about the difference between
telling someone that their concerns do not merit care and explaining
that there weren't sufficient symptoms for insurance to pay for the test
that I was requesting (which of course was after taking ten minutes to
interrogate the man about his rationale in the first place).
Eventually, I expect a doctor to just whip out a prescription pad and
write: 'patient presents as being
female/minority/overweight/foreign/old...recommend dying slowly, alone
and in a great deal of pain.'
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