my password is again my first and last name all lowercase and all one word. I password posts due to HIPPA laws. If you would like to read the posts and do not know my full name, e-mail me at wakeelf@yahoo.com.

Protected: the hopeless ones

My Stupid Oxen drowned fording the freaking river.

I often “played make believe” with my sisters or friends where we were explorers in uncharted waters or pioneers. Sleeping outside, cooking over a fire was fun. I thought it would be so neat to cross the country in a covered wagon to lands not fully mapped or charted. I naturally LOVED, LOVED, LOVED all the Oregon Trail games (and Amazon Trail and Yukon Trail, etc). My vision was somewhat like an extended family camping road trip. I spent hours at school and home playing those games. Remember when we would all giggle when we caught diphtheria or our ox fell in the river? Despite all our adventures at the end of the game we would could pull out and go back to very charted lives.

No matter how much charting I tried to do it seems my surgery rotation is a small series of not so comical disasters. They say it happens to everyone and it does but I can’t help but become steadily more aware (…yep I am getting ready to break one of my cardinal rules of life….)how much it sucks to try to figure how in goodness’ name to do this with no cartilage. There is no textbook I can buy that can tell me how to round with no sleep in a wheelchair, write, talk and think all at the same time at 5 AM in dark rooms stuffed with 7 tall able bodied people speaking in whispers that my not so superhuman ears can deciper and all the while remain incredibly enthusiastic. There is also no textbook that tells me how to cut right on the knot every time when half the time I can barely hold the scissors right. There is no book that tells me how to make the scrub nurses stop taking my stool to a place where I can get to it and stay sterile. Also written notes…OH MY GOSH, disaster. Haven’t had a handwritten assignment in 16 years, disaster (ALWAYS wrote everything on the com).

And of course its really hard to not hear all the echoes of all the people who think that disabled medical students are a bad idea. And I look at my average classmates and I nearly just give into the fact that I will never be able to compete. It all seems so effortless for them. While I sit there for the 11th time and try to cut a suture they get it on the 1st or 2nd try. While I run around to keep up on Rounds and get names confused as I try to roll and talk and write all at the same time. They stride so effortless from room to room with perfect handwriting and perfect memories unclouded by exertion . I can’t compete with their able bodies.

Pioneering is actually not half as romantic as it is in the movies or historical nostalgia. Its swollen feet, blistered hands, insecurity and endless mistakes.

Today after I had been released from my duties. I went upstairs to the room of a patient who came in with a abscess in the middle of the night that we drained this morning. It had been a crazy exprience for the kid. We had to do the procedure in the OR under conscious sedation because the mass was near her airway. The child had been sick when we rounded earlier in the day. So after another trauma and procedure I went back up and checked on the little one. I went to the nourishment room and got her ice. I think it was the only thing i did right the first time all day. (or the 11th time for that matter). Maybe all week.

stupid oxen.

I passed my Step 1 by a lot. In fact I did well.

yeah. Thank you Jesus. Thats about all there is to say about that.

Landing

About five hours after becoming an official third year I was standing in the OR  doing a bone marrow aspiration on a toddler. Terrfying, exciting and utterly forgien.

I feel exactly as felt when I stepped off the plane my first summer overseas. Confused, exhausted and somewhat helpless. Heck I have even switched time zones.   Its like I have been dropped on a alien planet.

I won’t say I like it or hate it because its just too soon to know. I know I don’t like the feeling of knowing nothing or feeling stupid.  But I can’t help but enthralled by the people as always.

The other sort of side show of all this is I am now a medical student in a hospital I worked in as a volunteer for 5.5 years.  In a way its neat to be living the dream where the dream was kept alive in another way its odd.

And then there is the odd personal commentary in the back of my head. I keep feeling as if I have been recast in a long running play. Pediatric surgery, a world I have navigated for first the 20 years of my life on a regular basis as a patient. So familiar yet so incredibly, perplexedly strange because I don’t know my lines at all. I am flying blind, improv-ing and making it up as I go along.  I keep looking into kids’ faces at 5AM and wanting to whisper I am not really one of them.  I am not really one of those worthless med students who wake you up at 5AM.

oh wait I am.