Wal-Bride…

I went to David’s Bridal today for the first time. I was to be fitted for my first real bridemaid’s dress. I walked in and found myself in a huge room filled with rows and rows and rows of dresses. I shivered in the air conditioning. One side was for bridemaids and the other side for brides. It was an overwhelming swarm of purples, blues, greens, blues, oranges and pinks in contrast to egg shells, cream and white. I was absolutely overwhelmed by the selection and by the sheer majesty of a sacrament/rite of passage/etc supersized and Americanized! stood there for a minute and waited to be directed to the blue light special on aisle 8. It took me 10 minutes to wade through the forest of dresses to find someone who worked there. I told her I needed to be fitted for a dress. She found the bride’s name in the computer and pulled a dress from the forest of a different shade but the same model as my dress. I tried not to think about the 1700 other size 6-8 girls who had worn this generic 100+ dollars worth of satin to be fitted. It reminded me distinctly of buying a car, I was test driving and then sending away for the right color. I was led to a changing room. It fit although it will need to be hemmed. I looked at myself in the giant mirrors up on a stool they use for altering and felt overdone, on display and well ridiculous . Is this beauty? Is this what I am supposed to want? Is this what every little girl dreams of? Walking into a store like this, pulling the magical white dress from the plastic hanger and then standing up here for everyone to see how beautiful she is?  This is one of the ultimate displays of love between two people?

10 minutes later and 150 dollars later I have a brown satin dress on order.

Where is the sacred in this strange form of marriage? In all the money we spend? In the party we throw? In the gifts we receive? There is celebration and love of course but where is mystery, the divine in all the fluff. What am I really doing…Am I assisting my friend by standing with her, affirming her commitment, her love? That I think I can do, the rest of it well I dont quite understand. I know very little of these things of love, of romance, of glamor, of marriage . But the glimpses of what I see I find disappointing.

I love my friend and I will do my best for her.

and so I enter into to this strange cultural ritual.

I am Here

I spend a lot of my life, more than I like to admit, right now wishing I could speed up or turn back time. I want optho to be over, I want my surgery rotation to end, I want medical school to move along so I can just do what I think I want to do with my life. Four months ago I just wanted to be done with class, then then the boards, then orientation. I day dream in a great deal of my precious free time, I dwaddle over pictures and blogs. I complain a lot. I am discontented and restless. I want the future or at least my vision of it or even the past sometimes wouldn’t be all bad. I would rather be where my sister is I say in college having a great time, working at camp for a summer. Or I would rather fast forward 10 years and be married with kids and doing child health work in some corner of the developing world. Any where but here, please God I find myself praying, Here Am I, send me…somewhere, please.

Today I tried to study for my surgery shelf which turned into a futile fight to focus on my textbook rather than the summer sunshine or my endless day dreams or journeys into nostalgia. I could barely sit still. I whined to myself about my inability to focus and then I whined about my whining. Then I had a thought in the mist of my whining. I found myself in the mist of the familiar near prayer of please send me somewhere and I found God whispering Here I Am, I am here. And I felt a great deal aware of the foolish, whimpy 6 old that I have been the last week or two.

Here is somewhere. and its the only time I will ever be here. Maybe its not my favorite place and maybe it never will be but its where I am. And its where God is because its where God wants me.

Big People

They are making me take care of BIG PEOPLE. GROWN UPS. ADULTS. I swear the first three patients who came I just didn’t know what to do with them. I just didn’t seem to know how to start a conversation with them. My usual bag of tricks of cartoons, books, sports teams and Hannah Montana was useless. I finally managed to have a half-hour conversation with a woman in the pre-op area about Budapest. And she thanked me profusely saying none of other “surgeons” in the past had ever offered any sort of distraction during the pre-op process. I then began to wonder if I was supposed to do such things with grown ups. No one seemed to care one way or the other. Sheesh I am terrible at all this professionalism and seriousness that goes into taking care of grown ups.

Today they let me take care of little folks’ eyes, it was a relief. Its not that I hate taking care of adults, I just don’t enjoy it.

culture shock…

We are waiting on a Spanish interrupter and I am sitting trying to look busy while my attending and an the anesthesiologist talk. I am trying not to eavesdrop but they are talking right above me and its hard not to hear. They are talking about private schools in the area. They go on and on about the various pros and cons of each and various other attendings’ children who attend school X, Y and Z. The conversation moves on to Aspen. I shift uncomfortably in my chair. I will never be that stereotypical, American physician who sends their kids to private school, goes skiing in Aspen and drives a SUV. Its ironic really, here I am a doctor’s child, a third generation physician no less and such conversations make me uncomfortable. Its not that any of these things are inherently wrong I just seem to have very different priorities than most of my peers and mentors. Maybe its the navybrat, maybe its the wandering in Eastern Europe, maybe its my crazy hippee Christanity but for better or for worse I find myself in many ways in an alien culture of affluence and prestige that I am supposed to be excited about but am somewhat wary of.

On my first day of optho, I find myself explaining my life plan to an attending. I want to be a general pediatrician I explain. He asks me if I know how much the average pediatrician makes. I said yes. He looks at me strangely, you are too smart for that job, do a fellowship, this is a good medical school use your education wisely. I smiled and brushed off the comment but again was struck by how different my conception of using my education wisely was from this respected physician. It wasn’t that his ideas were wrong or less worthy, it was just very different from mine.

doctors yet again such strange people, I have much to learn of their ways before I ever understand them.

the baby

I could tell a lot of tales from the last week of peds surgery. If you talked me recently, you probaly know I saw my first case of child abuse in America this week. I am not going to blog about it because of the sensitivity of the issue not even under password protected. I was surprised how hard it was for me. I seen so much gross neglect and abuse of children overseas. But most of it has been at the hands of the state and not at the hands of the child’s own parent. But it didn’t make me want to run from pediatrics, if anyting it motivated me. Little kids are so worth fighting for, there are few more just causes than protecting a child from harm and comforting them when they encounter it.

Today I was on rounds call. I went in and we were done by 7. I learned how to do an arterial blood gas and then found myself wandering the NICU. An idea came to my head. I presented myself to the nurses and asked if I could feed a baby. I explained that I had volunteered before I came to medical school. I spent 45 minutes holding a baby who happened to also be my patient. He had screamed all morning and his Mom never comes to see him. The nurse sent me to him when I asked to be put to work. I put on the gown and and sat in a rocking chair and watched the sun finish coming. I kept waiting for some doctor to walk in and send me off to do scut. But no one ever came and bothered us. I sang softly to him and stroked his little head and watched his eyes slowly droop When I left him in his crib, he was content and for the first time all day not crying. The nurses offered me a grateful glance. I nodded, grabbed my white coat and headed home.

There is more to these children than numbers and orders. My profession is really good at forgetting that.