Psych

I've never considered myself claustrophobic before, but how else can I explain my recent dreams? Over the past couple of months, I've repeatedly had dreams about being uncomfortably squished into tight spaces.

The last one was about two weeks ago, and I remember parts of it very clearly. I was leaving my office; the door was tiny, just small enough for me to crawl through, with quite a bit of trouble squeezing myself through. The door led into an antechamber, a small room perhaps three feet by three feet, with a second door on the wall to my right, leading to a larger room. The second door was the same size as the first, and I had to work my way through that one, while my lower body was still in the first doorway. As I was worming my way to the second door, someone came to talk to me through the second doorway; they mentioned something about increased budgets, and I was happy because it meant that I could get a bigger doorway for my office.

I eventually made it out into the larger room, but the ceiling there was about six feet high, and I kept hitting my head on the metal light fixtures as I walked around doubled over.

I wonder if being in my obstetrics rotation for the past six weeks had anything to do with it.

Now I'm thinking about going into psych; I'm in the middle of a two-week elective in family therapy, and it's great.

Survival of the Fittest

Obstetrics is going well; of the surgical specialties, this is by far my favourite so far. Did I already say that?

I just survived a week with three 24 hour shifts in it, so I'm a bit tired. One of the things with long shifts, is that you end up eating a lot in the hospital cafeteria. Options there are... limited, to say the least. However, the result has been an improvement in my diet, I think, as I have been consuming vegetarian sushi almost exclusively. Getting home, I'm too tired to go get take-out, so I'm eating mostly yogurt, Ensure, and chocolate. Yes, chocolate, thanks to my total life disorganization.

Recently, I bought a big box of chocolates from Bernard Callebaut for the nurses in one of the units I'd been working in. Unfortunately, I never got around to going back to drop it off. So... I opened it up and started eating it myself. And man, it's good stuff, bringing a bit of joy into my life every night (every night I'm home, that is). I'm sitting here with the taste of chocolate in my mouth as I type this; it's not just a moment of pleasure that it brings, but it also evokes memories of previous times and places, involving chocolate from various sources, like Burdick's, Serenade, or the chocolate of my youth: Rottenhöfer.

Anyways, I'm sure that right now there's an accountant at the head office of Wendy's, who's staring at some balance sheets, and thinking: "What's gone wrong in Calgary?"

The Gates to the Garden

Okay, I've enjoyed a lot of medicine before, for various reasons, but I have to say that the biggest rush you can get in meds may be obstetrics. I have three 24-hour shifts this week, and finished the first one this a.m.; it was my first completely sleepless call shift.

And it was good. I felt like the opposite of St. Peter, standing outside the gates of the womb, receiving the sinless into life, and cradling them in my size nine hands as their cords were cut and they took in their first breaths.

Potterless

As everyone knows, today saw the release of the final Harry Potter book. I preordered from Amazon months and months ago. Well, today is the day... and they have yet to ship it, those jerks. They sent an email a while back saying that if you wanted it shipped on time, you'd have to pay extra. I'm pretty angry at Amazon right now... I wish I hadn't ordered $270 worth of textbooks from them last week; they haven't shipped those yet either, those jerks!

'Chapters' all the way from now on!!!

Anyways, so here I am without Harry Potter to read. I had the entire plot worked out in my mind, based on the final few chapters of the last book, and now I can't confirm my predictions.

To make up for this fiasco, I picked up some light reading at the local used book shop: 'A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis' by Sigmund Freud.

I was thinking this week that I have been mostly successful at eliminating all fun from my life. Almost all reading I do these days is textbooks. I don't have a TV; I gave up renting movies. However, I unfortunately still listen to music, and have a remaining hobby. I ordered up a bunch of Towa Tei and Haroumi Hosono CDs a few weeks ago (Motivation Five, Future Listening/Future Recall 3, Sound Museum, and Hosono House), along with a disk I was missing from Faye Wong (天空), and they arrived this week; I drove to the courier office today to pick them up. I'm enjoying GBI (German Bold Italic) right now. Augh! It's fun! Darn, must stop!

Anyways, I should really be studying obstetrics now. I need to know how to deliver babies by 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.

High contrast. It's cool!

Forwards to the Past

Yesterday, I spent six hours in labour and delivery. Now I know that I can cross obstetrics off of the list of potential specialties.

The (only!) problem was that I was the only male in the entire ward, for those six hours. Everybody was super-nice (to use the parlance of the region), but I just got the feeling that I wasn't supposed to be there. I realized that that was how women must have felt in medicine thirty years ago. Perhaps it was just my overactive self-consciousness, but I have to wonder if other males in my class had similar experiences.

Anyways, Rococo pointed out to me, that that is how the women in my class felt over in Africa. The docs were super-nice to them, but the paucity of female docs made them feel like intruders into a male world. Hmm, I recall that a big percentage of the residents there were female, though, close to 50-50; just the older docs were all male.