Changes

I'm one and a half weeks into my current rotation, and it seems to have had a pretty profound effect on my thought patterns.

Some thoughts I had today:

"Hmm, this reminds me of the conflict between Hegelian and Marxist dialectics."

"He's caught in a classic Batesonian double bind!"

Neither of those sentences would have meant anything to me two weeks ago. I bought a six-pack of beer on the way home.

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.