The Good Life

She asked, "Did you move back into your old apartment?"

My friend answered for me. "Yeah, he moved right back into the same rut he was in when he left."

I've told people before that I sometimes feel like I'm living in stasis. Now I find that it is true. I'm walking the same streets as before, going to the same restaurants as before. Often it's the same employees as before. Eight years have passed.

The only difference is that now my hair is a bit longer, my beard scragglier, and there are lines at the corners of my eyes. And I had a future back then. Now there's just the present. Is that the improvement?

Oh Happy Day

Medical school finished on Friday.

Yunus said:

I haven't come here to settle down;
I've come here to depart.

De Omnibus Dubitandum

The dream was beautiful. He was helping the poor, the repressed, the innocent. Justice: it was happening, he was working hard, he'd do it, he'd change the world. And, the million dollars, oh the million dollars every day, just out of reach, but he'd get it.

Now, cracks started to appear. He had trouble remembering his plans, his ideas, and the people he had told them to had not written them down. His own notes didn't make sense, he had so many ideas. If only they'd written them down, if only he'd had a secretary writing down everything he had said.

A profound sadness was settling into his soul. Now, how could he achieve his goals? He knew who to blame: that medical student. The student had stabbed him in the back, said that he was not thinking straight, that he was sick. He had told the committee not about his wonderful dream, but about his mistakes. He wasn't sick! Now, the student was experimenting on him with his drugs, just to play doctor. His dream, his dream was dying.

I'm Only Looking for My Hand in the Snow

I started my psych rotation last week, and in celebration I put Yoko Ono on repeat in my iTunes. There's a song of hers I love, because it's somewhat strange: Walking on Thin Ice. I've never met another person who liked it; generally, people think you're nuts if you like Ono, and maybe they're right. Anyways, I came across it recently in a listing of remixes, which was a surprise to say the least.

Yesterday, I looked it up in wikipedia. Apparently, the guitar in Walking on Thin Ice is the last musical recording of John Lennon, and when he was shot, he had the final mix of the song in his hands. Hmm. It also appears that a remix of Walking on Thin Ice hit number one on the US dance charts in 2003. Who knew?

Anyways, I'm tired of winter.

Matchless

The CaRMs process has more or less sucked for me. I applied to internal without having done any electives in it; when I did renal during my core rotations, I realized that internal was my future. Big mistake. A large percentage of the graduating medschool population applies to internal as a backup, and I disappeared in the flood of applications, just another student with 'Pass' as his grade.

Man, I wish we were ranked by grades in class...

Leonard had this to say, slightly edited to fit my situation:

I came so far for medschool
I left so much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned

I thought I'd be rewarded
For such a lonely choice
And surely she would answer
To such a hopeless voice

I practiced on my sainthood
I gave to one and all
But the rumours of my virtue
They moved her not at all

I got a grand total of one interview. Wednesday is the big day.

Time

The person who picked my name passed away just before Christmas. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October, while I was out in Drumheller. When I got back to Calgary for internal, the question was, would I take a few days off to see her while she was still healthy enough? Well, the choice was made to delay going until Christmas. I knew, of course, that that was risky.

She passed away 36 hours before I got there. She was looking forward to seeing me, but I didn't take a couple of days off to give her something to be happy about in her last hours.

I spent Christmas cleaning up her apartment. All the things that meant so much to her, now they were being sold off or given away. I found her old photos, back from when she was a medical student and then a resident. Life seemed full of promise back then; not everything worked out. I realized that a generation later, I live a life remarkably like hers.

I left the apartment for the last time. As a kid, that place felt like home to me. Now, there's no going back. Funny, eating at restaurants where my great grandfather liked to go 100 years ago, I wondered, will I one day say, "Your great-great grandfather liked to eat the lüngerl here"?

First Class!

I ended up getting upgraded to first class for the last part of my flight from London! Sounds great, eh? That was after first being moved up to business with those crazy bed-seat pods!

My secret to getting great upgrades? Fainting, endless vomiting, and plenty of diarrhea. Not pleasant, but very effective. Oh, unfortunately the first-class upgrade was only to the washroom...

I kept thinking that I'd love to be the medical student taking this history. Living it was not so good.

Hockey

He had walked the razor's edge between life and death, and he knew it; a dozen strangers had formed a human chain to reach into Hell and pull him back into the land of the living. As consciousness returned, he struggled to ask one question of the doctors hovering over him:

"Did the Flames win last night?"

The Carms Revolution

Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows. (Leonard)

I headed out through the snow this morning to meet up with friends. It was supposed to be just for breakfast, but conversation dragged on through dinnertime, with the snowfall coming down hard outside.

We spoke of carms, the residency match process here in Canada. Where to apply, how many programs, what to put in our applications; these are questions that have no answers. The act of asking is cathartic, though, and so these days we go through this process over and over.

Of course, if we are successful in our applications, then this safe little world we're living in, with its tight friendships, will be destroyed, and we will all head out to begin from scratch, again.

To all of my architects let me be traitor.
Now let me say, I myself gave the order
To sleep and to search and to destroy.

They Come in Threes

I've been thinking a lot about life and death recently. Sitting in my spider hole in D'heller, my networkless laptop powered on just to keep me warm, put these thoughts about existence into my mind. Was there more to life than perfecting my Zero Wing skills? What was the point of being a Puzzle Bobble god?

My good friends in LA had a baby two weeks ago now; I've been through a lot of births in the past few months, but I still get choked up by them. And, when it's the baby of such good friends, it's especially meaningful. My happiness about the event are, well, inexpressible.

While they were experiencing new life, though, I was forming a new and close relationship with death. A week ago, I answered a code; the poor person passed away, his head in my hands, my face perhaps the last he saw. Will I end up the same, I wondered, alone, a stranger saying goodbye to me as I leave this world?

I continued on my rounds, and ended up at another code, less than twenty minutes later. This time, I had just begun to bag when she revived. The code team arrived, and I left. Is she still around a week later, I don't know.

They come in threes, I was told. And so, the wait for number three began. It happened on Thursday, at the end of a long day. This one turned out well, and everyone there was happy and relieved. Grandma was okay, and the family intact.

So, now that I am in nephro/internal, I find myself with a job opposite to that I had in my obs/gyne rotation. Death is all around, and it's our job to make sure that it doesn't come too early. This is why I'm here...

As Leonard said:

We've been around, we fall, we fly
We mostly fall, we mostly run
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we've done

Back to Life

Last Thursday, I emerged from my spider hole, and returned to so-called civilization, looking much like Saddam. I haven't quite recovered, though. A classmate asked me yesterday why I was walking around stooped over; the contractures will take some time to stretch away.

We had Thanksgiving on Monday up here, which resulted in a nice dinner at a classmate's place. I started nephrology the next day. It's fun so far; maybe I should go into nephro...

800

Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy Rumi's 800th birthday. Hmm, a trip from Balkh to Konya could be fun.

The BBC had an article on his birthday here.

From the Masnavi:

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Claustrophobia Update

In this world of irony, it is only fitting that I posted about my odd claustrophobic dreams a couple of posts ago. Now, I'm living the dream.

For my placement in the badlands, the school assigned me a room in a basement. Where do those dreams come in? The bathroom: the ceiling is about 6'1", which means that I can't stand up straight. Shaving isn't easy, walking around has to be done doubled over...

But, that's the good part. The shower, well, is about 6'2" tall, and about 2' by 2'. In other words, it would make a cozy coffin for someone 6" shorter than me. The shower head is located a bit below my shoulder height. I can fit in there if I fold myself up a bit like an accordion bellows. To top it off, the shower head pops off once it heats up, giving me a fixed time limit for shower length... showering is a form of comical torture.

No internet access at home either; I have to go to the hospital to (slowly) check my email... and facebook is blocked. I feel like I've been buried in Kill Bill: Volume 2...

Bones

My rotation in therapy is done, so I've left behind the hermeneutic circles I'd weaved myself into, and I'm moving on to family medicine. I have a rural placement, in a town famous for its dinosaur bones; it's in what is called the badlands of Alberta. I may not have net access there... not sure how I'll cope with that. If that's the case, I guess I'll be doing a lot of studying and reading, and perhaps a lot of running as well. I'll have to pack my Nietzsche and Freud books... I almost bought a couple of Dostoyevski books on Saturday, but held off...

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.

Ahem

Another weekend without call. The result: nothing. The highlight of the weekend was listening to 'Cough Piece' by Yoko Ono, all the way through, and contemplating its meaning to the artist and its meaning to me.

I tried to get a haircut, but failed. Didn't have a reservation...

Yoko's thought for the day:

Kyoko, don't worry
Don't worry, Kyoko
Mum's only looking for
Her hand in the snow

Which kind of makes you worry about Mum.

Leonard's thought for the day:

Four o'clock and the fog comes in
We all remember the sea
For several seconds our sins are forgiven
Mine against you, yours against me

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!