Christmas in July

I'm working in a CCU across the street from a big church these days. The window was open the other day, and you could hear the carillon playing. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that they were playing Christmas music!

Perhaps under the subliminal influence of the church bells, I've found myself listening to Joni Mitchell, on repeat.

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

The other explanation is that maybe I want to skate away from this place.

Code Blue

"See, there's a big difference between mostly dead, and all dead. Now, mostly dead: he's slightly alive." -- Miracle Max, The Princess Bride

Apparently, Max had studied ACLS.

Carousel

Randomly, we came across the carousel. She bought a ticket immediately. Most of the riders were kids, but there were a few more like her. She found a horse, and got on. I found a park bench. The carousel started up, and began to spin, much faster than I expected. She put her arms out and arched her head back, like she was in a movie, riding into the wind on some southern beach. I looked at my watch; we were running late.

Even Rainbows are Poisoned with Damnation

When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

-- Rumi

I hate going to half-days. To explain: we get half a day a week off from work, to go for teaching. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching, but somehow, half-days just aren't what they're supposed to be. People spend half of the time going for coffee, or sitting around complaining about inappropriate consults. My half-day is Friday morning, and as I sit at half-day, inside I'm burning with the need to get back to patients. Every second spent listening to complaints makes me think about how my patients are losing out because of this waste of time.

I'm unhappy to be there. Meanwhile, everyone else calls it "protected time" (a phrase I hate, obviously) that is their right by contract to take off from work.

Incredibly to me, I finally found support for my position in the writings of Rumi:

The intellectual is always showing off;
the lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love is to drown in the sea.
Intellectuals plan their repose;
lovers are ashamed to rest.
-- Rumi

Waitin' for my Odometer to Roll Straight Sevens

Screw rehab, I love my addiction
No sleep, no sleep, I am always on a mission.
-- J. Dupri

I was the only car on the 278, the only car on the Triborough, as I drove into Manhattan at 1:45 in the morning. Who knew that was possible, to be alone on the road into NYC. I found a parking spot at the entrance to the Museum of Natural Sciences, and made my way along the west side of central park to my hotel. The city was abandoned.

Meds has absorbed me into its lifestyle. One night, I'm asleep by 8:30; the next, I'm waiting for the sunrise so I can leave work and head into town. This pattern has creeped into my vacations as well.

December

It's December again. Summer is long over; short days, long nights, and a reminder that we're all dying, and not that slowly. Haruki wrote:

The bloom of summer came home to me after all these years. The tidewater smell, the cry of distant steam whistles, the touch of girls' skin, the lemon scent of hair rinse, the evening breeze, fond hopes, summer dreams... Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.

Anyways, 10 p.m., and I'm off to work, trying to put the tracing paper back in place for one more night.

Snow

It's back, and I'm actually happy about it. My schedule for November looks great.

My luck is turning

I stopped for a post-call café con leche on Queen West. Not bad, but not Seville. Reaching the bottom of the cup, I felt something odd in my mouth, mixed in with the coffee grounds: a shard of glass. Great.

Returning to the car, I was greeted with a $30 parking ticket.

Smurf

Another 14-hour day, and I was walking home. My feet hurt, the tie around my neck a constant irritation. I was preoccupied, thinking about what it means to exist.

Two white guys stumbled out of a bar and into my path. They're in their early twenties, dressed as b-ballers, and drunk or high or both. "Can you spare some change?" one asked me. "Sorry, no." I tried to be nice.

"You FAKER! You and your... BLUE SHIRT!"

Seriously? Is this my life?

I walked into a street sign.

"HA HA! That's the funniest thing I've ever seen! Hey look! Look!" His friend was now vomiting into the flowers in front of Just Desserts.

"FAKER!" I heard in the distance, as I disappeared into the darkness.

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...