do you have any pumpkin?

ps, it's highly possible that this is a you-had-to-be-there story...

friday night after the ray-pec high school homecoming football game, i went to get frozen custard with the family i'm living with because we had buy one, get one free coupons. we're all standing around, staring at the menu, deciding on our individual orders and it's mary's and my turn... we had made the decision and were ready to order...

but when we got up there, she saw a sign that said "pumpkin spice latte"... and decided she'd like to have pumpkin in her concrete (like a blizzard from DQ, but about 47 times better...). except pumpkin isn't listed on the list of things you can get in your concrete, so i explained to her that it's a seasonal thing, so obviously it wouldn't be on the menu that lives there all year...

so we go back up to the window, and i ask the girl, "do you have any pumpkin something that you can put into a concrete..." she kind of stares at me and then points at a LARGE sign hanging directly above her head that reads "pumpkin pie concrete"... yeah, so mary gets excited and orders it. and loves it, i might add.

as we're driving out, one of the kids says "pumpkin pie concrete"... at which point we all look over and on the HUGE sign for the custard place it says in gigantic wording (that we can probably read from our front door...) "PUMPKIN PIE CONCRETE!"

we almost died laughing. i can't remember the last time i laughed so hard. mostly because we're big dorks... but oh man... the ridiculousness with which i asked the question just keeps magnifying itself...

rad.

radiology is pretty boring. make that very boring. it would probably be ok if i were actually reading films with a doctor. but instead i hang out with the techs while they are shooting the films (or ultrasounds, or ct scans, etc)... and it's boring. very boring.

******

i officially have two. count them TWO invitations to interview for residency positions. i anticipate a few more (maybe 5 or 6; i applied to 10 programs)... but i just submitted my application on friday, so we're looking good so far! currently, i'll be interviewing in des moines and omaha. i applied only to midwest programs... so i'll stay semi-close no matter what. (at least that's the plan as it stands for now...)

******

in order to keep myself from puking from nerves about interview invitations, i bought these.

$1.99

guess what that bought me today!!

ears. noses. throats.

aka ENT. sometimes it's fun to see how many acronyms you can get into a sentence. it's like a language within a language.

what a great weekend! i saw a lot of my family on saturday, and had lunch with my best friend from high school today (haven't seen her in 3 years) (and ps, she has a cute cute baby girl who is 4 months old. and cute!).

i have to be in the OR at 730 tomorrow. yuck. one more week of ENT, then two weeks of radiology. good times, huh? we shall see.

i know this isn't the post you've been pining for... but i'm tired. good night.

to keep you busy.

eewww.

decovin totally peed on me after we came inside from our walk this evening. gross.

it's good to be home.

can i just say that decovin is the happiest baby i know. he's so sweet and good and playful.

******

friday, i went to see my friend sarah in omaha (her hometown) where she is doing a rotation. we babysat all night. well, until like 1:30am anyway. but apparently a baby was recently killed by it's sitter and so her aunt, who is notoriously hyper-vigilant anyway, was flipping out. and sarah, who cannot say no because she is catholic (which is a guilt far greater than camden-guilt), said we would come babysit. it was fine, i guess. i'm not sure what we would have done anyway. but when we got back to sarah's we were hyped up a little, and decided to go for a quick swim. it was pretty chilly out. chilly enough such that the temperature of the air made the temperature of the water feel warm. kind of. it was freezing. we stayed in maybe 3 or 4 minutes. but at least we had some excitement!

i left there saturday morning and drove the rest of the way home. i spent the rest of the evening unloading my car and filtering through things. somehow, i collect a lot of things. but hopefully, i've pared down to just a few suitcases to get me by the next few months (while i'm living with friends in the city).

sunday was pretty fun. church was great and it was wonderful to see so many old friends. one of my teen girls came up to me and said she was desperate to talk to me, so i took her to lunch and heard all about the woes of teen love and the drama that goes with it. she's a good kid though, and it was fun to spend a little time with her.

sunday night, mom and i went to see the devil wears prada, which was pretty cute.

monday, we came to jen's. where i am now. getting ready for sleeping. because it's late!! we had a nice pesto salmon dinner with vegetables, went for a walk, and played darts. and did i mention i snuggled that baby a LOT?

all in all, it was a very nice holiday weekend. and i don't have to work this week. so it's won.der.ful. i could get used to this!

i'm movin' on.

woowhee. i've lived in davenport for 6 months now. that's kind of a long time. long enough to get acclimated to your living space. long enough to learn the best route to the best mall. long enough to pick out a favorite coffee shop. the weird thing is, it's not long enough to make this place home. or perhaps it was my mindset from the beginning. when you know things are temporary, you never think of them as permanent. you start the countdown from the start, and when the countdown is up, you pack up your little ford focus and hit the road. and it doesn't even matter if your name is jack. today's the day. i loaded up the car last night (to the brim, mind you) and will take off in a few hours. i'm going home.

it was surprising, i didn't even cry when i said goodbye to the friends i'd made here. and i would consider them to be good friends... and i cry easily... and it's hard to know when we'll see eachother again... and all those things combined, i expected to cry. but maybe knowing from the start that all this was temporary somehow shielded me... that and the fact that i'm really ready to leave. because i'm going home!

so i have a couple of errands to run today, and tonight i'm going to visit a friend in omaha. but tomorrow? tomorrow, i'm going home.

ps. i'm excited!

9 months.

sweet!

just like grey's anatomy.

this week i started an anesthesia rotation. i'll finish it up next week. 2 week rotations are great.

this doctor thinks i actually am an anesthesiologist. he stays in the room long enough to start the case and then leaves me to play with the gases and keep the patient still. and breathing. yikes.

******

here's my new haircut. i love it. love.

******

my roommate and i went to see the world trade center movie tonight. depressing. good. but depressing.

******

so i've had a headache for the past 4 days and today the doctor noticed. so he took me into an exam room in the pain clinic (where we worked this afternoon - but i hadn't met any of the nurses there yet...) and cracked my neck, then gave me a shot of toradol (cousin of ibuprofen, but much, much better), then turned out the lights and told me to take a nap.

a few minutes later, i hear a nurse outside talking about how she thinks there's someone in room 5. she opens the door and asks if she can help me. i explain to her who i am and she leaves the room. i hear her a few minutes later explaining to another nurse that "there's a med student sleeping in there. it's just like grey's anatomy!"

boards.

so totally over. for a couple years anyway.

boards.

tomorrow. eek.

quite a cluster.

so, i've been up for 2 hours now. left my house at about 8... drove around for about an hour and ended up back at my house. see, first the road to the coffee shop that we study at was blocked. so i thought i'd try one of the other roads... and then another and then another. then i thought i'd stop and ask one of the cops that was blocking the way except he screamed at me to keep going (which made me even madder because he was young and cute)... then karen (my roommate who left 45 minutes after i did) asked a lady who was helping direct traffic and found out that there was a gas leak or something. so then we decide to go to panera. except panera was BUSY. and karen doesn't deal with lots of noise well when she's studying. so we made the decision to just get coffee and then come back home to study. so here i am. if i fail boards, i'm totally blaming the cop who screamed at me.

who'd've.

as in, "who would have"... can you have a word with 2 contractions in it?

i can stop studying now.

proverbs 17:22 "a cheerful heart is good medicine"

it's official.

i'm a 4th year!

can't sleep.

insomnia? too much coffee? too much excitement over the end of internal medicine? could be all three.

little old ladies say the darndest things.

little old lady #1 who had some double vision and stumbling yesterday at the fair:

little old lady: "we had a couple beers..."
a little later: "2 or 3 beers..."
later still: "3 or 4 beers... i probably had 4 beers."

******

little old lady #2 who had lost her license after an accident that was not her fault because the cop wrote the word "confused" in his report. we had to do a mental status exam to determine if she was, in fact, too confused to drive:

dr king: "starting with the number 100, count backwards by sevens."
little old lady: "oh, but i've never been very good at history!"

studying.

or should i say "studying"... because i've been here at my most favorite coffee shop in the quad city area for an hour and a half and have yet to crack a book or answer a single online practice question. but that's about to end. right after i finished this update. because i know how important the updating is to my friends and family. :-)

******

the awfully slow doctor complimented my progress note writing ability today. it made me slightly less disgusted with his slowness today. that and it's thursday and i have thursday afternoon off. and who doesn't love an afternoon off??

******

my favorite barista, lizz, asked me about why the honey jar says not to give honey to babies earlier. so i guess that's kind of like studying. because i totally knew... don't want no floppy babies! (for those who might not know, honey can have botulism spores in it which create the same toxin used for botox injections, which, if ingested by babies leads to floppy baby syndrome. and floppy babies are bad, just so you know.)

******

i just got off the phone with my good friend sarah. i miss her. she's almost done with her year of rotations in detroit. she's sick of school too. i'm going to see her the first weekend of september and that will be fun! this is another of the pictures she just sent me from my time in detroit. those were good times.

******

17 days until boards. 9 months 3 weeks 3 days until GRADUATION!!!

he ate the whole thing.

mark in detroit

******

i'm almost done with my 2nd week of internal medicine. which i LOATHE. it's terrbile. the first problem is that half our patients are old. we're talking how-on-earth-have-you-lived-this-long old. they can't hear and they don't bathe regularly. the other half have a list of medical problems longer than life itself. they're crabby and non-compliant. and some of them don't bathe regularly either.

the second problem is that the doctor i'm with is slow. i don't mean short-bus slow. just flat out slow. he speaks so slowly and deliberately that i think occasionally, i doze off between words. it's bad.

the third problem, which really doesn't bother me until i think about how much i'm paying for this month of my education, is that i don't see any of the office patients on my own. i only get to see patients on my own if they are in the hospital (of which we've had three the past two weeks...) and otherwise i just follow him around all day. horrible!

******

the other day we had a patient named earl. earl had the hairiest ears i'd ever seen. i couldn't stop staring.

******

i spent the majority of this afternoon contemplating whether or not it was acceptable to meet a guy in the laundromat. on one hand, he's at the laundromat, which means he probably doesn't live with his parents (because he's at the laundromat) and he probably doesn't have a serious girlfriend (who'd do his laundry for him... or at least with him). but on the other hand, it's the laundromat. and there are some pretty different sorts of people at the laundromat. what's your opinion? (just for the record, he was really cute, and clean as far as i could tell.)