My mom and I were watching The Help on DVD a couple nights ago. There's an especially touching moment when the main character's mother says, "I've never been more proud of you."
Mom, turning to me: "I've ... never been... PROUD of you!"
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
OMG! I'm back!
We'll see how long this lasts.
I haven't blogged in so very long. It's not that I don't have interesting things happening in my life. It's that most of the things I want to blog about, I don't feel comfortable blogging about. It's important to me to honor my patients' and coworkers' privacy, and I don't feel that de-identifying people when blogging about them is enough to protect them.
And so I don't blog about them.
What I need to do, though, is spend more time contemplating all the other things in my life. Mr.E (mystery!) and I have been married for OMG going on TWO YEARS and he makes me laugh like, all the time, and why don't I blog about that?? Or the movies we watched on our day off? Or the red lentil soup recipe I love so much?? Or the fact that I might have decided to become a pediatric intensivist? Did you know I want to be a pediatric intensivist??
And so, I'm back, and I'm pretty sure I have no audience left, but here we go: Hello, again.
Since my last post I put on like, 5 pounds, all in my midsection. Mystery and I are on yet another fitness kick. We're challenging each other, Biggest Loser style. To hold ourselves accountable, I'm going to record our progress here each week.
Monday, 1/30/12
I haven't blogged in so very long. It's not that I don't have interesting things happening in my life. It's that most of the things I want to blog about, I don't feel comfortable blogging about. It's important to me to honor my patients' and coworkers' privacy, and I don't feel that de-identifying people when blogging about them is enough to protect them.
And so I don't blog about them.
What I need to do, though, is spend more time contemplating all the other things in my life. Mr.E (mystery!) and I have been married for OMG going on TWO YEARS and he makes me laugh like, all the time, and why don't I blog about that?? Or the movies we watched on our day off? Or the red lentil soup recipe I love so much?? Or the fact that I might have decided to become a pediatric intensivist? Did you know I want to be a pediatric intensivist??
And so, I'm back, and I'm pretty sure I have no audience left, but here we go: Hello, again.
Since my last post I put on like, 5 pounds, all in my midsection. Mystery and I are on yet another fitness kick. We're challenging each other, Biggest Loser style. To hold ourselves accountable, I'm going to record our progress here each week.
Monday, 1/30/12
- Jess: 100% of starting weight
- Eric: 100% of starting weight
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Me, the Bear
Welcome back, me!!
I decided to start blogging again. I've been reading great doctor blogs and realized ... maybe I can do it, too! Maybe I can be introspective and witty and contemplative and interesting, all without sounding like a whiny little f*ck or compromising patient privacy!
So here we go!
-----------------
I have 2 months of intern year left, followed by over 3 weeks of VACATION (more on this later). This means I'm being propelled as fast as momentum can carry me, steeply inclined down, down, whoa-slow-down down! to the base of the other side of the VERY LARGE mountain called INTERN YEAR. Boy, what a slope! It feels great to be here, but I'm like the bear. You know, the bear. The one who climbed over the mountain, (who climbed over the mountain, the bear climbed over the mounta-in?)... to find another one in her way. Oi. Second year (and third, and whatever may come after), here we go.
It's a good thing I like hiking?
Especially since the end of my year is filled with the 2 hardest rotations. But one thing I've learned this year - or maybe I knew it already, maybe it was just reinforced - is that I actually don't like "easy" "boring" things. Which probably explains why, after all these months, I consider myself one of the happy ones. Of all the people I went to school with, of all the people I work with, I can honestly say it:
I can't imagine being happier doing anything else.
And isn't that what everyone's looking for?
I decided to start blogging again. I've been reading great doctor blogs and realized ... maybe I can do it, too! Maybe I can be introspective and witty and contemplative and interesting, all without sounding like a whiny little f*ck or compromising patient privacy!
So here we go!
-----------------
I have 2 months of intern year left, followed by over 3 weeks of VACATION (more on this later). This means I'm being propelled as fast as momentum can carry me, steeply inclined down, down, whoa-slow-down down! to the base of the other side of the VERY LARGE mountain called INTERN YEAR. Boy, what a slope! It feels great to be here, but I'm like the bear. You know, the bear. The one who climbed over the mountain, (who climbed over the mountain, the bear climbed over the mounta-in?)... to find another one in her way. Oi. Second year (and third, and whatever may come after), here we go.
It's a good thing I like hiking?
Especially since the end of my year is filled with the 2 hardest rotations. But one thing I've learned this year - or maybe I knew it already, maybe it was just reinforced - is that I actually don't like "easy" "boring" things. Which probably explains why, after all these months, I consider myself one of the happy ones. Of all the people I went to school with, of all the people I work with, I can honestly say it:
I can't imagine being happier doing anything else.
And isn't that what everyone's looking for?
Thursday, November 18, 2010
A Book List
Angie tagged me in this book list jobby on Facebook. I think it's pretty interesting that so many of the books are recent bestseller-type novels that aren't necessarily on their way to being classics, and also how many are simple childrens books. A lot of these are also on many high school summer reading/required reading lists, so it's surprising to me that most people will only have read 6... I've read 46, many more than once. It reminds me of the year I decided to read 52 books (I'm not sure how many I ended up reading, but it was definitely more than 30). It also makes me realize how much I miss reading, and how I should really try to pick up 4 more this year to get to 1/2 the list.
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (although I did listen to the entire audiobook)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (really?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in my opinion the single most overrated book ever. boooooringgg)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (loove that Ishiguro is on this list)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Angie I know I should be ashamed)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (I may have finished this but I can't remember what happens)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Dienophile
Eric & I have decided to shed our late summer/autumn weight and make a concerted effort at going to the gym on a regular basis. Yes, this happens every year. Yesterday we did our old leg workout and went out at night with legs o' Jell-O. Needless to say, this morning I awoke with maximal soreness and a complete inability to walk normally.
me, limping out the bedroom and finding Eric on the couch: I'm DYING.
Eric: I'm a dienophile. That means I love you.
:)
He makes me laugh with his punniness, and I think he's the greatest person to pick giant noses with.
The end.
Happy Sunday!
me, limping out the bedroom and finding Eric on the couch: I'm DYING.
Eric: I'm a dienophile. That means I love you.
:)
He makes me laugh with his punniness, and I think he's the greatest person to pick giant noses with. The end.
Happy Sunday!
Saturday, November 06, 2010
I'm Alive!
...just really, really sleepy!!!
Last month we, the intern class, got to go on a 3-day Intern Retreat near Gettysburg, PA. The senior residents covered all of our shifts as we listened to lectures on learning/teaching/being a resident. We also got to go on a ropes course and then climb a rock wall.
It was blissful - since we cover each others' shifts on days off, it's hard to spend time with multiple co-interns on any given day. And we literally never get to hang out as a class.
It's weird how you can work 70-80 hours a week for 4 months straight and feel like that's okay... and then get a teeny tiny little glimpse of normal life and suddenly become extraordinarily tired. For the following 2 weeks I took the last part of my Boards (the 2-day Step 3) and then worked 8 ER shifts without a weekend, and had some serious dread going into each and every shift.
But in 2 months I get my first vacation block of the year (I'm the last intern to get a vacation block!) - it's off on a Kim Family Cruise to the Caribbean! And going into 2 months of more normal hours (6a-6p as opposed to 5p-6a) I'm feeling a tiny surge of re-energy (re-energization?). Bring it on!
Happy end of Daylight Savings!!
Last month we, the intern class, got to go on a 3-day Intern Retreat near Gettysburg, PA. The senior residents covered all of our shifts as we listened to lectures on learning/teaching/being a resident. We also got to go on a ropes course and then climb a rock wall.
It was blissful - since we cover each others' shifts on days off, it's hard to spend time with multiple co-interns on any given day. And we literally never get to hang out as a class.
It's weird how you can work 70-80 hours a week for 4 months straight and feel like that's okay... and then get a teeny tiny little glimpse of normal life and suddenly become extraordinarily tired. For the following 2 weeks I took the last part of my Boards (the 2-day Step 3) and then worked 8 ER shifts without a weekend, and had some serious dread going into each and every shift.
But in 2 months I get my first vacation block of the year (I'm the last intern to get a vacation block!) - it's off on a Kim Family Cruise to the Caribbean! And going into 2 months of more normal hours (6a-6p as opposed to 5p-6a) I'm feeling a tiny surge of re-energy (re-energization?). Bring it on!
Happy end of Daylight Savings!!
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Babies!
I spend all day with babies. They're really cute at the newborn stage; they're so new they look like little old men, full of wrinkles, their faces in an innocent scowl. They spontaneously burst into wailing shrieks of displeasure, but are easily consoled and fall back to sleep again. Their poop doesn't smell. They make little gasping sounds while they drink their milk, and blow bubbles from their tiny lips before they spit up. Sometimes they move their fists (with their tightly-clenched teeny tiny fingers) into their mouths, and they'll contentedly suck on their little fists until they unknowingly pull their hand out of their mouth - and then they're shrieking in displeasure again.
When you pick up a crying baby and hold it close to you, bounce it around a bit, and sing it a song -- and it stops crying, it's like magic. Then it opens its eyes and looks at you, and blows some bubbles or reaches its tiny little hand toward you, and suddenly you're in love.
And then it screams again, and you're pleased as punch that this baby is not yours, it's someone else's, and you can go home to the quiet of a childless home (for now).
So many of my friends are starting to have kids, and while there's a part of me (the part whose ovaries twinge a bit every time I examine a new baby) who can't wait to be a babymama, it's just a tiny sliver in the piechart of my attitude towards impending motherhood.
The rest of this pie says: no thanks for now!
(In case you were wondering)
When you pick up a crying baby and hold it close to you, bounce it around a bit, and sing it a song -- and it stops crying, it's like magic. Then it opens its eyes and looks at you, and blows some bubbles or reaches its tiny little hand toward you, and suddenly you're in love.
And then it screams again, and you're pleased as punch that this baby is not yours, it's someone else's, and you can go home to the quiet of a childless home (for now).
So many of my friends are starting to have kids, and while there's a part of me (the part whose ovaries twinge a bit every time I examine a new baby) who can't wait to be a babymama, it's just a tiny sliver in the piechart of my attitude towards impending motherhood.
The rest of this pie says: no thanks for now!
(In case you were wondering)
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