New Year 2009
The holidays felt like a blur this year, as I spent most of it at the hospital for holiday coverage. In fact, I must've over-exerted myself and caught some viral bug last week. Between my intermittent coughs, Melody and I rang in the new year with our sore throats and hoarse voices as we squeaked "Happy New Year!". With the snowstorm and both of us being sick, we ended up spending much of our time indoors. This also gave us some time to revisit the post-apocalyptic ruins of Washington D.C. in Fallout 3. The game is very reminiscent of our favorite role-playing fantasy game Oblivion, but with guns. With this new generation of video games demanding more and more processor juice, though, I ended up overclocking my 2-year-old processor. So far, I've got my 2.4Ghz Athlon X2 running at 2.75Ghz using an 11x multiplier with minimal voltage increase. My hope is to get it up to 3Ghz with a little more tweaking. I'll just have to be careful not to push it too far, as I often end up doing to myself.
Another Step Forward
It's Christmas Eve 2008, and I'm spending it on the 10th floor of the Shapiro Center watching over two floors of cardiology patients while looking out at the quiet blanket of snow over Jamaica Plains. It's not how I would normally envision spending Christmas Eve. But after an entire month of juggling clinical duties in the day with studying for Step III at night, it was a relief that the exam is finally over. The USMLE Step III occurs over two days. Mine took place within the confines of a drab office building just 5 minutes from my apartment. Much of it felt more like a reading test, as each question tries to throw you off with paragraphs of unnecessary information and extraneous red herrings. Sadly, I had little time to celebrate after it was over, as I was back at the hospital for holiday coverage the very next morning. But even as I sit in my call room, answering the string of pages, I feel a sense of relief as I take on my role as a normal intern again.
Black Friday
Despite having 5-days off for Thanksgiving this year, we had little time to enjoy ourselves with Melody's oral boards and my Step III exam on the horizon. We spent most of Wednesday studying at the NYPL, breaking only briefly for hotdogs from Gray's Papaya, which sadly, were no longer the deals they used to be. After a big potluck dinner with the extended family on Thanksgiving Day, we drove up to the Woodbury Outlet Mall to battle the crowds. The last time I went there was exactly 8 years ago, when I stocked more than half my wardrobe. This year was no exception, and the hoards of shoppers made it hard to believe that we're actually in a recession. After more than 10 hours of bargain hunting, we drove home with a trunk full of clothes and an impressive stash of credit card receipts. We concluded the evening with a birthday dinner for my dad, which included a tasty black bass and a platter of walnut shrimps and fried milk. After lugging our heavy bags of goodies back to Boston, we went straight back to work. With little time left to study and no break until March, I anticipate a bleak winter ahead.
After 4-weeks at the VA hospital, I've learned a lot more about practicing medicine outside the sanctity of a large academic hospital - like having to wait an hour for the CT tech to come in for a head scan in the middle of the night, or even worse, waiting an hour for anesthesia to roll out of bed for an emergent intubation while we stood there bagging our hypoxic patient. I also got better at drawing blood, especially when the nurse refuses to do it. As a member of the code team in the MICU, I even got a taste of "code green" (psych code) on my first call night, which involved me running after a crazy old vet with his IV dangling from his arm, hospital gown flapping in the wind, and his naked behind exposed to me as he eloped from the hospital. I guess one of the great things about internship is that it always manages to keep life interesting.
After a gloomy 2-week-long black cloud on the ward service, even the ICU at the VA Hospital seems like a breath of fresh air. The service is lighter, my cloud seems whiter, and after election day last week, the skies appear ever brighter. I've also recently discovered an ingenious piece of software called PlayOn. Still under beta testing, the program can stream video content from both Hulu and Netflix directly to my PS3, and thus, my large-screen TV. This has unlocked a whole Pandora's box of TV shows to procrastinate with, including the first seasons of 30 Rock and Heroes, as well as new episodes of Terminator and SNL. So much to watch ... so little time. By the way, photos from our Japan trip are posted here - enjoy!
