… tachycardic and palpitating…in San Francisco. Even as I’m writing this entry aboard my red-eye flight back to Boston, I can feel the pain in my feet after climbing the slopes of the city in my dress shoes for the past 2 days of residency interviews. Even yummy dungeoness crabs in Inner Sunset or upscale Indian fusion in Palo Alto were hardly worth the exhaustion. Fortunately, the trip did give me a chance to meet up with some old friends. By the way, I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday. As per tradition, we raided the undergrad turkey luncheon, and cooked up a storm for a friend’s turkey dinner. Right now, I can hardly wait until my holiday break – just my board exam and 11 more interviews to go!

Spam has always been annoying, but lately it’s been out of control. Over the past weeks, you may have noticed the crap-load of spam messages being left on my website. I had put off dealing with it since I’ve been overwhelmed by my rotations, residency interviews, board exam studying, and Kaplan work (to pay for all the traveling). Last week, after removing 75 spam messages from my last blog entry, I finally decided to install reCAPTCHA. CAPTCHA actually stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. The reCAPTCHA service I’m using is part of an online effort to digitize printed books using OCR. Words that cannot be read are used by this program to be solved by the user before a message can be posted. This should hopefully hold off those annoying bots in the meantime.

I hope everyone enjoyed the extra hour of sleep this past weekend! I spent most of my time catching up with studying, but was ultimately lured by various distractions like finally finishing the last chapter of Super Paper Mario, testing a demo for the upcoming Crysis, and checking out Homer’s antics in the Simpsons Game. We also had a fancy dinner with Brigham physicians in Copley Square, and even enjoyed a hearty Italian brunch and pastries with a college friend in the North End. Now as I’m sitting in my hotel room in Philly awaiting my board exam tomorrow, I’ll have to make sure I don’t go crazy for dinner tonight.

Last week marked the start of my interview season for residency in Ophthalmology. The trip to Baltimore was a nice way to start things off, as I got to see some familiar faces. Overall, the experience was pretty laid back, though I am sure that I’ll be exhausted by the end of December. Right now, I have 15 interviews lined up for the next few weeks, distributed across the country in places like NYC, Philadelphia, Miami, Iowa City, LA, and San Francisco. Next week, I’ll also head down to Philly for the “skills” portion of my Step II board exam. Fortunately, my rotation in ambulatory medicine has been pretty benign, and we were even able to catch a performance of La Sylphide by the Boston Ballet last Saturday. The choreography was nicely done, though we did have to miss game 3 of the World Series for it. Luckily, our team did not let us down – victory is ours!