Island Med Student

I’m officially back in Brooklyn. As much fun as I had out of town, there’s something wonderful about being home again. I have some more interviews coming up this week and then it’s back to the hospital on Monday. Micah and I have finally begun a project we’ve been trying to work on for a while. We are converting all of my family’s old and mold-covered videotapes into a digital format. Micah has been watching my old home movies all day and sending me hilarious updates. He just sent me the above photo which was a screen shot of a video he was converting. At first I thought the picture was from LATFH.com, but then I realized it was me as Scrooge when I was around 11 years old. Apparently I was a hipster way before hipsters were cool (well, not-cool, in my opinion).

Perhaps the coolest thing my parents’ ever did was buy us a video camcorder. We didn’t have cable television and we lived in the middle of nowhere, so one of the things we did for fun was make movies. We recorded random events and also re-made blockbuster hits including A Christmas Carol and The Princess Bride. I will definitely give my kids a camcorder (although it won’t be an old school VHS one), so that they can get creative like we did.

In other news, I turned on the Christmas lights in my apartment. I’m not a very Christmasy person, but I actually do really enjoy the lights, and my apartment now feels all cozy and fun.

I’m tired from traveling and unpacking so I’m about to go soak in a super yummy bath with the wonderful soap that Laura gave me while I was in Baltimore. G’nite!

I had a fabulous time at the farm for turkey day. Micah and I headed back to Baltimore last night and then had a yummy dinner at his parents’ house. I woke up this morning ready to go on a long run to shed off my turkey-day-indulgences and realized that I’d left my running shorts in Brooklyn. After freaking out for a few minutes, I went to Target and bought a crappy substitute. I felt my anxiety level rising as all I wanted was to go on a nice, long run. I realized how much I need my runs. I could feel myself becoming super cranky and anxiety ridden. However, once I opened it up outside with my two doggies and some awesome music, all was well again. I could feel the anxiety dripping off of me in the form of my sweat, and life once again became manageable. It sometimes scares me how dependent I am on my runs for de-stressing. I am scared of what would happen if I was no longer able to run!

Anyway, enjoy the photos with this post. One taken on the way out of NYC, one of Scope wearing my “Life is Pain…anyone who says differently is selling something” t-shirt for beddy bye time, and one of my sister Bruce and her huge doggy, Chesney at Thanksgiving.

It’s time to take a shower and then figure a way to go back outside and enjoy the beautiful weather today!

Today is Thanksgiving day. I’m currently at my parents’ farm in Luray, Virginia. My mom is in the kitchen cooking up a storm and my doggies just got finished romping around outside. They pretty much live for coming to the farm, as they finally get to play off of their leashes.

Since I don’t have a lot to say, I’m leaving you with one photo from each of the last three Thanksgiving days. The first one is from my Thanksgiving sushi celebration with my friends in NYC last year. The second one is me stuffing my first turkey (thanks Sandy!) for Thanksgiving the year before last. And the last one is from our PHR Thanksgiving at the Grange Home for the Elderly in Dominica.

Happy turkey day everyone!

Check out my post on Medscape to read about my algorithm for choosing a residency program (it’s actually more complicated than this, but this is a good start!)

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Yesterday was a great day. I started the morning off with a nice run into Manhattan and back. After catching up on a few errands, Micah and I decided to go visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check out the Robert Frank exhibit. It ended up being a bit disappointing but all was well because we also checked out the Surface Tension exhibit, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There was one piece, which I was particularly fond of. I can’t remember the name of the artist, but he was Italian, and he took little glass slides and pressed them up to every single inch of his body and took photographs of each. He then assembled the photos into a somewhat random sequence for the installed piece. Very nice!

From the Met’s description of Surface Tension:

“Photographs are often perceived as transparent windows onto a three-dimensional world. Yet photographs also have their own material presence as physical objects. Contemporary artists who exploit this apparent contradiction between photograph as window and photograph as object are featured in Surface Tension. The exhibition presents 30 works that play with the inherent tension between the flatness of the photograph and the often lifelike illusion of depth. Surface Tension highlights the ways in which artists use photographic and multi-media techniques to direct our attention to the physical surface of the photograph. Among the works featured are photographs that have been purposely scratched, burned, or painted on, as well as photograms made by placing objects directly on top of a sheet of photographic paper.”

Micah and I walked around Manhattan for a bit afterwards. There were quite a few people out and about. I saw Christmas trees being installed, and there were many Christmas lights up all over the town, including one building that was pretty much covered in them. I’m not a huge fan of Christmas decorations, but I did enjoy looking at all the twinkling lights.

I have this entire week off, which is super nice. I might be going down to Baltimore today or tomorrow, and then I’m going to spend Thanksgiving day at my parents’ farm in Virginia.

Enjoy the photos with this post. A “Dominican Bakery” sign at my subway stop (NOT DominEEcan), the Christmas tree in the Met, and a statue in the lobby of the Met.

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I definitely want to have children at some point in my life, that is something that I am sure of. But the logistics of when and how to do so are mind boggling sometimes. I didn’t want to try and have children during med school – that just seemed too challenging. And now that I’m facing residency, I can’t imagine attempting to have babies while struggling with the rigors of my graduate medical education. I’d like to be financially stable before having kids, but that is beginning to also seem quite unfeasible. By the time I’m financially stable, I will be well past my childbearing days…or at least my natural fertilization days.

Someone once told me that there is really never a good time to have children. You just do it, and try your darndest to make the best of it that you can. It’s interesting to me how the times are a changing. Women are now having children later and later in life. Artificial fertilization and implantation techniques are becoming quite advanced and women can now have children way past their “fertile years.” I’ve even been entertaining the thought of freezing my eggs.

I guess I will just have to wait and see what life has in store for me. For now, I am happy with my two furry, intellectually challenged, quadrupeds (whom I do love like children).

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately. When I told everyone that I had decided to go to a Caribbean med school, some people thought I was crazy and said to me the “but you’re such a smart girl, why would you do that?” This post I wrote pretty much sums up my reply. But the gist is that prestige is not my goal.

Now I’m seriously considering a career in family medicine. When I told a doctor friend of mine he said, “but you’re such a smart girl, why would you do that?” I plan on writing a post to explain my thoughts on this, but I have a million reasons for wanting to pursue family medicine, and not a single one of them involves a desire for prestige.

I’ve been interviewing at different hospitals’ family medicine programs. Some of them are at more prestigious, university affiliated hospitals, and some of them are at financially challenged community hospitals. I’m finding myself drawn more to the community hospitals for many reasons that yet again I will write soon in a blog post. I told a friend of mine about this and she said, “but you’re such a smart girl, why would you do that?”

UGGHH! I just don’t get it. What difference does it make if I am the most brilliant girl on the planet?! I want to be an exceptional doctor. I want to provide excellent, compassionate care to anyone who needs it, and I’m particularly drawn to underserved populations. I just don’t understand why prestige is so important to people. I don’t care about winning a nobel prize or publishing a million articles in prestigious medical journals. I just want to be a great doctor and make the world a better place. The only opinions I really care about are my patients’. I want to give them the best and most compassionate care possible. And I doubt I’ll ever have a patient say, “but you’re such a smart girl, why would you do that?”

“Yo Brooklyn, Fuhgeddaboudit” Photo Series

It’s only been 5 days since I’ve been away from the hospital, and I’m already starting to freak out. I have basically become a professional interviewee/errand runner. Every day I either run errands, go to a residency interview, or a little of both. As exciting as this all sounds, it’s really not.

The one good side effect is that I have been ramping up my running schedule. I’ve already run almost 20 miles this week, and I’m planning on going for another 5-miler here in an hour or so.

This whole residency program selection stuff is kind of starting to stress me out. The problem is that I really have liked every single program that I’ve interviewed at. Sure, some of them are in better locations, or have better programs, or have nicer facilities, but I’ve really enjoyed every interview I’ve been on. I am going to have one helluva time ranking the programs, me thinks.

Anyway, since I had some spare time this morning, I decided to organize all of my million doggy doo photos into a single collection. You can check them out here (be sure to click “next page” to see them all…I haven’t figured out how to get them to all show up on one page yet). I think it’s kind of cool that they are in reverse order, because it starts with Scope and Molly being all grown up and goes back to when they were little puppy doos in Dominica.

I took the two photos with this post this morning as I was making coffee. Scope decided to stay in bed under the covers, and Molly was disgruntled because she wanted to go outside (as always).

Enjoy!

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