September 14, 2006
Needy Patients
I had my first "Patient Interview" today. We were virtually thrown to the wolves. We had a short reading assigned about how to interview a patient, and that was about all we got before the fake patient walked in the door (they're actors). There were eight students and two faculty members to oversee us. Four volunteers got to do the interviewing. I was the second to go. My patient was a 53-year old lady who just lost an uncle to cancer and was propelled to quit smoking herself. I told her, "I'm sorry to hear that," and asked her some questions about him and made remarks along the lines of, "It must have been hard for you." At the end of the interview, her critique was that I wasn't sympathetic about the death of her uncle. I see a long and illustrious career as a caring medical professional ahead of me.
September 13, 2006
9/11 is a Weird Day
September 11th is a weird day for me. For some reason, I don't like to think about it. I'm sick of the hype, the spin, the ranting and the conning of the masses. Watching twisted documentaries and drumming up hate toward Arabs is not the way I like to spend my day. I'm tired of even calling it "Nine-Eleven". It sounds stupid because it's overplayed. Give it a rest, and give it a little respect.
On 9/11/2001, I had nine months in as a probationary firefighter. I was working at St. 8 that day, at 51st and Telegraph, on the "C" shift. I was woken around 6:30, earlier than my normal waking time, by an excited co-worker calling me. "Somebody just flew a plane into the World Trade Center!" he exclaimed. "Really?" I replied, thinking to myself, "You woke me up for a plane crash? In New York? I know you're a wanna-be FDNY, but come on, did you really have to call me so early?" I got up, got in the car, and made my way to work. At some point that's fuzzy to me now, I must have heard on the radio or something, that the other tower was hit, and that it was deliberate. And the rest of the day continues to be vague and cloudy in my memory. I think that was the morning that we relieved the "B" shift from an early morning fire they had -went to the house to continue overhaul- but I can't be sure. All I remember, and this is crystal clear, is standing around nearly all day, gathered around the TV. I don't even remember the things that I was seeing on the screen. I was a new kid, but I certainly didn't do housework that morning. Everyone was huddled in the kitchen, silently watching. At some point in the afternoon, the CISM team came through. That's the Critical Incident Stress Management team. They came to debrief us, because clearly this was a disturbing, stressing incident for all of us, even though we were 3000 miles away. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to begin to place yourself in the same situation: what would I do if the Twin Towers were in my city, and I was the one called in to walk up those stairs, knowing that the building was on fire? Or maybe not knowing. Maybe only knowing that there was a lot of smoke and dust and something terrible had just happened. Would I chicken out? Would I quit? What would I do if I ran away out of fear? How could I live with myself then? What if I knew the risks? Would I have a gut feeling that I would never see my family again? Would I rescue someone? Would I die in there? Would I be alone, or would I be at least with a co-worker? The Golden Gate Bridge was said to be a potential target, so couldn't I actually be in this hypothetical situation if they really did attack it?
The CISM team helped, but I don't know how much. We all did end up talking. I recall looking at my co-workers who were stereotyped as male firefighters to be the silent suffering type, listening to more and more comments and thoughts coming out as each successive person talked. I don't remember the night time. I don't remember much past the afternoon. One event in the afternoon did strike me though, and that was that a woman drove up in her Volvo and stopped in front of the fire station. She pulled her bagpipes out of her car and began playing. Tears were streaming down her face. I stood and listened, and soon my co-workers heard it and came out to stand and listen also. We stood in a large, somber group. I always thought that bagpipes sounded cool, but this time they were gut-wrenching and haunting. I will always get goosebumps when I hear the sound of bagpipes now. The reedy sound touches something deep inside me and I really can't explain it any better than that. It's like a straight shock of a little bit of electricity to someplace in my gut.
Probation is stressful enough, and I don't know if it was just the fact that I was on probation ---or if it was the extraordinarily crappy relationship I was in, if it was being new at work, if it was the 23-year old hanging victim I responded to a few shifts later, the media telling us that the GG Bridge was next to be hit, being on High Alert but not really knowing what that meant in terms of my new job as a firefighter, going to so many "white powder" calls in the middle of the night, thinking about death, and my own death in particular, or if it really was all of those things combined--- but in hindsight, I realized that I started having nightmares not long after 9/11/01. For about three years, I had dreams where I was killing somebody, being killed by somebody else, my family was dying, some other person was dying, or many people were dying. There was a hanta virus dream in there, an atomic bomb dream, a dream where I hit someone with my car and was desperately running from the cops, a dream where my brother got hit by a train, a dream that I was a small child and I was running around at the bottom of an empty pool with other small children, and men with guns were standing on the edge, shooting and killing us like fish in a barrel. It's been five years and I still remember my dreams. They continued for three years, and I often woke up scared. Miraculously enough, they abruptly stopped within a few days of taking my leave of absence to take pre-med classes, and they never came back, not even when I returned to work the following year.
So I will "never forget 9/11." But probably not in the way that the angry Midwestern corn farmers who voted for Bush again and want to deny women abortion rights will "never forget." It's a day of sadness and wishing things were better, not a day to vow to kill more people. It seems like such a fad to "remember 9/11" that I must have subconsciously rebelled against it yesterday. What should we be remembering? We should be remembering that on that day, 343 firefighters (and many other emergency response workers) walked into those buildings because they had the duty and the desire to help people that they didn't know. And we should remember them so that we can be inspired to live our own lives as better people.
On 9/11/2001, I had nine months in as a probationary firefighter. I was working at St. 8 that day, at 51st and Telegraph, on the "C" shift. I was woken around 6:30, earlier than my normal waking time, by an excited co-worker calling me. "Somebody just flew a plane into the World Trade Center!" he exclaimed. "Really?" I replied, thinking to myself, "You woke me up for a plane crash? In New York? I know you're a wanna-be FDNY, but come on, did you really have to call me so early?" I got up, got in the car, and made my way to work. At some point that's fuzzy to me now, I must have heard on the radio or something, that the other tower was hit, and that it was deliberate. And the rest of the day continues to be vague and cloudy in my memory. I think that was the morning that we relieved the "B" shift from an early morning fire they had -went to the house to continue overhaul- but I can't be sure. All I remember, and this is crystal clear, is standing around nearly all day, gathered around the TV. I don't even remember the things that I was seeing on the screen. I was a new kid, but I certainly didn't do housework that morning. Everyone was huddled in the kitchen, silently watching. At some point in the afternoon, the CISM team came through. That's the Critical Incident Stress Management team. They came to debrief us, because clearly this was a disturbing, stressing incident for all of us, even though we were 3000 miles away. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to begin to place yourself in the same situation: what would I do if the Twin Towers were in my city, and I was the one called in to walk up those stairs, knowing that the building was on fire? Or maybe not knowing. Maybe only knowing that there was a lot of smoke and dust and something terrible had just happened. Would I chicken out? Would I quit? What would I do if I ran away out of fear? How could I live with myself then? What if I knew the risks? Would I have a gut feeling that I would never see my family again? Would I rescue someone? Would I die in there? Would I be alone, or would I be at least with a co-worker? The Golden Gate Bridge was said to be a potential target, so couldn't I actually be in this hypothetical situation if they really did attack it?
The CISM team helped, but I don't know how much. We all did end up talking. I recall looking at my co-workers who were stereotyped as male firefighters to be the silent suffering type, listening to more and more comments and thoughts coming out as each successive person talked. I don't remember the night time. I don't remember much past the afternoon. One event in the afternoon did strike me though, and that was that a woman drove up in her Volvo and stopped in front of the fire station. She pulled her bagpipes out of her car and began playing. Tears were streaming down her face. I stood and listened, and soon my co-workers heard it and came out to stand and listen also. We stood in a large, somber group. I always thought that bagpipes sounded cool, but this time they were gut-wrenching and haunting. I will always get goosebumps when I hear the sound of bagpipes now. The reedy sound touches something deep inside me and I really can't explain it any better than that. It's like a straight shock of a little bit of electricity to someplace in my gut.
Probation is stressful enough, and I don't know if it was just the fact that I was on probation ---or if it was the extraordinarily crappy relationship I was in, if it was being new at work, if it was the 23-year old hanging victim I responded to a few shifts later, the media telling us that the GG Bridge was next to be hit, being on High Alert but not really knowing what that meant in terms of my new job as a firefighter, going to so many "white powder" calls in the middle of the night, thinking about death, and my own death in particular, or if it really was all of those things combined--- but in hindsight, I realized that I started having nightmares not long after 9/11/01. For about three years, I had dreams where I was killing somebody, being killed by somebody else, my family was dying, some other person was dying, or many people were dying. There was a hanta virus dream in there, an atomic bomb dream, a dream where I hit someone with my car and was desperately running from the cops, a dream where my brother got hit by a train, a dream that I was a small child and I was running around at the bottom of an empty pool with other small children, and men with guns were standing on the edge, shooting and killing us like fish in a barrel. It's been five years and I still remember my dreams. They continued for three years, and I often woke up scared. Miraculously enough, they abruptly stopped within a few days of taking my leave of absence to take pre-med classes, and they never came back, not even when I returned to work the following year.
So I will "never forget 9/11." But probably not in the way that the angry Midwestern corn farmers who voted for Bush again and want to deny women abortion rights will "never forget." It's a day of sadness and wishing things were better, not a day to vow to kill more people. It seems like such a fad to "remember 9/11" that I must have subconsciously rebelled against it yesterday. What should we be remembering? We should be remembering that on that day, 343 firefighters (and many other emergency response workers) walked into those buildings because they had the duty and the desire to help people that they didn't know. And we should remember them so that we can be inspired to live our own lives as better people.
September 7, 2006
Things I Learned Today While Studying for an Exam
1. A gunner is a student who is always trying to learn every detail and every mechanism of every reaction in everything. Nearly all the Asian medical student population is made up of them.
-1(a) If you study in the same Starbucks as a group of gunners (a.k.a. former biochem majors), you will freak out because they know so much and you know so little.
2. The student housing office will not call you all summer and will not offer you a place to live until the day BEFORE an exam, AFTER you've already been living somewhere else for a month. Then they will require you to sign a lease within the week or else they give it to someone else. Never mind that you might have to give 30 days' notice at your current domicile.
3. Your roommate will inevitably, although not necessarily purposefully, eat your food. Chances are good that it's going to be on a day that you don't have time to go get more. (In my case, he finished my box of cereal on Monday. I thought it might have been his houseguests that left that morning, so I said nothing and bought another box. This morning, Thursday, I went to get my nearly-full new box of cereal to eat breakfast before I ran out the door, and discovered it was all gone and the empty box was sitting in the trash.)
-3(a) The cereal that your roommate eats will invariably be the good granola that costs more than the crap that he bought. So if you, in turn, eat your roommate's cereal, you will be unsatisfied and disappointed.
4. Southern California can cool down on occasion.
5. Bugs walking across a window can be incredibly fascinating.
Hey, don't knock my internet activity when I should be studying for exams. Look what happened two years ago when I was "studying" for an exam! =)
-1(a) If you study in the same Starbucks as a group of gunners (a.k.a. former biochem majors), you will freak out because they know so much and you know so little.
2. The student housing office will not call you all summer and will not offer you a place to live until the day BEFORE an exam, AFTER you've already been living somewhere else for a month. Then they will require you to sign a lease within the week or else they give it to someone else. Never mind that you might have to give 30 days' notice at your current domicile.
3. Your roommate will inevitably, although not necessarily purposefully, eat your food. Chances are good that it's going to be on a day that you don't have time to go get more. (In my case, he finished my box of cereal on Monday. I thought it might have been his houseguests that left that morning, so I said nothing and bought another box. This morning, Thursday, I went to get my nearly-full new box of cereal to eat breakfast before I ran out the door, and discovered it was all gone and the empty box was sitting in the trash.)
-3(a) The cereal that your roommate eats will invariably be the good granola that costs more than the crap that he bought. So if you, in turn, eat your roommate's cereal, you will be unsatisfied and disappointed.
4. Southern California can cool down on occasion.
5. Bugs walking across a window can be incredibly fascinating.
Hey, don't knock my internet activity when I should be studying for exams. Look what happened two years ago when I was "studying" for an exam! =)
September 5, 2006
Dogs in So-Cal
So, many of my Northern California compatriots heard me bemoan that in Southern CA I was going to have to start wearing makeup all the time, develop anorexia, get sunglasses that dwarfed my face, buy a Gucci purse and put a little dog in it. Well, I wasn't kidding. Darron came to visit, and we went to Laguna Beach, about 20 minutes away on Pacific Coast Hwy, to check out the little town. I was eager to go there because I'd heard that it was kind of a Bohemian place, as it started out as a crazy artist colony back in the day. South Coast Plaza with its gajillion chain stores scared me. Well, Laguna Beach turned out to be about as Bohemian as, say -again, for my Northern Cal compatriots- Walnut Creek. I was hoping more Berkeley than Walnut Creek, but clearly I had underestimated the power of SoCal superficiality.
At first, it seemed like a quaint, albeit crowded, little place, kind of like Santa Barbara. We wandered into a David Wyland gallery, just looking around. A really weird guy spotted us looking at a glass-encased underwater-looking sculpture of Ariel the Mermaid from the Disney cartoon, and beelined over. "If you look at her hair from this angle," he said, waiting until I joined him at his angle to the sculpture, "it looks like a rose." He paused, expectantly. I then realized that he worked there, and attempted to placate him by "ooo"-ing appropriately. Darron and I glanced at each other at the same time, and as quickly as possible, we untangled ourselves from the strange mercenary web and escaped to another part of the store.
Then the next salesman approached us, quite a normal guy compared to the last. Darron must have felt safer, so he inquired, just for curiosity's sake, how much the shark sculpture table cost. "Not that I could afford it," he disclaimed. The dealer took my guess, $5500 "at least," and shook his head. "It's going to be more than that," he said, thumbing through the catalog. It was priced at over $22,000. For a table. A glass table. With a shark under it. I told Darron he better start taking sculpture lessons. "It's a great conversation piece," remarked the salesman. I don't know about these Southern Californians, but I can think of a whole lot of things to talk about for a whole lot less than $22,000. Maybe I could market myself as an ever-changing conversation piece. I mean, all the shark does is sit there. I could rotate topics. I'd be a bargain!
So then we walked into a little store that looked like it housed crafts and art by lesser-known artists, you know, cute stuff that doesn't cost a fortune, to put on your bathroom wall. The art was fine, and I felt a little relieved after escaping the Wyland store. However, my relief was not to last for long. I spotted a little pink stroller behind me with a poodle in it. As I wondered where its owner was, I saw a woman and her little boy walking toward it. Naturally, I assumed that the woman had taken her little boy out of it because he wanted to walk, and put the dog in it, so she wouldn't have to worry about them both running off in different directions. Wrong! As the boy got close to the stroller, the dog let out a loud yelp that made him start crying, and even startled me. So it wasn't the woman's dog; whose stupid dog could this be? Soon, a young woman in her mid-twenties, with all her baubles and perfect little tiny clothes and perfect little heels appeared, apologized, and wheeled the dog out. I stood there, incredulous. The stroller was for the dog! And ONLY the dog. It was not a baby stroller-sometime-dog stroller, it was a dedicated dog vehicle. I wanted to run out and find the girl a sperm donor because clearly she was having motherhood issues.
All I can say about this place: Wow. Nancy, I sure hope Canada's treating you better!
At first, it seemed like a quaint, albeit crowded, little place, kind of like Santa Barbara. We wandered into a David Wyland gallery, just looking around. A really weird guy spotted us looking at a glass-encased underwater-looking sculpture of Ariel the Mermaid from the Disney cartoon, and beelined over. "If you look at her hair from this angle," he said, waiting until I joined him at his angle to the sculpture, "it looks like a rose." He paused, expectantly. I then realized that he worked there, and attempted to placate him by "ooo"-ing appropriately. Darron and I glanced at each other at the same time, and as quickly as possible, we untangled ourselves from the strange mercenary web and escaped to another part of the store.
Then the next salesman approached us, quite a normal guy compared to the last. Darron must have felt safer, so he inquired, just for curiosity's sake, how much the shark sculpture table cost. "Not that I could afford it," he disclaimed. The dealer took my guess, $5500 "at least," and shook his head. "It's going to be more than that," he said, thumbing through the catalog. It was priced at over $22,000. For a table. A glass table. With a shark under it. I told Darron he better start taking sculpture lessons. "It's a great conversation piece," remarked the salesman. I don't know about these Southern Californians, but I can think of a whole lot of things to talk about for a whole lot less than $22,000. Maybe I could market myself as an ever-changing conversation piece. I mean, all the shark does is sit there. I could rotate topics. I'd be a bargain!
So then we walked into a little store that looked like it housed crafts and art by lesser-known artists, you know, cute stuff that doesn't cost a fortune, to put on your bathroom wall. The art was fine, and I felt a little relieved after escaping the Wyland store. However, my relief was not to last for long. I spotted a little pink stroller behind me with a poodle in it. As I wondered where its owner was, I saw a woman and her little boy walking toward it. Naturally, I assumed that the woman had taken her little boy out of it because he wanted to walk, and put the dog in it, so she wouldn't have to worry about them both running off in different directions. Wrong! As the boy got close to the stroller, the dog let out a loud yelp that made him start crying, and even startled me. So it wasn't the woman's dog; whose stupid dog could this be? Soon, a young woman in her mid-twenties, with all her baubles and perfect little tiny clothes and perfect little heels appeared, apologized, and wheeled the dog out. I stood there, incredulous. The stroller was for the dog! And ONLY the dog. It was not a baby stroller-sometime-dog stroller, it was a dedicated dog vehicle. I wanted to run out and find the girl a sperm donor because clearly she was having motherhood issues.
All I can say about this place: Wow. Nancy, I sure hope Canada's treating you better!
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