My Diamond Shoes

You'd think that this part of the trip narrative could be summed up with "I flew to Paris." But that's not very fun, is it?

I'd never been to O'Hare before but I got there easily with very little pre-planning. Chicago public transit rocks my socks. I did end up sharing a Blue Line car with a cracked-out guy who was enthusiastically conducting the symphony orchestra playing in his head. but I didn't make eye contact and everything was okay!

About two hours after takeoff came the announcement that I'd been dreading since exactly one year ago- "If there is a doctor on the plane, please notify the cabin crew." I waited. I glanced around. I waited a little more. Finally, when it was clear nobody else was speaking up, I pushed my call button. One of the flight attendants came over to my seat, and before he could even open his mouth to speak, I blurted out "I'm an obstetrician." Meaning "Most acute medical complaints are not my area, so unless somebody's got an urge to push we are all SOL." But the flight attendant didn't care! His first question for me was, "May I see your medical ID?"

Um... my what? What is a medical ID? Did that mean hospital ID? Because I'd left both of mine on my dining room table that morning with the words, "The last thing I need is to lose these because I took them to France for no good reason." Or perhaps it was some affectation of more socialized nations wherein doctors are issued a card identifying them as such? In any case, I didn't have anything but my word, and the single personal check I'd brought that had "MD" printed after my name. Air France wasn't having any of it. They rejected my offer of help. Merci, mais non.

Now I know that an airline would be liable if they let any random person who calls herself a doctor start "treating" someone who gets sick on a flight. But I'm pretty sure they'd also be liable if somebody was genuinely ill and didn't get care for lack of an identification card. But that's Air France's problem, not mine. There weren't any repeated calls for aid, so I assume either the person wasn't that sick, or somebody else (with their ID card) was able to help. There weren't any newborn-baby cries for the duration of the flight, so I'm sure I wouldn't have been that big a help anyway!

National Poetry Month Fail.

Anyway!! Over the next few entries I will be discussing my most recent vacation, a week-long trip to Paris. Probably in more detail than any of you want to hear.

April 2: On the Birth of a Child- in honor of delivering my first baby at County

April 3: The Emperor of Ice Cream- when the day's Google Doodle is an ice cream sundae, how could I not have that poem stuck in my head all day?

April 4:


Today... no particular theme. I just like this one.

who knows if the moon's
ee cummings

who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

In March, I did my second month of gynecology at the university hospital. The first time I did that rotation was in July. As you might guess, there was a BIG difference this time around. It was just so much easier, not having to expend so much energy on newbie tasks like figuring out how to put orders in or learning my way around. It no longer took me an hour to do post-op notes and dictations for my minor cases. And even better, I got to do slightly more complex cases. The best part about it all was not having the overwhelming sense of fear that plagued me constantly throughout my first months.

So, coming off that great month, of feeling like I mostly knew what I was doing, my current rotation is at the county hospital. An entirely different system, with different people, different patients, different expectations of me. It was that July feeling all over again. I am doing a month of outpatient clinics- all gynecology. My clinic experience so far this year has been very OB-heavy so I welcome the change. After all, if I become a generalist the stuff I'm doing now will be my bread and butter. It's just tough because I haven't learned the system yet, and things aren't as efficient as at the private hospital where I've been getting spoiled all year.

Adding to my anxiety level was my first inpatient call at this hospital, this weekend. I'd already had the feeling of walking onto an L&D unit knowing nothing; I didn't care to repeat it. But it wasn't so bad!! Didn't hurt that there was exactly one laboring patient on the board. And once she kicked in to active labor I was totally fine. I might not know where anything is or how the systems work, but when a woman who's had 5 other babies says she feels like she needs to poop, I know what to do. After that delivery, most of my nerves were gone. Back in the saddle!!

So instead of posting entire poems here every day, I'm going to post links here and on Facebook. Simple and to the point. Today's poem was "Birches" by Robert Frost. I've posted it before but it's still one of my favorites. Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Yikes, I'm cutting it a little close on meeting my goal of an entry every month. It doesn't feel like it's almost April. Chicago weather just refuses to cooperate. Natives keep assuring me that there's at least one snowfall left before spring really comes. And yet millions of people continue to live here, as if they are unaware that there are other places. Places where it's hitting 70 degrees every day.

Speaking of Baton Rouge, my parents decided they don't want to live there anymore. And are buying a house in the small town where most of the rest of my family lives. Now I've really got to start saying 'my parents' house' as opposed to 'my house.' As for the old place, I think this all has happened too fast for me to truly process that I won't be going back to the house I grew up in. And right now, I don't really have the time/energy to process those feelings. So I'll think about it later.

Okay, obligatory once per month entry done. I'm going to try to observe National Poetry Month this year, as I did in days of yore. So expect more frequent posts, starting tomorrow!

Now that I've moved to Chicago, I am experiencing my first real winter. We had a big blizzard at the beginning of this month that was like nothing I've ever seen. Since I'm new to the whole Chicago winter thing, I didn't really know any better. But my co-workers who've lived in the Midwest all their lives were flipping out, too.
Walking home the night of the storm was crazy. Picture it: walking toward Lake Michigan into hurricane-level winds. There were times that, if I didn't stop and plant both my feet, I'd have been blown over.

Walking back to work a few hours later, before any of the streets had been plowed, was also an experience. At least then I had the wind at my back. I probably could have spread open my coat and used it to hangglide to the hospital. As it was, I highstepped it, Super Mario-like, through the knee-deep snow in the middle of the streets. That was safer than going through the equally deep snow on the sidewalk, where I was close to getting whacked by a segment of chainlink fence blown loose by the wind.

Working on the snow day was actually quite cool. Nobody there except people who were legitimately in labor. When there's 20 inches of snow on the ground, patients are less prone to run to the hospital the first time they have an abdominal cramp. We also had a plethora of extra hands, thanks to the admin's overly successful effort to make sure L&D wasn't understaffed that day.

I've been plagued by some sort of cold-like illness for the past two weeks. It sucks. I don't think it's my usual change-in-weather illness, which usually happens as summer turns to fall and again as winter turns to spring. Unless it was triggered by a change from freezing to REALLY freezing. Not getting sick as the weather first cooled back in September lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought there was something different about the weather up here that meant I wasn't going to get my usual illness. Boo hiss.

Since I last wrote...

I finished up my month (actually three weeks) of Ultrasound. By the end I was pretty comfortable, and reasonably proficient, at scanning. My favorite scans to do were Level I's- a head-to-toe survey of fetal anatomy that you do around 20 weeks. Of course I wasn't nearly as good as a real sonographer, but I could obtain some decent images. Definitely a far cry from my second year of med school, when during my Radiology class I despaired of ever seeing anything on ultrasound. At the time I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn't going into Ob/Gyn. Ha.

Now I'm back on Labor and Delivery (L&D) for the second of three months. This time around, I'm on days instead of nights. The two rotations are very different, for more reasons than just the obvious one. On days, I have postpartum rounding, weekend call, and continuity clinic. While those first two are no fun (I like clinic!), they're tolerable. For me, the hardest part about days is the fact that there are so many people around all the time. Having only ever done L&D nights and weekend calls before, I became used to a relatively empty, quiet board room. Not so during the day! It makes me anxious.

As the L&D intern I manage the low-risk laboring patients, do vaginal deliveries, and do primary c-sections. During the day most of the sections are planned, for things like breech babies or multiple babies. Since it's rather late in intern year, I've also gotten the chance to start doing c-sections on patients who've either had prior cesareans, or prior abdominal surgery. Much harder than primaries, thanks to all the scar tissue. Some days, I feel like I spend so much time in the OR that I barely get to do anything else. BUT, I can see myself improving as a surgeon every day, and that's the point.

In non-residency news, I'm now the proud owner of an iPhone. A Verizon iPhone, of course. I pre-ordered it that first day. Since my normal wakeup time is 4am I easily beat the sellout that afternoon. A few people have questioned why I feel having this iPhone is such a big deal, since the device has been out for years. My answer is that unlike previous owners, we new owners have iPhones with service that doesn't suck. I'm that person who stood up and cheered at the "Yes, I can hear you now" commercial during the Super Bowl. Apparently AT&T isn't so bad here in Chicago, but I'll never forget how crappy it was in Nashville. I hold grudges.

I just realized that I neglected to give the second reason I had a stay-cation last week: it was CREOGs week. CREOG stands for the Council of Resident Education in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Every year they give all ob/gyn residents a 300-question standardized test. Kind of like the shelf exams I used to take as a rotating VMS3. The test covered all areas of ob/gyn. It also covered random, primary care. Turns out I should have actually listened when that emergency department attending went over the different kinds of ankle sprains with me.

One thing to note about this exam is that its difficulty is not adjusted for year in residency. Everyone from chiefs to interns took the same test. So, it's not expected that I would know all the answers- not even close. I just haven't experienced all that much, and intern year is not very conducive to cramming with the books. While I am an exceptional standardized test-taker (and so modest, too!), there's only so much you can do with zero knowledge. The goals are to not bomb the exam, and to improve each year. I'll let you all know how that goes.

Only a few hours left of my second vacation of the year. It was a staycation this time around, for two reasons. First, I had five count-'em-FIVE friends from Nashville come into town for my first weekend off. They didn't actually come for my weekend off, it was just a ridiculously-well-timed coincidence. None of them stayed at my place; they had other friends who also live in town. It was awesome-- I got to hang out with them, minus the pressure of being the one responsible for showing them a good time. The other Chicago friends have been living here longer and are also not medical, so they knew the city a lot better than I do. I was able to tag along on all our outings like I was a tourist, too! With the added convenience of being able to go home and sleep in my own bed every night.

Our theme song for the weekend was Ke$ha's "We R Who We R." Actually, it wasn't really our theme song as much as our theme word, drawn from the line "hittin' on dudes...hard." So pretty much every sentence spoken over the weekend ended with "[pause]...hard. I tell you this to point out that I may be a real doctor with real responsibilities now, but I still love a good group inside joke based on a mindless pop song.

One purely touristy thing we did over the weekend was visit the Skydeck of the "Willis" (Sears) Tower. There are glass enclosures projecting out of the side of the building that you can stand in for a full-view experience. I learned that I am still afraid of heights when I was only able to place both my feet on the glass for maybe one full second. I wouldn't have been able to do even that if I'd known then that these glass boxes retract into the building for maintenance...meaning they are not absolutely, 100% fixed and immobile. Learning that fact hours later almost caused a whole new panic attack. I'm (sort of) glad I did it once, but I'll NEVER do it again.