Happy Valentine’s Day

As usual, I have been really busy lately. I owe a post about the wonderful VBAC summit and a link to my presentation. In the meantime, though, I give you Valentine’s wishes.

My cutie boys.

The chocolate souffles I made for them and me for Valentine’s Day. (Hey, I didn’t say I was busy with only med school.)

And, a love song:

Notes from pediatrics outpatient clinic

I am just finishing up a great month on peds outpatient. Here are some notes / lessons learned / comments to parents:

(Please note that I am a parent and usually am pretty resistant to judging parents)

1. “Sexy” is not an appropriate nickname for your three year old daughter.

2. Please try to remember to turn off your phones, parents. Answering and saying “Yeah, hey, I’m at the doctor with the kid, bro, let me call you back” while I am examining your child is, to say the least, distracting. That’s what the vibrate mode / voicemail is for.

3. If your kid is coming in for an asthma exacerbation, and currently has an asthma inhaler at home, trying to use the inhaler before coming in and then actually remembering what the name of it is when you come in (hey, even bringing it in!) is a great idea. I love the parents who bring in the bottles of meds.

4. It is amazing how wide the range can be of what worries parents. There are parents who will bring in a kid for one day of clear runny nose, no fever, no sore throat. There are parents who will fight with you about going to the hospital when their kid seems to have something clearly wrong that needs further workup that can’t be handled adequately in an outpatient setting.

5. I was happy and amazed how cute the kids were to me. Even the cranky ones. Even the ones who cried at the site of my white coat.

6. Parents, please don’t use the vaccines as a threat of punishment for bad behavior. And, please don’t use them as some sort of sick joke to scare your kids and get a laugh as I am coming at them with the stethoscope.

OK, as of Tuesday, I am swinging to the opposite end of the cycle of life. On to Geriatrics. Wish me luck!

Again.

My DSL got disconnected. Again. It was AT&T’s mistake. Again. They need to send someone out to reinstall it. Again. It will take several days before they can do that. Again.

Last time this happened, my son clogged up the toilet. This time, my cat vomited profusely all over my bed, I am having major issues with my ex husband-to-be who is refusing to pay bills and expenses that he owes, and somehow, I blew out my calf.

Anyway, I will try to find the time to liven up this space a little. I am still enjoying pulmonology. A lot.

You would think the hardest thing about being a single mom in medical school would be being a single mom in medical school. Medical school is the easiest part of my life right now.

How am I supposed to do these things?

I have DSL again!!

A certain wireless and DSL provider that shall remain nameless (but whose name involves three initials and an & sign) completely cut off my DSL service by mistake last week. Today was the first day I could arrange to be home and wait around for a technician to set me up with what constitutes a brand new DSL service, even though they seemed to be able to cut it off just fine without me being there.

How was I supposed to update my blog? Do my IRB amendments? Do practice Step II board questions? Surf the net? Hang out on Facebook? Try to chip away at my burgeoning blog reader?

You’d think I’d get some reading done. I am supposed to be reading two hours a night on medical learning type topics. Well, how am I supposed to get that done when my 11 year old clogs up the toilet…again? When our puny plunger doesn’t work, I had to go to Home Depot and pick out the only toilet auger that doesn’t have a UPC code on it, and then I get stuck at the self checkout line singing “This Old Man” with my six year old, a plunger and a toilet auger, waiting for the cashier to find the code for it.

Then, on the way home, my 11 year old calls and says “You need to stop by grandma’s house on the way home because the second page of my article didn’t print.” Remember the no DSL thing? Well, when I picked them up from their grandma’s house after school yesterday, the 11 year old was told to print out an article there for his biweekly science current events homework. Somehow in between eating chocolate and watching TV while he was doing it he managed to not get the second page. I drove by grandma’s house, after telling him on the phone I was beyond annoyed at him, his cloggy poop and his half printed article, and that his grandma better have the article ready for me to pick up, since it was already getting to be the six year old’s bedtime. Grandma is about as technologically inclined as, well, many grandmas, and was having problems printing the article. So, I had to go in and figure out the issue, print it, and bring it to the 11 year old who was supposed to be done with his project by then.

Then, I had teach myself to use a toilet auger by watching this video (John from NJ, I know it is a video about unclogging a toilet, but for Maude’s sake put on a clean t-shirt) on my phone (remember, no DSL). Then, I had to apply my knowledge to the poopy toilet. And put the six year old to bed. And edit the current event science assignment. And supervise the eleven year old making the lunches and getting showered. (He fell asleep in the shower! Yes, he did. I know. He did. No, I am not kidding.) And clean up the kitchen and dining room table from making dinner.

Needless to say, I only got about ten minutes of reading done last night. But, as of right now, I have a working toilet, kids with finished homework (I think), and a one casserole dish meal planned for tonight. Let’s see if I can get a blog post done and maybe twenty minutes of reading. Wish me luck.

Happy Halloween

Our jack o’ lantern was inspired by my 6 year old. First, he loves to color in my anatomy coloring book, and was coloring in it last night while I was trying to come up with an inspiration for our pumpkin. Secondly, for a while, his favorite punchline for his made up jokes was “eyeball.”

This was one time when having hospital scrubs to wear came in handy.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Today

Today is my younger son’s sixth birthday. He is such a sweet, funny, earnest kid. Yesterday night he told me that he didn’t want to turn six. “I am going to miss being five. Don’t you miss being five? Having fun?”

Yes, yes, I do, Z.

I have been putting off wrapping his presents. I am about to finally tackle that. After I write a blog post about not much, and whatever other stalling techniques I come up with. I got him a bunch of little things. We are going out to eat tonight, and we’re having a small birthday party on Sunday.

I helped out a cardiology fellow at my rotation site with some sympathy and advice about the course of his wife’s pregnancy recently. I was so happy to hear today that the fetus appears to be “small but extremely healthy” according to the maternal fetal medicine specialist they went to go see. He told me that I should consider an MFM fellowship. An intern whose service I am on happened to listen to our conversation, and was blown away by my obstetrics knowledge (I think he is easily impressed, really, I didn’t even say anything that complicated) and said “You’re an ob/gyn already!!” That was nice to hear. I don’t know. I am definitely attracted to MFM, and would love to spend the majority of my time with obstetric patients. I am just so old. I will be 40 my first year of residency. An MFM fellowship is another three years.

And, to wrap up a post of non sequiturs, I figure I’ll list the songs I sang along with today as they came on the radio, just because they tickled me in their diversity.

Hey Jude – The Beatles
Crazy Game – The Indigo Girls
Rebel Without a Pause – Public Enemy
Tainted Love – Soft Cell
Keep Your Hands to Yourself – Georgia Satellites
She’s Crafty – The Beastie Boys
Holiday – Green Day

I am rubbing off on my kids. S, my older son, asked to hear Don’t Stop Believing by Journey and The Lady Is a Tramp, Lena Horne’s version, the other night while in the kitchen with me. Last night he asked me to turn up Ani diFranco’s Little Plastic Castles and said “This song is awesome.” I quite agree.

Rethinking residency

I haven’t been posting that much. I am really busy. I am not busy with pregnancy / women’s health stuff for the most part, so I haven’t really been inspired to post on my passionate topics. And, I can’t really vent too much about my life drama on here. My ex is apparently reading my blog, and will take random statements out of context and bring them up at really strange times, and throw me off. For example, he read this post, and got out of it that I apparently want to drop out of medical school. Talk about missing the point.

I’m not going to lie. My future medical career is not looking as rosy to me as it once was. I remember feeling on top of the world when I found out I got accepted to medical school. It is not often that one gets to fulfill their wildest dreams. I went from being a single mom who was waitlisted for medical school and had unsure career options to a remarried mom with a new baby and an acceptance to medical school within the span of about three years. It was an amazing turnaround. Yes, I should have seen the red flags in our relationship already (like his refusal to move with me if I got into a school out of the area, then turning that around on me as my threatening to leave him…huh?, and the rages I had already suffered), but I thought I could reason with him, or that therapy and love would fix him.

I am reluctantly letting go of my ideal residency dreams. I met the program director from OHSU at ACOG’s ACM residency fair earlier this year, and she said I would be a good match for the program. Unfortunately, it is about as far as I could get from my two baby daddies while still staying in the continental United States. While it is rumored to be a family friendly program, and I have a substantial support network there of numerous friends, it will still be legally, emotionally, and logistically difficult to justify moving the kids that far away. It is breaking my heart.

I am not sure what is going to happen, now. I can’t imagine doing any other specialty rather than ob/gyn. Ob/gyn has become an increasingly competitive specialty recently, and I can’t consider myself as a shoe-in for any program I apply to, especially as an osteopathic candidate in the allopathic match. There is one, count it, one residency in the immediate area. According to APGO, they have an average of 600 applicants for 9 slots. There are a handful of other programs in the state, but the closest is more than a four hour drive away. I guess that’s better than being a four hour flight away, but…sigh.

Friday music selection

I don’t do this very often, but I am going to post some music today. I have been really busy and bogged down with more drama than I need, and I think a little musical interlude would do me some good. And hey, who knows, maybe someone else will like one or a few of the tunes I put up.

OKGo’s “This Too Shall Pass”. Not only is it a great song, but it’s an awesome video. And, a message I need to repeat to myself.

I can’t figure out how to embed this, but HERE is a link to Babe the Blue Ox’s “Stand By Your Man”. It’s not my absolute favorite song of theirs, but it’s a great one that shows their balance between sweet ballads and rockin indieness, and it may be their only official video. I wish “King of the Rain” had a video. I was triggered into a Babe the Blue Ox fest last night when a website asked what band deserved more success than it got.

And, “No Children” by Mountain Goats. I can listen to this without crying now.

Putting it in persepctive

I had a rough week, to say the least. My tumor board presentation went fairly well, but I was called out by my attending for a mistake on my epidemiology slide. It was a minor point about the prevalence of a less common type of thyroid cancer than the type I was talking about, but it still wasn’t fun being corrected at the podium.

Earlier this week, I found out that a Friday night social event at a good friend’s house is not open to me anymore if I have my kids with me. I understand the concept of wanting a childfree space, especially since many of the regular attendants are childless, but it still really stung, especially after the week I’ve had.

The status conference over the custody of my younger son went better in some ways than I expected, and worse in some ways than I expected. I got to sit with my soon-to-be-exhusband in a waiting room for an eternity, and he spent the entire time doing the Dr. Jeckyll / Mr. Hyde routine that made my life miserable when I was with him. “I hope you’re enjoying your rotations…Being a medical student means you’re a bad mother…I hope you find happiness…Have fun at residency when you’ll never get to see your children…I just want us both to be able to spend time with Z…You never loved me, and just used me as someone to watch your kids when you went to school…(Sorry, can’t come up with another positive quote)…My next wife will make lunches for me to take to work; you didn’t and that means you didn’t love me…” and it went on, up and down (mostly down) the roller coaster while we waited for our paperwork. I left and sobbed in my car, and considered dropping out.

I drove hundreds of miles this week in my car (and my piriformis and sciatic nerve are not forgiving me for that, yet). My rotation site is about 30 miles from my house on the highway, which is fine with me, and I put my older son in a camp at which I was a former counselor. It is near his dad’s work and my mom’s house, which is even farther from my house, and on ground roads (ugh). I also had to pick up Z from my ex’s house, which is even farther away. Yesterday, after picking up Z at the ex’s, then driving the opposite direction to S’s camp, I turned around again and drove 70 miles from my house to go to the viewing for my classmate who died recently.

My sons came with me to the viewing. She is being buried in her white coat, and we were asked to wear ours. The kids were very understanding about going. We only stayed for a short while, and sat in the back of the room. I briefly paid my respects at the coffin and to her family up front. Z crawled into my lap when I came back to our seats, and I held him and kissed his head. As I sat there and listened to my classmate’s mother wail with pain, and thought of her baby in the NICU, I thought how lucky I really am. Danielle wanted nothing more than to be a mother, to hold and nurse her baby, and to be a doctor. She never even got to meet her baby, and now her family is reeling from the sudden, heartbreakingly unfair loss.

In a few years, this shitty week will be a distant memory. I can still hold my sons and kiss their soft hair. I am still (so far) going to achieve my dream of becoming a physician. I still have a strong social support system with loving friends, even though, sometimes, it can be more piecemeal than I would like. I am trying to keep it all in perspective.

Wish me luck today

I have a status conference in front of the judge to lay the groundwork for my divorce and custody proceedings.

Ugh.

Send good luck wishes, please!