Tuesday, April 04, 2006

slumping into action

So Gabriel and I were peeking over the windowsill this morning, looking out at the rain, watching the cars drive by. It's been raining for days and days and days! I read in the paper today that there were 22 days of rain in March, and 4 already in April. I am DONE with rain! Rain means no walks and that means being stuck inside with grouchy babe staggering under his own weight at the window while trying to gnaw lead paint (I'm sure) off the sill with new bottom teeth. He's in bed now. I simply could not take him one moment more. And he'd had it with me, too, believe me.
So what else is there? There's school stuff I need to get on. This, unfortunately, involves many, many telephone calls. I go to a smallish, private medical school without a hospital to call its own. For the academic years, this mattered not at all -- perhaps was even an advantage as we got some excellent just-plain-teachers, fewer powerhouse researchers with no interest in teaching. For the last two clinical years, however, it is a major pain in the ass to organize a schedule. I hate the telephone. I avoid calling good friends if I can reasonably get away with it. I REALLY hate cold calling doctors to see if they would possibly take a student on for a month or so. Of course, I usually get no further than the office manager, and you can just hear her thinking, "You're a student? Sure, you are hon' and I'm the Duchess of York!" So, for some reason, I'm putting off the whole exercise.
I have to apply for a residency in September and I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. It's a little trying. The options I keep coming back to: Family Med, Internal Med, and Emergency Med. That last is something of a dark horse as every last student and her cousin wants to do EM, and despite my good grades (cough), I have little else going for me. Few activities, no research, just my smiling face and winning personality. I blame "ER" for this dagblasted popularity. I'm basing these choices of the fact I enjoyed my Family Med and ER rotations the most last year. I was jazzed by the atmosphere in the ER of impending catastrophe, and when I stopped having anxiety attacks about walking in to talk to a patient I started to feel competent and wow, what a rare feeling for a med student. IM was okay too, except the patients tend to be sicker and in the hospital. IM does have an aura of being more serious medicine that FP. I don't know if I care about that or not. Not that I'll write this in my personal statement or anything. I can be impassioned at need, trust me. And full of crap. I just wish I was excited by something. And I wish I didn't dread with every ounce of my being my internship year. I think it's ludicrous that I'll spend anywhere close to 80 hours a week anywhere but home with M & G. I really want to find the program that will give me the most time off. They don't seem to rank them like that, though, oddly enough.

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