Life as you know it

Hooray for vacation!!  I'm back in the states, after a week off in London and a few days off here and there at home.  I won't go on too much about the trip itself, except to say that there was lots of shopping, drinking and laughs.

Oh, baby.

But here's something that struck me - in the course of meeting many of my sister and cousins' friends, I wound up talking about my job.  A lot.  Probably a certain amount of that was just desperation and gratefulness at having the chance to get away that it almost seemed unreal.  A significant proportion was also residual pain from the way that I had been professionally singed on my last rotation, by some people who I had underestimated in their ability to put personal gain above team duty.  But the thing that drove it the most was the fact that I work so many hours at this one job, and so many people that I met just couldn't comprehend it.

It's a fact of life in the UK that work hours are very severely limited.  It's a culture that is hardly hedonistic compared to the rest of Europe, but by American standards can seem outlandishly fun-oriented at times.  To have several drinks with colleagues, to travel, to spend time together, to shop during the lunch hour, these are all things that are assumed by many to be a regular part of life on a weekly or even daily basis.  Even for doctors, the work-hour limit is about 50 hours per week, just over half of what American residents are limited to (and often work over).  So while discussing my job with people, the shock and horror I experienced at describing a standard 85 hr work week was overwhelming.

I used to encounter this sort of attitude years ago, when I was in medical school and dating around.  People would ask what I did for fun on weekends or holidays, and the response of "I'm studying" used to baffle people.  Later, when I started rotations, I would gripe about having to get up so early when the rest of the world seemed asleep, or having to travel so much in such an unpredictable manner.  But eventually, I took solace in knowing that I wasn't the only one.  It enabled me to get off my high horse when I realized that investment bankers work 90 hour weeks too, and while they have bonuses larger than my entire salary, they also have to do it all in a suit and tie, and deal with way bigger assholes.  Embarrassingly, it took me 3 years to figure out that the guy at Dunkin Donuts serving me my latte had to get up at 4:30 in the morning, too.  And my dad chided me for complaining about the frequent travel - nearly all consultants do the same, and they have to do it on planes.  I gradually started to feel that my situation wasn't special, and that allowed me to tone down the pity party I was throwing for myself at working so long for so little.

It is easy to feel jealous that I do not belong to a culture, or a world, in which lifestyle and experience are the focal points.  I certainly turn green at the thought of my friends, who casually meet up with each other with little notice and maximal enjoyment.  But, the fact is, to make those lifestyles happen, these people all picked jobs where they more or less sit at desks, deal with vague concepts and handle a level of office politics that I am, paradoxically, protected from in many respects because the people I work with just don't have time for petty grudges.  I would never be happy in those circumstances, and the few rotations I went through resembling such work had me bored out of my mind.  I didn't pick it because it didn't suit me.  I feel healthier in some ways, doing a job that keeps me occupied for the majority of my time.  I feel healthier in a job where I walk a lot.  If given the option of living the London lifestyle or not, I probably wouldn't pick it if I had to stay with it the rest of my life.  And that's just the way it is.

LDN

Things I have learned in the past 36 hours:

1) The aisle seat is NOT preferable when you are sitting next to a woman who ate NYC street food before getting on the plane.

2) They have Ben and Jerry's vending machines dispensing little mini-pints of ice cream at the Heathrow airport.  I live on the Eastern seaboard, how come we don't have that???

3) Gherkin is a far better name for this.

4) I am truly addicted to my Android.  Last night, I realized I was going to have to go a whole week without TMZ and I nearly had a heart attack.

5) I did not drink enough on Memorial Day, otherwise I would not still be feeling all that wine I had last night :/

I-C-London, I-C-France

I'm beginning to have the strangest feeling that my internship is already slipping from my hands.  I always have this sort of feeling around February, the knowledge that winter is nearly done and time is passing right in front of me.  The trees are still bare, but I can see tiny knobbly bits protruding from the tallest twig branches, and I know that in a month or so, real buds will appear and I will be just a few short months from forever ending my internship.

I shouldn't feel sentimental about this at all - after all, internship is That Dreaded Year in the life of all doctors, the year that you are supposed to hate and feel as though you can never get back and so on.  And it is, and I am mentally "done" with the silliness of tylenol orders and 3 am falls and patients demanding dilaudid instead of morphine.  I don't feel like I have to rush to the bedside for every little thing anymore, and I can recall how to write for potassium without looking it up and I can tell whether the nurses really do need my help with an IV line or if they're just being lazy.  But... it's over so soon.  I can't believe it.  The infancy of my career is nearly done.  I feel like I should have taken more pictures.

I've transitioned from my last two weeks on the ICU into the night float, where I'm continuing to cover the ICU and a few other floors.  Despite some very questionable nursing calls, I've had quite an easy week taking care of things, mostly because my nurses are terrific and organized and know what they're doing.  I keep waiting for patients to die (I am covering the critical care unit and the hospice, after all) but for some reason I have been extremely fortunate and sleeping a reasonable amount, which translates into hours at home during the day to relax and do exactly as I wish.  I came into the night float really dreading it, since I was pretty sick of it by the end of two weeks the last time I was on it (and that was with terrific weather in July), but I have been taking my vitamins and bringing my laptop in with me, and I find that a warm room + 4 seasons of Battlestar Galactica on dvd has made for a very pleasant experience.  I am most definitely dreading next week, as the other intern and I will swap floors, leading to lots of late-night troponin blood draws and EKGs and imaginary chest pain calls.  This won't be all that bad, except that I must also go in for an eye appointment and a surgical poster presentation conference post-call next week, all the day before my birthday.  I then have to start two weeks of surgery in-house the day after my birthday, but hey, at least I have it off.

As part of my planning for the coming months, I have finally kicked off a few things that I had in the works for some time.  The first is that I have scheduled myself for Lasik for March, which I am really excited about because I JUST CANNOT DO EYEGLASSES AND CONTACTS ANYMORE.  It really isn't so bad, it's just a massive hassle and when I already feel so unpretty on-call and post-call because I have to wear glasses, it brings my self-image down, and I would love to continue to feel good about myself as I go forward in surgery.  I scheduled it with the same guy my dad went to, and my parents are helping me out with cost, so things should go smoothly and I hopefully will not end up blind and transferring into a specialty where eyes are not required (like psych).  I should be good and recovered by the time I head back to Shmanhattan Hospital for two more months of surgery, which should be a ton of fun since I will be back in the city for the spring.  This time, I will make a greater effort to go out and hit TopShop, because shopping for pretty fun clothes genuinely does make me feel better about myself.

I am also putting things into motion for my spring vacation, and I am trying to juggle a trip to London with a second trip somewhere in the US, maybe Chicago or Texas or something.  I had such an awesome time in Memphis that I really would love to do another southern trip again.  Nothing is set up yet, but I'm just enjoying that I can actually move forward with planning all the fun stuff I had been holding off on for so long, because I am done with my exams and can really take control of things instead of acting like I am a victim of my own specialty.  The best part is that I just discovered Groupon, so once my dates are set, I plan on London spa-ing myself in a bad way while my sister and cousins are working.  We're toying with the idea of at trip within my trip, maybe to Paris or Scotland or Dublin, with the goal of getting smashed and just having an awesome time.  But really, if I come back with a semi-British accent as I typically do, that will be more than enough for me.