Go Shorty, it's your birthday

Today, I am 28 years old!!  (And now, the requisite DAMN I'M OLD, WHEN THE HECK DID THAT HAPPEN).  I love celebrating my birthday, and getting calls from everyone and feeling overall popular.  Yes, it's all about ME.

The odd thing is, I tend to have a little anxiety around my birthday, only because I get very sensitive and insecure and then read everything into things going wrong.  On my 18th birthday, I got a seriously crampy period, then spent the day at home because it was a snow day (I know, why was I complaining?), and then stayed moody the whole week even though my parents had been meticulously planning a surprise birthday party for me at my favorite restaurant.  I read into slights, like who didn't post on my wall on Facebook (what do you mean, you didn't have internet access in rural Kenya??) or who didn't call, which is so ridiculous because I have so many friends and family who love me no matter how many birthdays or special occasions I forget or can't be there for.  So, this year, I decided to take a different route.

I didn't have the best start.  I had asked the nurses to hold off calling me, but instead I spent all of Thursday night chasing nothing-calls.  After finishing my night shift on Friday morning, I went straight to my weekly surgical conference and then to a Long Island surgical conference for a poster competition.  I had brought a blanket with me, vainly thinking I could find a quiet lecture hall to sleep in, but instead spent the day camped out by my poster and trying to stave off my impending grumpiness.  I managed to get an hour or two of sleep Friday night, but then woke early Saturday morning to manage a patient who became so agitated and disoriented in the ICU that she tried to run out completely naked, as her oxygen saturation dropped to 70%.  By the time my sister called at 8 am for her annual early morning birthday call, the only response I could muster was "GAH, it's too early!!   TOO EARLY!!!  AT WORK!!!!  Call me later!!  GAAAAAH!!".  I had to call back later and apologize for being so cranky.

But once I came back and slept for a few hours, I felt like a totally new person.  My dad called to say that he had sent me flowers for my birthday, and my landlord confirmed that my birthday gift to me (a designer dress) had arrived at my apartment.  My boyfriend surprised me with a Kindle so that I could travel and read, which I am still so excited about that I'm having trouble naming it.  (The best I have come up with is Kenny the Kindle.  It needs some work.)  My best friend and her boyfriend called to sing me happy birthday (with the promise of helping me to download books for free).  And we're going out tonight for dinner and a movie, during which I plan to drink a terrific glass of wine and go to bed at a normal hour.

And so, I am breaking my streak.  It's happy birthdays from here on out =)

Conference Call

I always think of myself as a fairly flexible person in terms of how I view people, but one thing that always throws me off is the boxes.  By this, I mean that the people you know from school should be in school clothes, and the people you know from work should be at work in work clothes, and the people you know from home should be in disapproving parental clothes.  So I get really thrown off when people look and do things differently, even for a day.

We had our first surgical conference of the year on Wednesday, which was a fun event where we presented posters on cases we had seen, and also had the chance to sit in on lectures by experts in different surgical fields.  Unfortunately, every time I went to a lecture where someone else in my program was there, I just could not focus.  I genuinely do love it when we put on our good faces, because its nice to see everyone gussied up with actually brushed hair and lip gloss and jewelry and skirts or suits, but it weirds me out.  I went into one general surgery lecture on laparoscopy over the years, being given by the chairmen of surgery at another program I interviewed with.  It was a great lecture, with a really terrific discussion of the trade-offs of laparoscopic procedures, especially with regard to surgical education.  I wanted to focus on Dr. F, and I really tried to.  But sitting 5 rows ahead of me was my chief and 3 other seniors, and I just kept thinking to myself, "Wow, their hair is shiny.  Is my hair that shiny?  Maybe it's shiny because they got dressed up today.  Or maybe it's always shiny, but they just look different in scrubs.  Or maybe it's that new haircut I'm seeing, 3rd seat over.  Or maybe it's the contrast of the hair with the sweater?  That is a sweet sweater.  I wish I had that sweater.  Can I get that sweater?  It looks so professional yet cool.  I want to be professional yet cool.  Maybe I need straight hair to look professional yet cool.  Oooh, inguinal hernia repair."  Repeat ad nauseum.

This seems especially shallow of me, since there was some sort of clusterf*** going down at the mother ship and several residents had to leave early so that several last minute cases could go forward.  The intern who was on the night before broke down in tears over a minor mistake that she made which had big consequences, and another intern had to leave to help take her home, since she was so sleep-deprived that she wasn't safe to drive.  Quite a few residents weren't able to come due to being on-call at other hospitals, and another resident didn't come because of internal issues.  I volunteered to stay till the end to take down all of the program's posters after judging, but mentally escaped into the "pantsuit: Hillary Clinton or lipstick lesbian?" debate.

I finally found escape from my shallowness in the cardiothoracic room, where my poster was being displayed, to hear a cool talk about management of nightmare aorta cases.  I was able to say hello to a few surgeons that I knew, including one I rotated with as a first year student in vascular surgery, and another with whom I had done my poster (yet hadn't met because he was at a different institution).  We didn't win any awards, but I still felt pretty proud of my poster at the end of the day.  I also felt proud of my team.