from 2010: And this is how anatomy is going...

from 2010: So, I finished my first dissection. The first day of dissection was this really bizarre mix of rabid fascination and sheer disgust. Skinning the gluteal muscles went really well. They're big; they're easy to differentiate. We then moved on to the back of the thigh and the popliteal area. The popliteal area (behind the knee) has a lot of deep fat no matter how thin your cadaver is, so there's a lot of digging involved with uncovering and differentiating structures. That was when I felt a pit in my stomach, a wrenched expression overtaking my face, and had to look away and breathe slowly.

That heinous feeling happened less with each dissecting session, until I finally got to where I can dig around with my fingers between musculature, tear away fat with abandon, and probe canals into other compartments of the body with nary a gag. By the time of our demo (where we present all the structures we've found and their functions in 10 minutes), I was handling the cadaver and its structures with gusto, if not reckless abandon.

By the way, the knee is weird. When I cut into the knee with the scalpel, it shed synovial fluid all over the place. It was clear, viscous, and alarmingly alive-seeming. I got to touch an ACL, PCL, MCL, and LCL. I really think differently about bodies even after dissecting just one section of a body.

And I have some new vocab words:
inguinal ligament
popliteal fossa
vastus intermedius
ascending circumflex artery
cruciate anastomosis
and about fifty more...

Tree shopping update. Finally went last night and it took about three times as long as it should have. By the end of the night, R and I were both pretty grumpy and KidM and KidV were, too. KidM ended up busting her lip and remaining top front tooth on her bed frame at 10 pm (yeah, she had just gone to bed...bad parent!).

Nonetheless, I hope everyone is gearing up for a delightful holiday. I have pared down my Christmas crafting ambitions to only dough ornaments and Christmas cookies. I hope to post pics once they're in progress. It may be Christmas day at this rate!

2010: Epic compassion fail

Mine.

Reminder: never presume. Never think you know a person from the outside. Again and again, I am reminded...but manage to forget in-between times. My latest epic compassion fail is too fresh to relate, so I'll deal with an old one partly to demonstrate that these failures are iterative in nature. Just when I think I am humble, I see clearly that I need to work on my compassion vigilance.

2020 note: Okay, no idea where I was going with this.

from 2010, Words of the Day:

1. Pamplemousse. R bought two bags of Pamplemousses (Pamplemoussen?) today.
2. Mitral Snap. The sound of the little strong cords that hold the cusps of the heart valve snapping when the heart valve has been stiffened in mitral stenosis (in this case from childhood rheumatic fever). I unwittingly called that sound "The S2 Split" and got a gentle smack-down from a very talented preceptor. Shoot. I thought S2 split was general. So much for impressing Dr. D.
3. Tyrannosaurus Rex. KidM's challenge word for tomorrow's spelling test. I had to check just now to see if it had two n's.
4. Match Day. Today is the day all the senior med students found out which residency they matched to. There was a ceremony in the atrium of our school at noon today, when the Eastern Time Zone folks found out (not sure if it's synchronized country-wide). All the envelopes with the assignments were laid out on a table and the seniors lined up in a semicircle to rush at them at the stroke of noon. I watched from above and cried at the shaking hands and proud families. Several small children attended today, and I thought to myself that KidM will be nine and KidV will be seven on our Match Day. They'll be big kids.

Actually, this whole word list was just so I could write "Pamplemousse."

All the best!

From 2010? Rainy Night in Georgia

My good friend LJ was recently complaining about the lack of reality in blogs she reads. She doesn't just want to hear the good stuff (see Garrison Keillor on the Season of Bragging (I haven't read that entire article, just remember GK doing a great bit on prairie home companion in which he parodies Christmas letters)

So, right now Our Family has the flu. I am supposed to be on this all-out board study schedule and yesterday I was too feverish to concentrate and today KidM was too sick for school and R is too sick to do all the things he normally does. So I have scrapped it.

2020 note: And Now Garrison Keillor has become infamous. :(

Happy Inauguration!

Here's what I think about when I think about Barack Obama as our president. I think about Albert Crump, William Jeffries, and K.K. Avery. These three highly capable natural leaders were in my ecology class in 2003. They did great on their class assignments and, each in his own way, won my heart over the first few weeks of school. After the first few weeks, I lost them all. I don't know what I did wrong but I lost them. I tried to get them back but the normal ways of talking and exhorting and questioning didn't work. Again, my fault I'm sure, but for whatever reason I just couldn't do it.

Anyway, I cried tears of hope and joy during Obama's inauguration in early 2009, partly because I hoped it would help someone could get Albert, K.K., and William back.

Father's Day, thinking about Pete. Maybe 2010

Maybe from 2010: I got flooded with thoughts to write out day-before-yesterday while running, but I now have only the vaguest memory of what they were and how they connected with one another...I'll do my best.

Something about generosity. Something about human limitations. Turn the corner, fly down the gully, creep up the other side...Oh, yeah. Father's Day is coming up. I feel like I eternally have a load on my mind that I want to tell Pete, who has been a father to me. I feel like I want to half-nudge him, half-goad him into seeing just what he has meant to me and how superhuman his grace towards me and acceptance of me as his own charge have been. Peoples' conceptions of God are supposedly limited by the models their fathers provide. For instance, people who have been abandoned by a father, abused by a father, or lied to by a father often have trouble trusting that God will be present, benevolent, or honest.

Pete has covered over a multitude of wrongs just by loving and accepting me. All I can say is, I trust that God will be present, benevolent, and honest...probably because of Pete. He could've left. He could've accepted me a little, but not completely. He could've held any number of things against me. Pete suggested in the past that those options would be unthinkable. Because he loves me.

There was more that I deleted. I guess this was just the beginning of something bigger.

2010? early med school phase.

 This must have been 2010.

To write about what's ACTUALLY happening in a completely unsanitized forum. I haven't been completely honest here because I don't want to discourage or worry those who are supporting me...but this is one of the hardest things I've ever done.

To say the role adjustment has been difficult would be a massive understatement. R has taken on the traditional single working mom role, which sucks for anyone who does it. Then we have a dynamic in our marriage that I thought we put to rest and banished (with lots of dying to self and changing of ways) years ago: I control/backseat drive/criticize and he overreacts, defends disproportionately and resents. You could put his stuff first because there are times when he misses the mark by a country mile (which he'll admit retrospectively) and when I express legitimate frustration, he does his half. But I'll put me first because me being irritated first is how it begins some unknown percentage of the time. I wish someone would mic our house and press record when we argued so we'd know exactly what happened. I think we'd both be shocked.

Anyway, this last month saw me freaking out because he was cloudy and stormy and I have been under a constant guilt burden since beginning this med school thing. It isn't just hard, it is painful to let go of my cooking, my homework help, my management of behavior, my cleaning (I really only enjoy an hour or two per week of cleaning, but I actually get a fresh feeling about life after I have organized/ cleaned (controlled) everything)).

Anyway. It's been hard. there's been some shouting. I have lapsed into some of my more self-destructive behaviors at times. I've been staring at the screen occasionally, or at a book, or at notes, utterly incapable of making my mind move over them.

But I do love this cardiology stuff. There's a lot of practical skill involved. Speaking of which, I'd better end this navel-gazing session pronto and resume in a week.

All my best to whoever cares enough to read this.

Maine post...Late 2011? Early 2012?

Sorry about the light pole.

This is a light pole in Portland, Maine.  I took over 500 digital photos yesterday while driving and walking around Portland.  Unfortunately, none of them are really that good - my purpose was to document quickly to show Richie who could not be here with me. I'd add more but the slow internet deters me.

I keep thinking of New England imagery I've encountered, mostly from reading children's books to M and V: Alice and Martin Provensen, 


 Where the sap rises and you can eat a green bean and the lake is frozen over.

There's What Happens in the Spring,With Tracy (the boy) and Killian (the Irish Wolfhound)...both of whom enjoy watching the details of spring unfolding around them.

Rosemary Wells makes ample use of New England imagery:


There's One Morning in Maine:


Finally, Winslow Homer - who has his own museum in Portland.

Maine is beautiful.
These artists evoke the Maine I saw far more effectively than any of the photos I took.
Amazing how that can be.  That's one of the zillion reasons why art is important.