The zipper

2003-01-13 - 11:44 a.m.

Ok, so this morning at five to six I was up on the eighth floor waiting for rounds to start. My team, however, was nowhere to be found. I worked a bit on a few old patients that were still in the hospital after the weekend, but basically I had nothing to do. And where was the team? At quarter after six the team piled off the elevator and started rounding on the eighth floor. I walked up and joined them. One of the medical students who I actually met while doing my pediatric rotation leaned over to me and said, "We're starting at 5:30 now." I responded intelligently, "5:30?" She said, "Yeah, and we're starting from the bottom and working our way up." Me, again showing off my mental prowess, "The bottom?" "Yeah, we started on SI-1." So I missed the greater half of rounds this morning and discovered that my day will now begin a half hour earlier. Not that I'm complaining. Well, I am a little bit. I really don't mind getting up early. It's the going to bed so early that's a problem. It seems unnatural to have 8:00 as a bedtime.

Kevin called again yesterday. He was calling to see if I could make it to the game this Wednesday. The game starts at 9pm. I told him I couldn't make it. He tried to guilt-trip me a bit, but I stuck to my guns. I can go to all the games after this one though, because the rest of them start between 6 and 8. Also he invited me to go to an open gym tonight. I think I will go to that. It will be an opportunity to meet my team. But I also promised my dad I would go running with him. I'm thinking I should be able to do both. Go running then go play some ball for an hour or so. But that sort of takes up all my time for dinner. Ah well. We'll see. Wouldn't it be fun to have time to have a life?

Last Thursday the Mole paged me away from my lunch to make sure that I filled out a self-evaluation form about my performance in clinic by today. So today, like a good little resident, I had it all filled out and I tried to give it to him. He took one look and shouted, "Don't give me that!" as if it were toxic, loud enough to turn heads. I was a tad confused so I said, "This is the self-evaluation you asked me to fill out." He said, "I know, but I haven't filled out mine yet." Damn, my mind-reading skills must be getting rusty. I know I should just accept that as part of the way he is, but his over-reactions to every little thing really get on my nerves sometimes. I had several other things to talk to him about, but he already seemed on edge for some unknown reason so I decided to just leave him alone.

The other thing that has been bugging me recently is the situation with the residents' desks down in adminstration. We have four pharmacy practice residents at my hospital. For the four of us we have two desks and two computers. We also have one infectious disease pharmacy specialty resident. She has taken over one of the desks and one of the computers. Completely buried it in piles of journals and papers and what not. So that leaves one desk and one computer for four residents. On top of that, there are several pharmacists who see our desk space as space claimed by people lower down on the totem pole than themselves and therefore available to be taken. I often drop by the residents' desk to do some work only to be turned away because there isn't a square inch available. The problem is that the people who steal our space happen to be people that I like so I can't bring myself to ask them to go away. So I wind up here in the library where deskspace and computers are plentiful.

Last night I had another dream. I was in the 2nd grade but I was the same age I am now and so was everyone else. Also we were learning to become fighter pilots. First I fought with classmates over how long I could use the water fountain, complete with 5 Mississippis, being called a water buffalo, and being told to save some for the whales. Then I hopped in my jet. It was top of the line, brand new. It was called a "Zipper." Yup, it zipped. In fact, it went so fast that I had trouble staying on this planet. Yup. I would go straight ahead and be almost out of the Earth's atmosphere before I could get it turned to follow the curvature of the Earth. Yee-haw, that was fun!