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2003-01-20 - 6:32 a.m.
I'm sort of embarrassed that Saturday's lame entry stayed up for so long, so I'm typing in here now as a cover. I actually have quite a bit to say, I just don't have much time to say it. I have rounds in a few minutes. It's a holiday so they don't start until seven.
Yesterday I worked ops all day. It was a very long day. The other pharmacist working with me was Howard. Howard who greatly prefers shooting the breeze to actually working and absolutely detests answering the phone. Which means that I entered 3/4 of the orders and answered 80% of the phone calls. I took a 15 minute lunch break and while I was gone he didn't do a single thing. He just let the work pile up. On top of all that I am still sick and my nose would not stop running. I was working on my third box of tissues when it was time to go home. My poor little nose is bright red from so much blowing. Not that I'm complaining (nooo, I never complain...), I'm just explaining why Saturday's lame entry remained up for so long.
Before I left last night I paged the SGI team to find out when rounds were going to be today. No one ever answered my page while I was at work. I went home, ate dinner, downed some Nyquil, and went to bed. At nine o'clock I was awakened by my pager going off. I know that no one at work would page me that late so it would have to be one of my fellow pharmacy residents paging me to ask me something of a more personal nature...or, as my little brain slowly processed the given information, it could also be the SGI team finally returning my page. And that's who it was. I got out of bed and called them back and found out that rounds aren't until late today. She apologized for taking so long to return my page explaining that she was in a procedure. That's sort of scary. I was sound asleep and she was doing a procedure. How do medical residents function on so little sleep? I groggily but happily adjusted my alarm clock to reflect my later departure time and then layed my head back on the pillow and promptly returned to that lovely state we call sleep.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what I'm going to do with my life after this June when my residency is over. I want to talk about that, but I have to get myself upstairs now. Hopefully I'll have a chance to come back here to add more.
**********Do you know what I find annoying? People who don't respond to e-mails, or at least act on them. I guess that makes me annoying too since I have several unresponded-to e-mails sitting in my inbox right now. But that's not my point. The point is that last Tuesday I e-mailed the Mole the minutes to the residents' meeting so he could approve them so I can send them out, but he has yet to do so. Everyone else now thinks I'm slacking in my chiefly duties. Also, last Wednesday I sent the schedule lady all the residents' new schedules. Today, the new staff schedule was posted and it still had all the old residents' schedules on it. Again, argh! And do you know what else I realized this morning as I was showering? I realized that now that I am doing clinic on Fridays I will no longer be able to sleep in on Thursdays which means that staying up late on Wednesday evenings to play volleyball is going to be a bit tougher. I'm still going to do it, though. I told Kevin I would. And I want to, darn it! The medical students and some of the medical residents have today off because of the holiday. Rounding with me today were the attending, the chief resident, and two junior residents. It was actually pretty cool. I talked with the attending a bit. He was asking me questions about pharmacy residency. Everyone finds it so novel. He was curious why I was required to be here on a holiday. I didn't know. I just am. Then he asked me how long am I required to be here. I told him I'm required to be here eight hours a day five days a week but I'm usually here twelve hours a day six days a week. Which set him off about how Americans are overworked. He is not from America. He made the statement that people who are paid by the hour will stay extra hours to finish up projects while people who are paid a salary will not stay extra hours. We were interrupted before I could disagree. It seems to me that people who are paid by the hour don't work extra hours because no one wants to pay them overtime. People paid a salary will work extra hours because they want to get the project done. Yesterday at work I was very hot. I probably had a fever. So I stripped down to the bare essentials. I hung my lab coat on the back of my chair. Unfortunately, it is long and I forgot about it and rolled over it with my chair. It is now very dirty. And it is a holiday so I don't think I can get a clean one until tomorrow. I feel like such a slob.********** It turns out that the laundry people have to work holidays too. I once again have a clean lab coat. I also have the creasedness of a newbie, but that will soon fade.Someone made the mistake of putting a bunch of Dove dark chocolate into the candy dish in pharmacy administration. I love dark chocolate. It is one of my weaknesses. If left to my own devices with an unlimited supply of dark chocolate I would likely eat it until my stomach popped. And then I would be sad because I couldn't eat it anymore. Fortunately (in this case), I am seldom left to my own devices and I've yet to find myself an unlimited supply of dark chocolate, so this is unlikely to happen. There are two job opportunities that I've been looking into recently. I've mentioned them both in this journal before. Both of them are not at all what anyone who knows me would expect me to do. One of them is a much more real possibility than the other one though. I wish I didn't care so much what other people think. It's funny, in day to day life I don't really care what people think of me. It's the big things that I care about. For example, I don't think I would ever be able to give up on pharmacy because everyone would be so disappointed. Either that or they would have confirmation of their opinion that I'm about as useful as a lump on a log. I don't think I could stand that. Or if I was gay (sorry, extreme example here) I don't think I'd ever be able to come out because I'd care too much what people think. But anyway, last week I received a letter in the mail. It was from the owner of Quincy Drug. He is still looking for a pharmacist. This letter listed out pay, benefits, and work schedule. Let's just say that all three of those things were considerably nicer than I had expected from a small town independently owned pharmacy. I'm considering doing it. I have this vision of me in a little house in this mountain town with my pick-up truck and a big dog that I take jogging with me every morning around the valley. My grandfather owns about five acres of land on the outskirts of town. I could eventually build my own house there and help clean it up. Being the pharmacist in a small town I would know almost everybody and everyone would like me and trust me. But of course there are drawbacks. First of all, I never wanted to do community pharmacy, especially not in an independent. If I worked there I would quickly lose any critical care skills I may have and would probably never be able to go back. Which is fine, if I like it there, why leave? But this day and age is not friendly to independent pharmacies. Insurance companies rarely pay enough to even cover the acquisition cost of the drug, especially to independents who don't have any weight when making deals. It's possible that this store won't last much longer which would leave me high and dry as there are unlikely to be other pharmacy openings in such a small town and I would be stuck doing community pharmacy because all my hospital skills would be gone. However, due to the fact that it is a small mountain town, it does have the advantage of geographical monopoly so competition from chain stores would be less intense. There is a Rite Aid in town, though. Also, living in this town are family members of mine. My grandfather is fine, but there are also my uncle and my cousin. My uncle is (let's see...12 years younger than my dad who is 5 years older than my mom who is 30 years older than me and I'm 24 but we'll say 23 for the sake of this calculation making my mom 53, my dad 58 and my uncle...) 46 years old, is single, lives in his parents' house, and bears a striking resemblence to Grizzly Adams. Nice enough man, but severely lacking in brain power. My cousin is three months older than me. Granted, he did not have a pleasant childhood due to the fact that both of his parents are nuts, but lots of people survive that ok. He never graduated from high school, has been married twice, has three kids (that I know of), is living on disability, has been in jail several times, and grows pot (the details of which I refuse to know). So if I move there, I'm inextricably associated with them. But I could deal with that. The other big problem, were I to stay in this town, is finding a guy and starting a family. What are the odds of finding him in such a small town? And if I find him somewhere outside of town, what are the odds the he would want (or be able) to move into this town with me? And then, if all that happened and I actually had a family, my kids would be growing up in such a behind-the-times little place. My dad grew up there and when he went to college he didn't know how to use a phone without a crank! They could end up like Stretch and be scared to drive on roads with more than two lanes. But that isn't so horrible and it's also preventable if I try hard enough. The problem is getting a man in the first place. So what do you think? If I worked there I would be financially well off with a very decent work schedule living a slow-paced life in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Wouldn't it be ironic that I would be running away to the place where my dad ran away from?**********I fixed it! The problem with my site that probably no one else in the world noticed but was bugging the heck out of me has now been fixed. Phew!Someone found their way to my journal through a search for "suffregettes." I bet that person was sorely disappointed. I also got a bid on one of the items I listed on Swappingtons. So I'm sending that out tomorrow and I actually have some points now! No thanks to my readers who did not sign themselves up using my referral...hee hee. Since I got some points I also made a bid on another item. Is this getting exciting or what?
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