On a cross country drive there's a lot of time to think about why you're doing what you're doing. In the larger scheme of things, but also in the moment--like, why are we driving all day long? I think that that thought is one of the reasons to love long drives. Caitlin, my partner on the road, mentioned a meditative exercise where you sit and concentrate on sensation starting from your toes moving up, so that you become acutely aware of yourself piece by piece. Watching long stretches of road feels similar. You notice sudden and subtle changes in the landscape, and in the position of your arms and legs, and in how much sun is coming through the window to warm your skin. There are moments too when you lose attention altogether, which is nice too.
Caitlin and I both have clinical rotations on Indian health reservations in the Southwest for the month of October. She's doing ob-gyn in Gallup New Mexico, and I'm doing primary care in Chinle Arizona. Both places are in the middle of nowhere, hours from the nearest airport in Albuquerque. The cities are two hours from each other, and we planned on driving from Connecticut to the Southwest together since the end of summer, though most of our few concrete plans were made in the week before leaving. Another thing to love about drives, the freedom and flexibility and living out of the car and not having to carry stuff and worry too much about packaging.
The drive took us way down south on 95 (I had no idea 95 went so far), into regions of the country I'd never seen before. I've wanted to see the South for awhile, not because I had any appealing images of it but because I had no images of it at all. After a night in Maryland we drove through North Carolina, stayed along the coast in Charleston South Carolina and Savannah Georgia, saw Alabama and Mississippi through the car windows, spent a full day in New Orleans, drove along an L-shaped route through Louisiana to reach Dallas for a night, drove across a lot of nothing to get to the next Texan city of Amarillo, and completed a drive across the whole of Texas and the beginnings of New Mexico to arrive at Albuquerque.
To describe the South is hard, after such sensory overload in a new place; and unfair, after such a brief glimpse. But with those caveats, I think it's worth sharing. Driving from Maryland and Virginia into the Carolinas, the weather changed palpably from cold rain to warm yellow. I saw cotton fields for the first time; in Georgia we stopped to pick some, probably illegally; in Texas we were surprised to see miles of cotton and picked those as well. Caitlin had said they smelled like earth, and she was right, and Georgia earth smelled different from Texas earth. Against all overexposure and desensitization, I always feel pleasant surprise at seeing pure white lying so low to the ground (snow, salt, cotton).
We met Charleston SC at nighttime, where the homes have long wide columns, side porches, gates guarding gardens and fountains, and painted family portraits visible through windows. The street and house lamps burn real fire, and the trees and gates stand close to the homes, creating quietly gorgeous shadows. After the night sun takes over for the fire, though they keep the fire during through daylight too. Savannah was more developed and less striking than Charleston, but we did find plenty of magnolia trees, oak trees, and Spanish moss hanging off the oak trees. The drive through Georgia was populated by peach tree orchards, baby pine farms, and lots and lots of cotton.
I fell asleep for a good chunk of the drive through Alabama, due to the sun and to the Faulkner audio book playing in the car (Light in August: worthy to read and very Southern, but listening to books read aloud by strangers hasn't grown on me yet). I went to my first Waffle House in Alabama, and I remember Mississippi being very pretty with its water and expansive fields, and I also remember this day being a daze of a drive. Once in New Orleans, Caitlin snapped me out of it with rapid fire commentary on every street, home and billboard in her hometown. She took me round to all the good eats (crepes, beignets which I called French doughnuts which offended someone, ice cream, burgers & milkshakes), and drove me down St. Charles and her favorite street and Bourbon St in the French Quarter, stopping every few moments so I could take pictures of the incredible houses and balconies. She also introduced me to her tall kind lovely parents, showed me turtles in her favorite park, had our hair cut at her go-to hair salon, and had our pictures taken in a photobooth at a local bar; these parts were best for being specific to her and her home.
From there we had a long drive to Dallas; we didn't have much time to see the city, but we had our own kind of experience through Texas as we drove from there to New Mexico. Between Dallas and Amarillo there is a whole lot of nothing, and it was the first time on the trip that we felt like we were in the middle of nowhere, with mostly trucks on the road and no rest stops for a hundred miles at a time and speed limits of 80 and skies absolutely clear (we saw exactly one cloud). There is something really calming about driving across entire states, sensing both the immensity of things and the fluidity of lines. This made for the best day of the trip, with a soothingly empty landscape of concentrated red dust on either side of us, sometimes suddenly broken by unusual beauty--small sunflowers growing like weeds, a cluster of leaveless trees with gnarled branches, a dilapidated farm house, a field of what we'd call ranch country, stretches of what we called prairie grass--lightly tinged at the top with maroon and purple in a way that seemed unreal, in the way that its faint color could make you feel so much. There was also an adult video store every so often, standing on its own with nothing for miles before and after, because as Caitlin said, even the middle of nowhere needs that.
Once we arrived in Amarillo, we had our Texan experience over the course of five miles and an hour, none of which had been planned (we'd only known that Amarillo was the only city besides Dallas that showed up on our Google map route). This included a huge tacky road-side shop with a sign claiming "everything really is bigger in Texas" and a huge cowboy boot for evidence; breezing through a big warehouse of cowboy boots; a glance inside Hooters (neither of us had been to one and thought TX was a fitting place for our first venture); and a stop at Cadillac Ranch, a public art installation of ten Cadillacs vertically half-buried into the ground that people are free to spray-paint with whatever they fancy as they road-trip across Texas.
Then we were off for more flat landscape (this was our longest day, roughly 12 hours from start of driving to end) until we entered New Mexico, where the land changed dramatically to flat-topped canyons and crumbly ground sprinkled with little bushes. We arrived little before sunset, and drove until dark when the sky became dense with stars, and the outlines of mountains blended into black so that you had to squint to see if they were there. I've been to New Mexico before, but entering it this way felt new. We drove fast in the dark blasting pop songs, and when we got into a neighborhood we stopped at a stop sign and got out of the car to dance outside barefoot (until a car came up behind us and we raced back).
I looked back at something I wrote on the cross country trip I took a few years ago: "When in your life you feel both brave and unsure and open to emptiness, drive across your country with your Thelma." Still believing this to be true, I know I'm lucky to be able to 1) feel this way, and 2) act on it; to not be stuck or closed in feeling or movement. We ended our trip with the hot air balloon fiesta in Albuquerque, getting up at 3 AM to catch the balloons inflating and rising from the heat of fire. It was funny to watch things float and fly after so many days on ground, funnier that I was content to stay in place. Until we left again.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
editing
My few weeks of nothing is coming to a close, as I ready for a cross country drive to Arizona, where I'll be doing a primary care rotation for a month. Probably because my mind is preparing and no longer in cruise control, I've come to the realization that these past weeks were more editing and maintenance than writing and moving forward.
In one respect, I enjoyed that a lot. Often I relish editing someone else's words more than forming my own. It's less taxing in a lot of ways that writing can be frustrating, and it can also be its own sort of challenge, as I found anew while working with the patient for my project on her personal story. On first read, you might think that it required a lot of reworking, both structurally and textually. In terms of structure, it wasn't something I could shape just by removing repetitions and grouping similar details. That's the first step, but just a concrete one, and if anything solid is to come from that, I had to understand what the author wanted to say. The same goes for nuances of text, choosing words etc. But in terms of that, I found it a really interesting and satisfying endeavor to keep her words while trying to manipulate the presentation of the words to better convey what she wanted. Again, on first read the story would be taken as undeveloped in terms of style, but I found myself falling in love with her simple narration, very much a mental print of memories as they came to her. I liked the sense that this was her, and didn't feel compelled use or add different words, which would change this sense.
Figuring out what she wanted of course was the most important, and this isn't straightforward. I can most definitely relate to writing without consciously knowing my purpose. So this grew out of a lot of conversation, questions, and reading versions of the story as things were concretely refined. And in those, I found that her words supplied both structure and text, and overall purpose. Everything added was added in the raw form that she gave it, and then it was a matter of placement and detail.
She had begun the story all because of the fact that she had known this person, and she ended it feeling that she hadn't really known the person at all. To go through that process with her and be able to document and express that process, it made me feel again how natural it is to want to shape narratives, how complex and fulfilling the effort can be.
It was also a pleasure to speak to someone who has experienced worlds and lands so vastly different from the ones she occupies now; to see in one person how much can be had in a life. It makes me feel less caught up in doing the things I wanted to do during these weeks, makes me feel all right with letting experiences happen and unfold as they come, to feel less lame for expending energy on simply maintaining the things in my life that take me places without actually going any place (car, camera, body). Just continuing can bring newness and fullness, and even though I've done almost no writing at all in this period, maybe sometime in the near future my words will come as simply and clearly as hers.
In one respect, I enjoyed that a lot. Often I relish editing someone else's words more than forming my own. It's less taxing in a lot of ways that writing can be frustrating, and it can also be its own sort of challenge, as I found anew while working with the patient for my project on her personal story. On first read, you might think that it required a lot of reworking, both structurally and textually. In terms of structure, it wasn't something I could shape just by removing repetitions and grouping similar details. That's the first step, but just a concrete one, and if anything solid is to come from that, I had to understand what the author wanted to say. The same goes for nuances of text, choosing words etc. But in terms of that, I found it a really interesting and satisfying endeavor to keep her words while trying to manipulate the presentation of the words to better convey what she wanted. Again, on first read the story would be taken as undeveloped in terms of style, but I found myself falling in love with her simple narration, very much a mental print of memories as they came to her. I liked the sense that this was her, and didn't feel compelled use or add different words, which would change this sense.
Figuring out what she wanted of course was the most important, and this isn't straightforward. I can most definitely relate to writing without consciously knowing my purpose. So this grew out of a lot of conversation, questions, and reading versions of the story as things were concretely refined. And in those, I found that her words supplied both structure and text, and overall purpose. Everything added was added in the raw form that she gave it, and then it was a matter of placement and detail.
She had begun the story all because of the fact that she had known this person, and she ended it feeling that she hadn't really known the person at all. To go through that process with her and be able to document and express that process, it made me feel again how natural it is to want to shape narratives, how complex and fulfilling the effort can be.
It was also a pleasure to speak to someone who has experienced worlds and lands so vastly different from the ones she occupies now; to see in one person how much can be had in a life. It makes me feel less caught up in doing the things I wanted to do during these weeks, makes me feel all right with letting experiences happen and unfold as they come, to feel less lame for expending energy on simply maintaining the things in my life that take me places without actually going any place (car, camera, body). Just continuing can bring newness and fullness, and even though I've done almost no writing at all in this period, maybe sometime in the near future my words will come as simply and clearly as hers.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
perspective
This morning I walked home with my pockets empty, no keys to let me in my house. Luckily my roommate was home, and at the time I figured I had left my keys and the attached red pouch, with my license, credit cards and ID, inside. But once inside, they were nowhere to be found: purse, backpack, desk and countertops scoured without find. I remembered that I had used the keys to lock the door, then had returned to grab something from my room, so I knew that if I'd left the keys in the house after the return, they would be either in 1) the door, or 2) somewhere visible I would've tossed them, like a table or dresser or the bed. They were in none of these places.
Which left my trajectory from after leaving my place to returning to it. After the keys' last use, I got on the handlebars of his bike; he thought it was safer than walking in the dark with the bike. I had a bookish childhood in which I never learned to ride a bicycle, much less ride on the handlebars, and I was hesitant. The streets were newly damp from fresh rain, still warm in the late summer/early fall. It smelled clear, but the air had the presence of humidity dissolving after the rain, one of my favorite weathers. I leaned back for more balance, and braced my face against his. It was late with pockets of quiet, and pockets of silent sirens where streetlights had gone out, so that his breaths felt close. I'm so used to the New Haven street wanderers and police cars that the visuals of danger don't incite much, and I felt safe flowing by in a breeze.
Not being able to find my keys and wallet the next day, the only other possibility was that they had fallen on this ride. Despite not being fazed by red and blue lights, I knew that if they had fallen in this part of New Haven they were pretty much lost to me. But I tracked my way back, this time on foot, and when strangers tried to make conversation with me (I learned that the large man who sits on the porch of the big green house is Aaron), I even asked them if they'd seen my keys. I went back to his house and rummaged those rooms too, and then scanned the streets again on my way back. Nothing. On the way back, I stopped at the Yale Security Office, who gave me the number to the central security office, who gave me the number to the Yale police, who gave me the number to the New Haven police--all of whom were very nice, none of whom had seen my stuff.
So I came back home with my roommate's keys. I called my friend who has a copy of my car key. I brought these to the locksmith kitty corner from our place, who said they wouldn't be back until 12:45. So I went back home, and canceled my credit card and my ATM debit card. I looked up how to get another driver's license, and realized that it's a bitch to do from across country, and called home to ask my parents to go to the DMV in California, and see if they could fill out the forms there for me. I went back to the locksmith, still closed at 12:45, and decided to go to our landlord down the street to see if I could get a copy of our house keys. I could, for $25. I headed back to the locksmith for my car key, still closed at 1:00. So I walked to campus to get a new Yale ID, for $20, paid for by cash borrowed from my friend. Walking back I passed the locksmith, who was finally open, but who could not copy my car key because it has a chip in it. Instead, I had to go to a locksmith in West Haven, 15 minutes away. After calling them first to make sure they could make a copy of my key, I drove over there, where they made me a copy for $35. I handed them the one credit card I had that hadn't been in my nowhere-to-be-found wallet, and they handed it back to me: "Um, this is expired." Only $7 in cash left, no other cards, no friends nearby--shit shit shit. I got back in my car, maneuvered it in the small awkward parking lot, called Bank of America who told me to get a temporary ATM at the bank, then backed my car back up into a spot, and went back to the locksmith to ask if there was a nearby Bank of America. I drove several minutes down to it, where they told me I couldn't get a temporary card since my account had been open in CA, and here we are in CT. But I could still get cash with a photo ID and my SSN; I had an old license that has expired, but luckily now I also had a new Yale ID. So I withdrew some cash, went back to the locksmith, and got my new car key.
On the drive home my parents called and told me they couldn't get a license for me; I had to be present at the DMV in California, so that they could take a new photograph and attain my fingerprints. I won't be back in CA until December, and I'm driving cross country and back before that happens; a license would be useful.
I came home, and sighed.
The one thing I couldn't recover was the least important, the coffeeshop card with which I'd ranked up almost enough coffees to get a free one. After the day's escapades I escaped to the coffeeshop, told them I'd lost the card and could I get a new one? It turns out they had my name in the computer, with my records and that this coffee would be my free one. So I upgraded from small to large, and told them that this was the first thing I'd lost that I'd gotten back without effort or expense.
As I settled down with my large drink to write about this, I received a call from my other roommate. I had called her in the morning to see if she'd seen my keys in the door. But I didn't see them anywhere in the house where she might have placed them, and she hadn't called me to tell me she'd found them, so I figured this hadn't happened. It turns out that it had; she had found them in the door, taken them with her, and wasn't able to call me until later this evening. After I spent the day replacing things I don't even really want back but "need" in some form.
If someone were to ask me hypothetically, whether I'd go through all that, to have wasted over four hours and eighty dollars, all because I sat atop handlebars of a bike ridden by a silly sweet boy whose face I could feel the whole time, I (like anyone else) would say no. And it's not something that logically follows; I didn't need to lose all my things, scrounge to replace them, eventually find that I'd never lost them--none of that needed to happen in order for me to have that ride. It could've happened, and I could've kept my stuff at the same time. But the comparison changes perspective. Having a nice moment is one thing, and having its niceness sustain itself through moments of not-so-niceness is another. Knowing how little the inconvenience of those four hours of wasted time and money will matter to me tomorrow, and feeling how those four minutes with him will last, I would have to say yes, it was worth it, to really feel what's close to me and what's not.
Which left my trajectory from after leaving my place to returning to it. After the keys' last use, I got on the handlebars of his bike; he thought it was safer than walking in the dark with the bike. I had a bookish childhood in which I never learned to ride a bicycle, much less ride on the handlebars, and I was hesitant. The streets were newly damp from fresh rain, still warm in the late summer/early fall. It smelled clear, but the air had the presence of humidity dissolving after the rain, one of my favorite weathers. I leaned back for more balance, and braced my face against his. It was late with pockets of quiet, and pockets of silent sirens where streetlights had gone out, so that his breaths felt close. I'm so used to the New Haven street wanderers and police cars that the visuals of danger don't incite much, and I felt safe flowing by in a breeze.
Not being able to find my keys and wallet the next day, the only other possibility was that they had fallen on this ride. Despite not being fazed by red and blue lights, I knew that if they had fallen in this part of New Haven they were pretty much lost to me. But I tracked my way back, this time on foot, and when strangers tried to make conversation with me (I learned that the large man who sits on the porch of the big green house is Aaron), I even asked them if they'd seen my keys. I went back to his house and rummaged those rooms too, and then scanned the streets again on my way back. Nothing. On the way back, I stopped at the Yale Security Office, who gave me the number to the central security office, who gave me the number to the Yale police, who gave me the number to the New Haven police--all of whom were very nice, none of whom had seen my stuff.
So I came back home with my roommate's keys. I called my friend who has a copy of my car key. I brought these to the locksmith kitty corner from our place, who said they wouldn't be back until 12:45. So I went back home, and canceled my credit card and my ATM debit card. I looked up how to get another driver's license, and realized that it's a bitch to do from across country, and called home to ask my parents to go to the DMV in California, and see if they could fill out the forms there for me. I went back to the locksmith, still closed at 12:45, and decided to go to our landlord down the street to see if I could get a copy of our house keys. I could, for $25. I headed back to the locksmith for my car key, still closed at 1:00. So I walked to campus to get a new Yale ID, for $20, paid for by cash borrowed from my friend. Walking back I passed the locksmith, who was finally open, but who could not copy my car key because it has a chip in it. Instead, I had to go to a locksmith in West Haven, 15 minutes away. After calling them first to make sure they could make a copy of my key, I drove over there, where they made me a copy for $35. I handed them the one credit card I had that hadn't been in my nowhere-to-be-found wallet, and they handed it back to me: "Um, this is expired." Only $7 in cash left, no other cards, no friends nearby--shit shit shit. I got back in my car, maneuvered it in the small awkward parking lot, called Bank of America who told me to get a temporary ATM at the bank, then backed my car back up into a spot, and went back to the locksmith to ask if there was a nearby Bank of America. I drove several minutes down to it, where they told me I couldn't get a temporary card since my account had been open in CA, and here we are in CT. But I could still get cash with a photo ID and my SSN; I had an old license that has expired, but luckily now I also had a new Yale ID. So I withdrew some cash, went back to the locksmith, and got my new car key.
On the drive home my parents called and told me they couldn't get a license for me; I had to be present at the DMV in California, so that they could take a new photograph and attain my fingerprints. I won't be back in CA until December, and I'm driving cross country and back before that happens; a license would be useful.
I came home, and sighed.
The one thing I couldn't recover was the least important, the coffeeshop card with which I'd ranked up almost enough coffees to get a free one. After the day's escapades I escaped to the coffeeshop, told them I'd lost the card and could I get a new one? It turns out they had my name in the computer, with my records and that this coffee would be my free one. So I upgraded from small to large, and told them that this was the first thing I'd lost that I'd gotten back without effort or expense.
As I settled down with my large drink to write about this, I received a call from my other roommate. I had called her in the morning to see if she'd seen my keys in the door. But I didn't see them anywhere in the house where she might have placed them, and she hadn't called me to tell me she'd found them, so I figured this hadn't happened. It turns out that it had; she had found them in the door, taken them with her, and wasn't able to call me until later this evening. After I spent the day replacing things I don't even really want back but "need" in some form.
If someone were to ask me hypothetically, whether I'd go through all that, to have wasted over four hours and eighty dollars, all because I sat atop handlebars of a bike ridden by a silly sweet boy whose face I could feel the whole time, I (like anyone else) would say no. And it's not something that logically follows; I didn't need to lose all my things, scrounge to replace them, eventually find that I'd never lost them--none of that needed to happen in order for me to have that ride. It could've happened, and I could've kept my stuff at the same time. But the comparison changes perspective. Having a nice moment is one thing, and having its niceness sustain itself through moments of not-so-niceness is another. Knowing how little the inconvenience of those four hours of wasted time and money will matter to me tomorrow, and feeling how those four minutes with him will last, I would have to say yes, it was worth it, to really feel what's close to me and what's not.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
what i'm doing
I've finished my month of subinternship and am in the midst of a month in between rotations. I'll be starting a primary care rotation in October, but in the meantime, when people ask what I'm doing, I usually say, nothing. Which is both true and not true. It's true that I'm not assigned a particular rotation, don't have a routine schedule, and don't have any concrete tasks to accomplish each day or even by the end of the month that anyone is going to check on. And it's true that I've prioritized getting enough sleep, food, exercise, and time with people above all else, which can generally qualify as what's commonly regarded as nothing, as it's not work. But it's not true that I don't have goals to work towards during this time. This block of time was blocked off for research and writing, both endeavors with less concrete goals than this past month.
The last month of being in the hospital was absolutely worth the time and work (of which there was an incredible amount), and I loved it more than I thought I would (in the beginning I was mostly terrified). The structure, mindset, and general atmosphere are very different than my current state, though. Being in the hospital is about treating acute problems, accomplishing tasks: figuring out a diagnosis, ordering the right medicine, filing out the right paperwork, presenting numbers. You work patients up for their problems, you try your best to make them better, and then you discharge them from the hospital. In the gaps and in the broader scheme there are all the other things that make a good doctor, that are more abstract and less straightforward, but the day to day is about getting stuff done.
Which isn't the case with research and writing, both of which I've been working on this past week, without much visible to show for it.
In terms of research, I developed a project that is more about knowing patients than attaining data, which is a difficult thing to 1) do and 2) measure. The general gist is that I want to speak to terminally ill patients who have transitioned from care with goals of cure, to care with goals of quality of life. In the hospital we're good at acute care and quantifiable results, but not as good with transitions that happen over time and aren't easily communicated. I think it's important to know what factors play into patients being ready for this transition, so that we know when and how to talk to them about it, so that care is focused on minimizing suffering, not so much maximizing breathing time.
The first patient I interviewed is dying from lung cancer and had been admitted to the hospice unit of the VA. He was very open to speaking with me but was breathing so heavily, with few gaps between large gasps, that he couldn't talk for longer than a few minutes. When I came back the next day, it was only worse. So nothing came about from those efforts, in terms of my project. But it reminded me of what it's like to see someone actively dying, and of what I want to learn in this process.
My second interview was an actual interview, with a lovely 88 year old woman with lymphoma. She had very developed thoughts about her life and death, and was very comfortable talking about them, so the outcome was completely different from my previous attempt. Another thing I wanted to explore was personal writing, and to have patients journal about their experiences at the end of life, because that can be so different than what someone is able to share in a conversation with a doctor. So at the end of the interview I asked the woman if she'd be interested in participating in something like that. She said that she can't really write due to arthritis, but she had been working awhile ago on a story about her childhood. She brought out several pages of yellow lined paper, and asked if I wanted to read it. We talked about typing it up and having me help her finish it.
So I took the pages home to read and transcribe. Several of them are numbered the same number, such that the order was hard to determine, and as I read through them I realized that's because she had written several different beginnings. Throughout there are some anecdotes told in slightly different ways, so that in typing up the story, I had to maneuver some passages, putting the similar ones side by side, so that she could decide which parts of the same story she wanted to keep, discard, combine. During some particularly difficult parts to decipher, where reading continuously didn't seem to give a sensible narrative, I saw that she'd written in every other line, and in the lines in between added other parts of the story. All of this required some rearranging as I read and typed, and I liked indulging in both the neurotic need to organize and the creative desire to piece things together. The story has nothing to do with my research, but it does have to do with what a lot of people seem to want, a desire to record certain memories, something that resonates a lot with me personally.
I really appreciate the flexibility of this time, that allows things to happen that don't fit a mold of efficiency or list of things to do, where I'm led not by steadfast goals but by natural happenings and my natural responses to them.
And this woman's story comes to me during a time when I've been working on a story about my childhood too. The writing part of this time off is even more vague than the research. I have a list of things I want to write about, which is a little overwhelming, and even when I focus on one, I'm not quite sure what I want to say or how to say it. All I'm sure of is that I feel compelled to write about them, but having the time to do it means being faced with why, and that has resulted in major writer's block. I could spend an entire day on something without much to show for it, and the lack of proportion can be disorienting. But I'm endeared to writing in the way that it's not science and things don't logically lead to other things, and it is amazing to wake up each day with the freedom and privilege to just try, with no expectations, to feel that that's enough, for now.
And so instead of explaining to every person who asks, I say I'm doing nothing. It gets somewhat tiresome, because we're not used to nothing being okay. I'm not traveling anywhere, so it's not like a vacation. The few times I've tried to go more deeply into it, I usually just confuse the person and I'd rather have them think I'm doing nothing of significance instead of misunderstanding something of personal significance. Besides, everyone takes nothing in their own way, and I think we could all use more of it.
The last month of being in the hospital was absolutely worth the time and work (of which there was an incredible amount), and I loved it more than I thought I would (in the beginning I was mostly terrified). The structure, mindset, and general atmosphere are very different than my current state, though. Being in the hospital is about treating acute problems, accomplishing tasks: figuring out a diagnosis, ordering the right medicine, filing out the right paperwork, presenting numbers. You work patients up for their problems, you try your best to make them better, and then you discharge them from the hospital. In the gaps and in the broader scheme there are all the other things that make a good doctor, that are more abstract and less straightforward, but the day to day is about getting stuff done.
Which isn't the case with research and writing, both of which I've been working on this past week, without much visible to show for it.
In terms of research, I developed a project that is more about knowing patients than attaining data, which is a difficult thing to 1) do and 2) measure. The general gist is that I want to speak to terminally ill patients who have transitioned from care with goals of cure, to care with goals of quality of life. In the hospital we're good at acute care and quantifiable results, but not as good with transitions that happen over time and aren't easily communicated. I think it's important to know what factors play into patients being ready for this transition, so that we know when and how to talk to them about it, so that care is focused on minimizing suffering, not so much maximizing breathing time.
The first patient I interviewed is dying from lung cancer and had been admitted to the hospice unit of the VA. He was very open to speaking with me but was breathing so heavily, with few gaps between large gasps, that he couldn't talk for longer than a few minutes. When I came back the next day, it was only worse. So nothing came about from those efforts, in terms of my project. But it reminded me of what it's like to see someone actively dying, and of what I want to learn in this process.
My second interview was an actual interview, with a lovely 88 year old woman with lymphoma. She had very developed thoughts about her life and death, and was very comfortable talking about them, so the outcome was completely different from my previous attempt. Another thing I wanted to explore was personal writing, and to have patients journal about their experiences at the end of life, because that can be so different than what someone is able to share in a conversation with a doctor. So at the end of the interview I asked the woman if she'd be interested in participating in something like that. She said that she can't really write due to arthritis, but she had been working awhile ago on a story about her childhood. She brought out several pages of yellow lined paper, and asked if I wanted to read it. We talked about typing it up and having me help her finish it.
So I took the pages home to read and transcribe. Several of them are numbered the same number, such that the order was hard to determine, and as I read through them I realized that's because she had written several different beginnings. Throughout there are some anecdotes told in slightly different ways, so that in typing up the story, I had to maneuver some passages, putting the similar ones side by side, so that she could decide which parts of the same story she wanted to keep, discard, combine. During some particularly difficult parts to decipher, where reading continuously didn't seem to give a sensible narrative, I saw that she'd written in every other line, and in the lines in between added other parts of the story. All of this required some rearranging as I read and typed, and I liked indulging in both the neurotic need to organize and the creative desire to piece things together. The story has nothing to do with my research, but it does have to do with what a lot of people seem to want, a desire to record certain memories, something that resonates a lot with me personally.
I really appreciate the flexibility of this time, that allows things to happen that don't fit a mold of efficiency or list of things to do, where I'm led not by steadfast goals but by natural happenings and my natural responses to them.
And this woman's story comes to me during a time when I've been working on a story about my childhood too. The writing part of this time off is even more vague than the research. I have a list of things I want to write about, which is a little overwhelming, and even when I focus on one, I'm not quite sure what I want to say or how to say it. All I'm sure of is that I feel compelled to write about them, but having the time to do it means being faced with why, and that has resulted in major writer's block. I could spend an entire day on something without much to show for it, and the lack of proportion can be disorienting. But I'm endeared to writing in the way that it's not science and things don't logically lead to other things, and it is amazing to wake up each day with the freedom and privilege to just try, with no expectations, to feel that that's enough, for now.
And so instead of explaining to every person who asks, I say I'm doing nothing. It gets somewhat tiresome, because we're not used to nothing being okay. I'm not traveling anywhere, so it's not like a vacation. The few times I've tried to go more deeply into it, I usually just confuse the person and I'd rather have them think I'm doing nothing of significance instead of misunderstanding something of personal significance. Besides, everyone takes nothing in their own way, and I think we could all use more of it.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
subintern
I've just returned from my first day as a medicine subintern. It was about as overwhelming and exhausting as the hype goes, but the core of it was intensely gratifying. And that's not rationalization of the semi-blind choices I've made and difficult path I've chosen, and it's not making the best of things. It's something I feel in my tired chest (why is it that fatigue localizes there, as though our beats and breaths really do consume us). Why else would I be staying up to write this, in a partly delirious state, after having slept less than two hours in the past thirty-two hours? There's so much to say.
A subintern functions much like an intern, which is the first year you legitimately call yourself doctor, except nothing about it feels legitimate. This means that every four nights, you are on-call at the hospital. This means that you work a 30-hour shift. During this time, you see patients who come to the hospital, try to figure out what they have, and try to treat them. You also take care of the patients who are already in the hospital, who are getting better, worse, or staying the same. It's an incredible jump in responsibility, and work hours, from being a student to subintern. I was terrified, and after the first day, still am.
My first day of being a subintern also happened to be my first day on call. So not only did we have to learn the ropes of this new role with parameters wider than my mind could wrap around, but we had to do it for 30 hours straight. Naturally I had a lot of fears about all this. Fears of incompetence, of willpower giving way to fatigue, of being lost in what's supposed to be our space. All of these fears came true. I must say that I did a horrible job on my first day and call. I didn't get morning labs scheduled on time, I didn't think of multiple tests needed for my patients, I made several unnecessary calls and missed other necessary ones, I didn't know how to find new patients in the emergency department, my admission notes were short not for conciseness but for lack of comprehensiveness, my morning oral summaries of the patients were choppy, I didn't gather enough information from past records, I didn't perform complete physical exams on my patients. On and on and on.
It's natural to feel a little frustrated with failure, but what I found myself thinking more than shit, I'm doing such a bad job was, I really WANT to do a good job. For the first time in awhile, I felt want in the purest form. I didn't want it out of frustration from doing badly or because we're always being evaluated, but because I realized 1) just how damn difficult it is to be a good doctor, and 2) how worth it is to be a good doctor. I was lucky to be working with doctors who are good in such complete sense--smart and efficient with the science, smart and kind with the people. People acknowledge that both of these areas take training and effort, but personally, it goes far beyond what I imagined. On the science end, there is an incredible amount of information to gather and most importantly, analyze, apply and synergize. There's the story of symptoms, the methods of the physical exam, the interpretation of numbers, the understanding of images, and how all these complexities interact. And for many patients at once, juggling the components of one patient and then juggling multiple patients--it's dizzying. There is so much to know, and the knowledge isn't empty. Lab values and squiggly lines might appear dry, but when you consider how they are created representations of raw happenings in your body, it's pretty amazing. The indirect ways we've designed to figure ourselves out--I respect them, and I want to know that language in the same way I value language in its conventional definition, as a means of communicating ourselves and something bigger than ourselves. It's never quite the thing itself, but is our approach to it, and a whole other thing on its own. Of course, much (sometimes the majority) of it can be logistics and errands, which I can foresee becoming old fast. But it also appeals to my nerdy, neurotic self and also to a human part of wanting to build when immersed in an environment where people are not rarely falling apart. In both science and logistics I don't pick up things that quickly, and so I know I'll be lost for quite some time, but that's not a source of bitterness--I'm glad to be pursuing something that doesn't come easily.
And I'm glad that the challenge isn't simply for the sake of challenge. Besides the natural appeal of science and systems, there are the patients, and there is the learning of how to be with patients. People think that this isn't as hard as learning all the other stuff; I used to think that way too. But I've learned that while being nice is easy, connecting takes as much of your mind and effort as knowing the science. More often than not I'm not very good at it. I get mixed up with my words and with my silence, I'm bewildered as how to translate my intentions, I find myself painfully aware of my simple experience. The workings of another person can be as foreign as the mechanism of an antibiotic, and I know it's a corny parallel, but the truth is, I often feel myself encountering the same boundaries and confusion with a person as with a drug. But just like with the science, the feelings of stumbling make me feel how much I want this, how much I want to be good at this because I believe in its worth as a goal. I've seen other doctors show such grace at it, and I want that.
It's one of the things I love most about medicine, the way it forces you to interact with people you would never, ever know otherwise. Even as the VA gets the reputation of catering to old men with similar shadings of gruff salted life, each of them carries biting character. The lack of teeth, the sweetness of ninety years of age, the inhibition of schizophrenia, the depression of age, the depression of a hard life, the response to talk about pain, the blue blue eyes, the contortions of wrinkles going this way and that, the leg no longer there, the missing fingers, the natural questions, the natural anxiety. There is such pleasure in coaxing out qualities, of trying hard to see what you can and respect what you can't. And there are fleeting moments where you stop discriminating, when the harsh becomes as welcome as the welcoming, because it's another thing to absorb, another way to hold quality. Of course you'll get mad and annoyed when someone makes things difficult for you; when you're tired and responsible, you aren't looking for this extra baggage and I know I'll never be immune to impatience. But still, isn't baggage the reason we do all this in the first place.
A subintern functions much like an intern, which is the first year you legitimately call yourself doctor, except nothing about it feels legitimate. This means that every four nights, you are on-call at the hospital. This means that you work a 30-hour shift. During this time, you see patients who come to the hospital, try to figure out what they have, and try to treat them. You also take care of the patients who are already in the hospital, who are getting better, worse, or staying the same. It's an incredible jump in responsibility, and work hours, from being a student to subintern. I was terrified, and after the first day, still am.
My first day of being a subintern also happened to be my first day on call. So not only did we have to learn the ropes of this new role with parameters wider than my mind could wrap around, but we had to do it for 30 hours straight. Naturally I had a lot of fears about all this. Fears of incompetence, of willpower giving way to fatigue, of being lost in what's supposed to be our space. All of these fears came true. I must say that I did a horrible job on my first day and call. I didn't get morning labs scheduled on time, I didn't think of multiple tests needed for my patients, I made several unnecessary calls and missed other necessary ones, I didn't know how to find new patients in the emergency department, my admission notes were short not for conciseness but for lack of comprehensiveness, my morning oral summaries of the patients were choppy, I didn't gather enough information from past records, I didn't perform complete physical exams on my patients. On and on and on.
It's natural to feel a little frustrated with failure, but what I found myself thinking more than shit, I'm doing such a bad job was, I really WANT to do a good job. For the first time in awhile, I felt want in the purest form. I didn't want it out of frustration from doing badly or because we're always being evaluated, but because I realized 1) just how damn difficult it is to be a good doctor, and 2) how worth it is to be a good doctor. I was lucky to be working with doctors who are good in such complete sense--smart and efficient with the science, smart and kind with the people. People acknowledge that both of these areas take training and effort, but personally, it goes far beyond what I imagined. On the science end, there is an incredible amount of information to gather and most importantly, analyze, apply and synergize. There's the story of symptoms, the methods of the physical exam, the interpretation of numbers, the understanding of images, and how all these complexities interact. And for many patients at once, juggling the components of one patient and then juggling multiple patients--it's dizzying. There is so much to know, and the knowledge isn't empty. Lab values and squiggly lines might appear dry, but when you consider how they are created representations of raw happenings in your body, it's pretty amazing. The indirect ways we've designed to figure ourselves out--I respect them, and I want to know that language in the same way I value language in its conventional definition, as a means of communicating ourselves and something bigger than ourselves. It's never quite the thing itself, but is our approach to it, and a whole other thing on its own. Of course, much (sometimes the majority) of it can be logistics and errands, which I can foresee becoming old fast. But it also appeals to my nerdy, neurotic self and also to a human part of wanting to build when immersed in an environment where people are not rarely falling apart. In both science and logistics I don't pick up things that quickly, and so I know I'll be lost for quite some time, but that's not a source of bitterness--I'm glad to be pursuing something that doesn't come easily.
And I'm glad that the challenge isn't simply for the sake of challenge. Besides the natural appeal of science and systems, there are the patients, and there is the learning of how to be with patients. People think that this isn't as hard as learning all the other stuff; I used to think that way too. But I've learned that while being nice is easy, connecting takes as much of your mind and effort as knowing the science. More often than not I'm not very good at it. I get mixed up with my words and with my silence, I'm bewildered as how to translate my intentions, I find myself painfully aware of my simple experience. The workings of another person can be as foreign as the mechanism of an antibiotic, and I know it's a corny parallel, but the truth is, I often feel myself encountering the same boundaries and confusion with a person as with a drug. But just like with the science, the feelings of stumbling make me feel how much I want this, how much I want to be good at this because I believe in its worth as a goal. I've seen other doctors show such grace at it, and I want that.
It's one of the things I love most about medicine, the way it forces you to interact with people you would never, ever know otherwise. Even as the VA gets the reputation of catering to old men with similar shadings of gruff salted life, each of them carries biting character. The lack of teeth, the sweetness of ninety years of age, the inhibition of schizophrenia, the depression of age, the depression of a hard life, the response to talk about pain, the blue blue eyes, the contortions of wrinkles going this way and that, the leg no longer there, the missing fingers, the natural questions, the natural anxiety. There is such pleasure in coaxing out qualities, of trying hard to see what you can and respect what you can't. And there are fleeting moments where you stop discriminating, when the harsh becomes as welcome as the welcoming, because it's another thing to absorb, another way to hold quality. Of course you'll get mad and annoyed when someone makes things difficult for you; when you're tired and responsible, you aren't looking for this extra baggage and I know I'll never be immune to impatience. But still, isn't baggage the reason we do all this in the first place.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
parenchyma
While cramming for my board exams, I found myself tucking away medical terms like crackers. A big part of doing well on these exams has to do with associations; read nitroblue tetrazolium and think chronic granulomatous disease. At one point I learned the details of what the former and latter actually mean. These days I retain a general sense, but a lot of the finer points that would help form a concrete image are lost in the process of remembering the words. Things have become more and more familiar to me, but I don't know them more deeply.
Despite learning so much, the time has been so compact that I can still remember what it was like in the beginning. I distinctly remember feeling as overwhelmed as I still do, but also completely bewildered (as opposed to 89% so, currently). I remember sitting in front of the computer with my classmate, going through learning exercises on our school website. I remember looking at pictures of the lungs, and looking at each other, and wondering, "What's parenchyma?"
Wikipedia told us that parenchyma is the "bulk of a substance." This wasn't quite clear to us. I was used to science depicting arrows to things and giving them names, names that you could then translate into something you could point to. Over the past few years, we've learned that learning science isn't so much about precision as much as it is generalities for the details we don't know yet or can't know. Over the same past few years, the term parenchyma has been thrown around so often in relation to so many organs that we feel we know it. We know it not by memorized definition but by sense and familiarity. We can't point it out but we can nod when we hear the word. I feel this way about a lot of things in science and medicine, but parenchyma specifically crossed my mind a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday a friend of mine brought it up as an example of something he still doesn't really understand.
It's not that I think our knowledge is hollow. Every so often when I study, I'm stopped by the sudden rediscovery of how smart people can be. Sometimes words are gloss-overs, but often they are substantial representations of observation and logic. But I do feel we know less of the bulk of substances than we like to admit. After all, it's supposed to be a catch-all term for the essence of something, and we throw it around like it's something we can hold, and we dismiss the fact that we don't have precise means to define it. But if it's kind of the essence of the thing, shouldn't we take more care with that? Shouldn't we want to express it more clearly, know it better? At the least, give credit to its depth by confessing that our hands are too slippery and clumsy for it?
Writing is important to me for being a way to give more substance to our vague sense of substance. Even though it doesn't give the step by step explanation that we seek and sometimes miss from science, it acknowledges the fact that it can't. The bulk of a substance might be heavy, but weight can make things more elusive, and it seems right that this is so. For all the parts of life we know and handle, we rarely absorb it as a whole. I don't think it's meant to be fully known (or maybe it's just not possible), but I do think we're meant to seek it out (or maybe we just want to).
Despite learning so much, the time has been so compact that I can still remember what it was like in the beginning. I distinctly remember feeling as overwhelmed as I still do, but also completely bewildered (as opposed to 89% so, currently). I remember sitting in front of the computer with my classmate, going through learning exercises on our school website. I remember looking at pictures of the lungs, and looking at each other, and wondering, "What's parenchyma?"
Wikipedia told us that parenchyma is the "bulk of a substance." This wasn't quite clear to us. I was used to science depicting arrows to things and giving them names, names that you could then translate into something you could point to. Over the past few years, we've learned that learning science isn't so much about precision as much as it is generalities for the details we don't know yet or can't know. Over the same past few years, the term parenchyma has been thrown around so often in relation to so many organs that we feel we know it. We know it not by memorized definition but by sense and familiarity. We can't point it out but we can nod when we hear the word. I feel this way about a lot of things in science and medicine, but parenchyma specifically crossed my mind a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday a friend of mine brought it up as an example of something he still doesn't really understand.
It's not that I think our knowledge is hollow. Every so often when I study, I'm stopped by the sudden rediscovery of how smart people can be. Sometimes words are gloss-overs, but often they are substantial representations of observation and logic. But I do feel we know less of the bulk of substances than we like to admit. After all, it's supposed to be a catch-all term for the essence of something, and we throw it around like it's something we can hold, and we dismiss the fact that we don't have precise means to define it. But if it's kind of the essence of the thing, shouldn't we take more care with that? Shouldn't we want to express it more clearly, know it better? At the least, give credit to its depth by confessing that our hands are too slippery and clumsy for it?
Writing is important to me for being a way to give more substance to our vague sense of substance. Even though it doesn't give the step by step explanation that we seek and sometimes miss from science, it acknowledges the fact that it can't. The bulk of a substance might be heavy, but weight can make things more elusive, and it seems right that this is so. For all the parts of life we know and handle, we rarely absorb it as a whole. I don't think it's meant to be fully known (or maybe it's just not possible), but I do think we're meant to seek it out (or maybe we just want to).
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
radio
I don't listen to the radio much except for when I'm at home. In addition to the perfect temperature of the sun, and the easy wide roads, and the hills, the radio is why I love driving in the Bay Area. Besides the current pop (it was unexpectedly satisfying to crank up "California Gurls" in California), the stations here take me back to junior high dances and even further back to playing in the aisles of my dad's store with nineties soft rock in the background, and to being driven around by my brothers in their eighties cars to the tunes of eighties new wave. I blast a lot of bad, catchy music. It's stuff I never hear elsewhere, stuff that I haven't heard in years, like old school Mase (words I still know) or that one beautiful Donna Lewis song (I Love You Always Forever) that made me buy the entire album but only listen to that one song. Now that I've sold that CD away years before iTunes import was invented, the only time I might ever come across the song again is by chance on the kind of radio station they use at the dentist, the kind of station programmed in the car along with pop, hip hop and oldies.
It was in this house and in this place that I listened to my first radio, sometime in elementary school. The beer and cigarette companies my dad would purchase his store's goods from would send him little gifts with their brands all over them, like bags and cups and one time, a radio. It was from Camel cigarettes. It was a blue and yellow handheld radio, in a rectangular shape, with a camel on it, and an antenna. I sat on the carpet of my parents' bedroom, turned it on, and became mesmerized for the next four hours. I heard the same top forty songs cycled through the afternoon, and it's my first memory of discovering music. I became familiar with the concept of a radio station, and especially when I've been away for a long time, the pureness of that discovery comes back when I drive here to the radio. There's something about all this that makes nostalgia fresh, and the layers of everything around so light without losing substance. And it's just fun to dance and sing loudly, badly, and honestly in the car.
It was in this house and in this place that I listened to my first radio, sometime in elementary school. The beer and cigarette companies my dad would purchase his store's goods from would send him little gifts with their brands all over them, like bags and cups and one time, a radio. It was from Camel cigarettes. It was a blue and yellow handheld radio, in a rectangular shape, with a camel on it, and an antenna. I sat on the carpet of my parents' bedroom, turned it on, and became mesmerized for the next four hours. I heard the same top forty songs cycled through the afternoon, and it's my first memory of discovering music. I became familiar with the concept of a radio station, and especially when I've been away for a long time, the pureness of that discovery comes back when I drive here to the radio. There's something about all this that makes nostalgia fresh, and the layers of everything around so light without losing substance. And it's just fun to dance and sing loudly, badly, and honestly in the car.
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