Sunday . May 19 . 2002 . 10:57am |
batten down the hatches It's the last day before the start of our Surgery rotation. Kiss my ass goodbye for the next five weeks. Actually, you can kiss my ass goodbye for the next five months, since the Friday after Surgery, I'm taking the Boards, and the Monday after that, Fourth year starts. Oh man, is that ever depressing. This being our last weekend off for quite a while, everyone is making provisions for the storm ahead, not unlike squirrels hoarding nuts. We're cleaning our rooms and doing mounds of laundry. Joe and I are cooking huge pots of soups and sauces, building up strategic freezer stockpiles of food. We're sleeping in, and relishing the ability to do so. Well, some of us are. Today, I forced myself to sleep in until 10:30am, even though I really wasn't even tired after 9:00am, making last hour and a half of sleep purely recreational. Joe, being a lunatic, set the alarm for 7:30am this morning. (Alarm goes off) JOE (Joking) Well, I guess I'll see you in June. MICHELLE (Groggily) Wait...this is your last day off before Surgery starts, and you set the alarm? JOE Yeah. MICHELLE For 7:30am? JOE Yup. MICHELLE What are you going to do? JOE I need to do some reading. MICHELLE You're starting Surgery tomorrow, and you set the alarm so that you could wake up early and read about Surgery? Are you insane, man? Your whole life is going to be Surgery after tomorrow. You may never see this sight again-- look here, it's your pillow in the daylight. JOE (Resetting alarm) OK, half an hour more. Our group is largely non-surgical, so we're dreading this rotation like the approach of the draft. Our first day, we've been told, we'll line up and draw our team assignments out of a hat. All the teams are hard, but certain teams are the kiss of death. No one wants to be put on the Colorectal or Vascular teams. No one. With my luck, I bet I'll draw one or the other. The slip of paper will come out of the hat, and as I read my team assignment out loud, men will clutch their hats to their chests and look downward. A solitary bugle player will play "Taps" with tears in his eyes. Hey, look. We're the last group in the class to do Surgery. If everyone else has gotten through it, than so can we. We're a sturdy team. We roll with the punches. And it can't be harder than Medicine and Peds. Those hours were brutal as well, not to mention the ton of work that we had to take up with us to prepare for the next day. Surgery doesn't have that element of take-home work. It just has long hours in the hospital, 90% of which are mind-numbingly boring. And it's only five weeks, right? I can do anything for just five weeks. OK, gotta go cook now. xo Michelle |
