Steady hands are a beautiful thing

They are good for surgeons. I certainly would not want someone with shaking hands doing my cardiac surgery. They're good for mechanics, seamstresses, chefs, etc. They would be good for me if I had them. Instead, my hands shake. The have a minimal shake when I'm not doing anything. The beautiful thing, the more still I need to be, the more they shake. Great isn't it?

I have medical examples or times when I shake. It makes me appear really nervous. It makes me feel nervous. However, I've found ways to work with it and still be able to succeed at procedures such as intubations. So instead of a medical example, I thought I'd give an example from my apartment, that happened today.

It was dinner time, and I was getting hungry. So, I decided on macaroni and cheese. I boiled the water, put in the macaroni, and waited for 8 minutes. So far so good. Then I was ready to drain the water. Now I live in a small apartment, and the smallest part is the kitchen. As such, I have opted not to have some of the items that I would consider standard kitchen supplies, in this case a colander. So instead of draining out the water with a colander I grabbed the lid for the pot and held it so that I could drain out the water. I've done this many times before without problems. Today, however, was not such a day. Instead while holding the pot full of recently boiling water with macaroni in it, I was unable to simply keep the lid on the pot. Instead I managed to, while holding the pot and lid by their handles, each intentionally out of the way of the flowing boiling water, spill the water on my right wrist. I don't especially recommend that action as it is followed by a significant amount of pain that I have been limiting with an ice pack.

I'd love to have steady hands, wouldn't you?

Good to be the Chief?

I don't know for certain yet, but I'm sure going to find out. On Tuesday Dr. Hopkins, our program director, paged me and told me I was selected to be one of the Chief Residents for next year. Subsequently I will be spending another year at Albany Medical Center. Then she told me I had to keep quiet about it until after the faculty meeting on Thursday and since at least 2 of the residents know about my blog, I couldn't even post it here.

Then on Thursday they announced it at the Faculty meeting and over the course of the day people were coming up to me and congratulating me. Dr. Comber from pulmonary was the first person to say something, and he told me "it's a thankless job but someone has to do it." Not quite the words of encouragement I was looking for, but I'm still excited.

Then Friday at noon, when I was post-call, I had a meeting scheduled with one of my attendings. I forgot it, went to sleep, woke up at 5, and then remembered. So one thing's for certain about being chief, I need to do a better job of keeping on top of my schedule and not forget meetings. Actually, I've been realizing I need to be significantly more organized to do this job well and have been working on it. After all, I have another 9 months before I'm formally chief, so I should use it well.

All the negatives aside, I am pretty excited about next year. It'll certainly be interesting.

Back to PICU

Tomorrow I start my second month in the PICU. It's a pretty intense month that has me on call every third night. I am lucky, however, because our switch day for September was later and subsequently this ends up being a shorter month. I have 9 calls, where in August they did 11 calls each. I'm also somewhat looking forward to it as last time I was there the attendings thought I did a really good job and I was comfortable there, and that's always encouraging.

My first call is this coming Thursday, which will unfortunately make me miss game night for the third straight week. I will however be able to join in for the 2 weeks after that.