So this is the new year

I'm not enthusiastic about holidays. The notion that one can designate one day and announce that everyone must celebrate and have fun is ridiculous. Against this usual belief, for several years Adam and I had a New Year's tradition that we thought will last forever.

I met Adam in late 2001. We exchanged stories about New Year's Eves gone wrong. In 2000 I was wishing the world would end. But I was far less despondent this year. Adam told me of his plan to have a New Year's Day dinner, complete with ham and black eyed peas. He argued that it was the perfect unclaimed holiday. After all, everyone was home and hungover. They were ripe for food and good conversation. I planned to come as a sort of second date, but at the last minute fielded a desperate call from my former restaurant manager. I negotiated terms for working a shift including a free meal for two. I stopped by Adam's house to check on the progress and break the news. He was marinating ham in coke and chopping collard greens. I told him I would take him out to dinner to make it up to him.

The next year we were living together and decided to make the dinner again, complete with several vegetarian additions including risotto and collards sans ham hock. We had friends over and learned to love New Year's Day over the next few years. Upon moving to Johnson City, we tried to carry on this tradition. It was much less successful. We had a group of friends by this point, but they were all home for the holidays. Awesome, I thought, there are so many people I would like to get to know. We secured 8 guests, bought food, and started work on dinner. One by one, every guest cancelled within 2 hours of arrival time. We were left with a 12 pound ham, 10 cups of collard greens, and a complex. For the next year, we panicked every time we invited someone over for dinner. Are they going to show up? We vowed never to celebrate New Year's again. We now enjoy a quiet evening at home. It might be hard to get collard greens and black eyed peas in New Hampshire anyhow.

Reality Bites

I struggled to keep my eyes open on the drive from Manchester Airport. It had been a trying day and I was ready to be home. After a week in Italy we were on our way. Arriving at Fuimicino in Rome we found out our flight to Dulles had been cancelled. "Snow" they told us. "Didn't anyone tell you?"

Who would have told us, I wondered. You're the flight people. Luckily we were re-routed through Munich on a congenial German airline. Adam was sloppy drunk before we boarded after spending three hours in a German bar. He continued sucking down scotch for the better part of the nine hour flight. I spent my time reading Antic Hay and wishing I was a 1920's jet setter. After landing in Boston, we spent $150 on a rental car to drive the one hour to Manchester. It was worth every penny to get home. As we drove North on Route 89, I could not wait to see my cats and climb into bed.

We unloaded our bags and entered the narrow stairwell to our apartment. There was construction equipment blocking our way, and I had a bad feeling about what was behind the door. Our landlord said she planned to do a little work to our closet and promised she would carefully remove our clothing and put it back in place before we came home. "No big deal" we said.

We climbed over the shop vac and lumber and opened the door.

Oh my god.

The entire contents of our life were strewn around the living room. Our pictures, stationary, and journals were crushed. Chairs and floor were piled high with camping equipment, kayaking gear, and linens. We were not sure where to drop our bags because we could not walk through the house. Everything was covered in sawdust and plaster. Dirty footprints led the way to the bathroom. Our bed was piled high with clothing and there was used cat litter on the floor of our bedroom.

Where are the cats? I began to panic. We found them cowering under the bed, unkempt and frightened. Omega ran from me as I chased him around the house. I wondered if this was all a delusion brought on by lack of sleep. We spent two hours making a walkway through the house, unclogging the toilet, and clearing off the bed so that we could sleep. We slept from midnight to three a.m. and then woke up jet lagged and started looking for a new place to live. Later that morning when we confronted our landlord she was very apologetic. We told her that we were moving out, but would give six weeks' notice. She told us that she understood completely and respected that. "But, New Hampshire law requires you to pay rent for the duration of your lease" she smirked.

I was livid. Adam pleaded and tried to appeal to her sense of decency to no avail. I told her I supposed we were not leaving. We sulked back upstairs and got to work cleaning and reorganizing our belongings.

The next morning we had a strange text page from her stating that she had listed the apartment but was out of town. Could we show it for her today? I almost threw the phone through a window. I consider myself a rational person, but this sort of audacity is hard to swallow. Now I'm still cleaning, suffering from allergic rhinitis, and have not slept in two nights. All I can say is, reality bites.

Only happy when it rains

I glanced out the window through a narrow slit in the blinds. Raining again. Damn. The clock in his room said 6:15. I rolled over and fell back to sleep, wondering how hungover I would be when I aroused. We had been out late at a comedy club with friends. I discovered a love for our local beer, the Highland Gaelic Ale. I had the day off work, so my plan was to sleep it off. Half an hour later I was abruptly disturbed by a cell phone ring. Who would call at 6:45 on a Sunday? I was about to put my pillow over my head when my sleeping partner lept out of bed to grab the phone.

Adam and I had been dating for a short time. I knew that I liked him. He was an Asheville man- enlightened but masculine. He had read all my favorite books and knew about my girl bands. But he was no pansy- he loved to eat bloody rare steak and his arms rippled with muscle. He was mild mannered and knew everyone in town. He held the door open for me, but let me pay for meals half the time to respect my feminism. The quality that struck me most was his complete honesty. He did not hold back, unlike myself. I knew that if I asked him a question his reply would be entirely candid.

"Hello? Yeah, dude. I can be ready in 10 minutes. Come on over."

What was happening here? I found out soon enough when a 1987 Ford truck loaded with four grungy men, kayaks, and gear pulled into the driveway. They entered without knocking and sat down in his kitchen. I was still in pajamas and had not brushed my teeth. Adam introduced me to the crew. They were suprisingly polite and engaging. After a few moments of chit chat, the conversation turned serious.

"Where are we going today?" Adam was clearly their leader, and all eyes were on him. He launched into the kayaking equivalent of the Gettysburg Address.

"Today is high water heaven, just name a river and we can go there. On a day like today, the question is not what's running, the question is what's not running. This is the kind of day people lose jobs over. Let's go get it boys!"

With that, they departed to chase water. Later that day Adam called me to say that they were completely shut out. They ended up passing the afternoon drinking whiskey in a small town bar in North Carolina after eight hours of driving.

This was my shocking introduction to the world of kayaking. I was some girl who spent the night at a kayaker's house and was left behind the next morning. Luckily, Adam always comes home to me when the river dries up.

In Training

People often ask me what it's like being a resident.

It's remarkably similar to distance running. The beginning of a run is always painful, as is coming to the hospital at pre-dawn and waking up one's patients. Once awake, they tell me their woes from the last 24 hours and I review their labs and X-Rays. At 8am we convene as a group and discuss new patients. During this time, the pages begin and occur about every 15-30 minutes for the rest of the day.

Team rounds are a bit like the one hour mark during a run. This is when I desperately want to stop but unfortunately things are just getting started. Time for a power bar (coffee). I try to stay sharp to answer questions but dissociation begins to deal with the pain. We finish rounds just before noon and I have a few minutes to complete discharges and write orders before noon lecture.


Noon lecture is like an aid station. We sit and eat, getting paged every few minutes to ensure indigestion, and listen to a lecture about neurology. By the time it is over, I have a list of things I need to accomplish before new patients start arriving. This is the sweet spot in the run where I am totally focused and feel no pain. I race back to the workroom and hammer out discharge summaries, page other physicians, and do other forms of scutwork. Scutwork is a nebulous term depicting the daily tasks required to take care of inpatients. Examples include ordering medications, placing consults with other services, reviewing MRIs with neuroradiologists, performing spinal taps, and speaking with patients and family members. Residents are often lovingly referred to as scut monkeys because of their endless scribbled lists of tasks and checkboxes. I find nothing so gratifying as checking little boxes as I complete my scutwork for the day.

In the mid-afternoon new patients file into the hospital. The local Dartmouth elite are recognizable by their fair trade herbal tea and down pillows with satin covers. They are Ivy League and command respect. They expect immediate service, and I am experiencing another bonk. I sneak into the second aid station (the call rooms) and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then I keep running, although the pace slows considerably. Pain returns and dissociation becomes the norm.

The finish line is elusive and depends upon how many admissions we have and whether I am on call for the night. On call is the ultra-marathon version of neurology where one stays overnight and repeats the above over and over until noon the next day. A regular day ends between 5 and 6pm with enough time to exercise, eat, and prepare for another day. Welcome to residency, I hope you trained for this.

Silence of the Fam

Home in two days, I won’t be here for dinner.

Going home for the holidays brings about a tempest of emotion. The house I grew up in now has plastic covering the furniture and fake flowers. The clutter of my childhood is long gone, as if strangers now live there. Even the familiar smell is replaced by a foreign one. How did this happen? Oh, right, now I remember.

My parents separated when I was ten. I chose to live with my dad because I could not bear the thought of him being alone. We initially had a nanny, but she was let go during a brief reconciliation. For a while things were good. We shared household chores and cooking duty. Eventually my dad wanted adult companionship. He tried his hand at dating, but it did not work out as planned. American women were just too damn independent. One day he came home with a brilliant idea.

We spent the evening perusing a booklet with pictures of exotic Asian women, complete with profiles detailing their perfect mate and hobbies. We circled possible candidates then we went to the store and bought fancy stationery. I helped him write letters to potential contenders about how he loved long walks on the beach and poetry.

Two years later a 28 year old porcelain doll was in my father’s bedroom when I came home from school. She was kind and spoke in broken English. Neither of us was sure what to do, so we ignored each other. This worked pretty well so we continued for the rest of my teen years. My father joined in the game, and sometimes we went weeks without speaking more than a sentence to each other. He wanted to give the household a more congenial and respectful touch, so he insisted that I let my stepmother know if I would be home for dinner. So I left notes, never saying where I was going but always saying whether I would be home for dinner.

On days when we ran out of sticky notes, I wrote on napkins or magazines. Soon the entire house was filled with notations on every writable surface. When I come home now, I still look for them buried under the new life that now exists. I guess they were thrown out after I went to college. By then they realized I would not be home for dinner for a while. But I still make it every once in a while.

the truth about cats and blogs

I mounted my bicycle for the two mile trip to Johnson City Medical Center on August 1st. After a lengthy auto commute in July, I was excited to enjoy the fresh air. It was early, but the sun was peeking out and it was summer in Tennessee. I rode through the VA campus and passed my medical school on the left. As I approached the hospital, the first rays of sun glistened on the dingy gutters lining the road. I caught a glimpse of a puffy tail disappearing underground as I rode by.
I wonder what that was.
There was construction around the medical center and in some ways I envied the workers. I was trapped in stale air conditioning all day while they labored in the sun. They ate lunch under a tree. I saw them working or resting on my afternoon ride home. I wondered if they envied me, getting to work indoors with my mind instead of my body.
The next day I came upon the gutters more slowly. Two baby blue eyes met mine from inside the drain.
I think that's a kitten.
As quickly as I thought those words, the creature was gone. I looked again for him on the way home, but he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the week I searched in vain. My husband, Adam, also worked at the Medical Center. I told him to watch for this mysterious creature as he rode his bike to work. The next week I saw Adam in the emergency department. We smiled at each other.
"I saw your kitten." He told me. I was happy to have reassurance since I had also seen the kitten that morning. This time he was scoping out the grass around the gutter, but again raced to safety as I approached. I wondered if the loud construction noises bothered him. I wondered why he was alone. Did his siblings die? Or was he misplaced?
After work I walked my bicycle down the road. I looked more carefully into the gutter and saw the kitten's mother. There were no other kittens, and his mother looked sickly and undernourished. Apparently someone else previously noticed this situation because there was a large pile of cat food in their den. I decided this must have been the construction workers who saw the kitten as they lunched in the shade. How kind. Okay, these creatures are being taken care of. I certainly do not need any more responsibilities.
That night I woke from sleep during a torrential downpour. My first thought was the kitten, shivering and soaked in the drain, with his mother crying because their food stash was being washed away. I could not fall back to sleep and the next day told Adam my revelation.
"I have to rescue that kitten. We could care for it until it is strong, and then find a better home for it."
Adam, who is used to my crazy schemes, told me that if I could capture it, we could rescue it. I did not understand his cynical snicker at the time. How hard could it be?

That night I gathered supplies: soft cat food, treats, our pet carrier, and string attached to the carrier door. When I came near the hospital, I immediately saw the kitten in the grass. I approached like a ninja and set up close enough that he could smell the soft cat food inside the carrier. I lay in the grass on the side of an embankment ten feet away, clutching the string. I knew I would only have one chance. I lay in the grass for a long time. My muscles cramped and I began to have doubts. Kitten was scared. He knew that I lurked somewhere nearby and could sense danger. It took kitten two hours to bravely enter the carrier, with hunger finally winning out over fear. I pulled the string as hard as I could. Trapped! I ran to the carrier to clasp the door. The kitten was slamming his body against it, trying in vain to free himself.
I told him that it was okay. On the car ride home he slurped up an entire bowl of food. At home, Adam could not believe that I had succeeded. We brought the kitten to the spare bedroom and closed the door. We examined him. He hissed at us and ran behind the bed.
Over the next few weeks we fell in love. We named him Omega after the philosophy of the "omega point" which asserts that a certain combination of factors leads to perfect satisfaction and happiness. We set aside talk of adoption. When we found him, Omega weighed less than one pound, was 6-8 weeks old, and could not chew solid food. He is now a healthy, happy cat. And we have found our omega point.

the wedding stinger

Adam and I privately committed to each other one bitterly cold night in West Virginia in 2003. We had been together for a year at that time, and both knew that this was it. The subject of marriage honestly never came up for a long time after that. But then one day it did…

We got “engaged” during a vacation to the Northwest. There was no proposal and no exchange of rings, but we decided it was a good idea to publicly commit and get it over with. We initially had the idea to have a big, informal outdoor wedding. Low key, everyone welcome, fun for all. Before I knew it demands were piling up from all directions. Apparently our vision was not paramount in this event, but to be diplomatic, we refocused and tried to plan an intimate family affair at a bed and breakfast. This may have been ill-fated from the start. To understand why, here is a bit of background on my family.
My parents have been divorced since I was 11, following several years of an on-again, off-again struggle. At one point during this time, my grandmother physically assaulted my mother, who still claims to have PTSD from this incident. Let’s just say the relationship between the two sides is not pretty. After the divorce, my mom found her hippie side and now resides in a commune growing edible plants. My father subsequently bought a mail-order bride, thinking that he could subjugate her. I guess he did not do much research regarding Filipino women.
Now, added to this train wreck comes Adam’s ultraliberal PhD parents, lesbian sister, and outspoken New Jersey grandmother. Uh oh.
The notion that these people could get along in close quarters for a weekend seems absurd now, but at the time I entertained the notion as logical. But demands continued to escalate in terms of what was expected. Ironically, resources were dwindling to nonexistence. The pinnacle occurred during a two week correspondence with my father about the $800 down payment for the bed and breakfast. He had told me “the check is in the mail” several times, but it never arrived. Perhaps he had more insight into this potential disaster than I did.
I was fed up. “Adam, do you want to get married tomorrow?” It was Monday evening. Tomorrow I had a three hour break between classes.
“Well, I was going to go kayaking in the afternoon. Could we do it late morning?”
We debated on whether to call our parents, and ultimately decided that it was only fair. His mother threw a fit and told us she was coming. My mother was upset that his mother was coming and demanded that she come, but that we had to work around her schedule. The only fair thing to do was forbid all friends or family from participating. We did not tell anyone else and went to the courthouse alone on November 9, 2004. It was surprisingly easy to get married. We paid our money and a clerk helped us find an available judge. He asked if we had any family or witnesses with us. When we said no, he told us that people who get married in secret are often hiding something. I told him “That’s interesting. So, is there a staff person who can witness?” After all, I had to be back at school soon so there was no time to waste listening to paternalistic speeches.
After we got hitched, Adam went kayaking and I went back to class. We eventually bought some rings from a pawn shop to really cinch the deal. Do I regret not having a wedding? Hell no. I do wish some things had gone differently with respect to this whole affair, but our families eventually forgave us. It was a good lesson in relinquishing control.