This are some of the things I learned this weekend:

If you are interviewing for something:
- do not wear cologne or perfume. As much as you might think that this finishes your look, noone appreciates your chosen fragrance as much as you do.
- do not lie. This seems obvious but you might be suprised how many people say things that aren't even believable.
- if you don't have something worthwhile to say, don't say anything at all. Even if your instinct is to fill up the space, don't.
- don not swear or use racial slurs. Duh.
- do not start making assumptions about the interviewer. Even if you are right, you look judgmental and narrow minded.
- do not cry. As much as the interviewer might be nice about it, they still don't want to console you.
- do not start talking about how badly you are doing at the interview.
- answer the question that is asked.

Even if you are four weeks behind, it still isn't motivation to study for a test four weeks away.

As long as you put enough chocolate in a cake, everything else can go wrong and it will still taste good. Especially if you eat it with friends.

I don't expect every opening band to be worth the price of admission but I also don't think that they should be punishment for coming unfashionably on time. My advice to you, if Matt Allen (I believe he is from Lethbridge) is the opening act come late and stand at the back if you have to. Your sore feet are small price to pay for saving yourself the pain of having to listen to his set.

Ooops, that sounds bitter and judgemental.
I am sure he is a perfectly nice person if you take his guitar away from him.

I have not posted lately because I am attempting to be be less cynical and judgemental as I speed my way to the big 30 milestone. Everything I consider posting just sounds bitter and judgemental lately (for example why is it that medical students, a group of people that all profess to be concerned with helping mankind, can only do generous things that will be put on a resume or CARMs application or used for class credit?) so I have been practicing the Thumper 'if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all' philosophy.

One thing that has come up for my consideration this week is what it is to be a Standardized Patient.

We learn physical exam in groups of 5 with a clinician preceptor (we are assigned 2 that we alternate between) and a SP in the medical skills area that is set up like a clinic. Both of our preceptors are rheumatologists and excellent teachers, but that is where the similarities end. On Monday we had a session with preceptor one. She is a pediatric rheumatologist; warm, exuberant and eternally sensitive. We had a great session, if a little superficial in content, with a youngish female SP where we spent a great deal of time doing respiratory exam. Thoughout the session preceptor one talked directly to the SP, made sure she was draped properly and at the end asked how the session was for her, if she had been comfortable. It was a comfortable experience for everyone.

On Wednesday we had a cardiac session with preceptor two. It started out badly; two of the people in my group and the SP were late because the roads were terrible. It went downhill after that. The SP turned out to be a rather larger young woman. The preceptor had requested a male but the med skills, for good reason, do not honor these requests. We are just as likely to get a female on our exams and need to learn how to do cardiac exam under all circumstances in practice as well. The preceptor was at all times respectful, but far from sensitive. Because of her extra girth we could not see a JVP, feel a PMI and hearing heart sounds was even difficult. It was an uneasy experience for everyone. I, and all the other members of my group, tried to make her feel as comfortable as possible, but our preceptor was evidently disappointed that we didn't have a better subject.

One of the people in my group later commented that he couldn't understand why she would subject herself to the experience knowing that she would be exposed and examined given her extra weight and that she was so obviously uncomfortable. I think that a great deal of the situation would have been diffused if the preceptor had shown sensitivity to the degree that preceptor one had demonstrated. On the other hand we practice on SPs for a reason. They are not in the vulnerable place that real patients are; they are not sick, they are not depending on us to fix them or give them answers. They are being paid to be there so that we can use them as living models. However, we are also learning to be physicians and demonstrating respect for the people that are in our care is a really big part of our training. We can't start thinking of our SPs as meat puppets rather than as people or we might be tempted to think of or patients as a collection of symptoms or diseases instead of people as well.

I just got back from seeing "Pan's Labyrinth". It was quite good (with some fairly gruesome minor surgery scenes) but I am writing about about the people who sat in front of us. The group was, by our guess, a pair of middle age parents, a daughter and her boyfriend. I initially thought that the reek of booze was spillage on my husband's jacket from his last trip to the bar. But it was soon apparent that they were accompanying their movie with a beverage or two. The boyfriend left, sometime around the boogey man scene, and the rest of the group managed to drink themselves into an incoherent, but loud, mess by the end of the movie. While I enjoy a drink now and again, I don't really understand going to a subtitled historical fantasy/war movie to get hammered. They could barely make their way out of the theatre. It seems like an odd thing to do while at a movie with mom. I spent Monday morning shadowing in the inpatient psych ward at the hospital. Maybe it says more about me, but some of the psychotics actually make more sense to me than the 'normal' people I see all the time. I can understand that, if you honestly believe it is your job to receive signals for the armed forces or spirits are coming through the walls to get you, you could get paranoid or violent. I don't understand people who risk their life acting like an idiot in traffic just to wait two cars ahead at the light. Or spending $50 to sit in a movie, drink out of a flask and talk about your dog.

Some times I feel like I am propelling myself through my day. All my strides are long and purposeful, like I know where I am going and how to get there. I can accomplish what I am setting out for. I am the powerful, confident overachiever that I would like to be.

Other days I feel like I am being dragged from place to place, from task to task. Anything I accomplish is drawn out and painful. More the petulant three year-old that would rather sit at home and watch cartoons than follow their parent around the supermarket.

I am definately in the toddler stage this week. I haven't done anything except the very minimum. I should be reading and learning and staying on top of things but, knowing that I still have months before I am going to be tested, I just don't wanna.

I think my life might be a little off kilter. I had dinner at 4pm tonight and happened to be talking to an old friend of mine who wondered when I had turned 70 and started having dinner in the middle of the day.

Well, the reason I was having dinner so early was so that I would have time to go grocery shopping with my husband and then drive me up to the North East to pick up my car and still get to curling on time. My car was up in Hawkwood because I went to a Ukrainian New Years Eve party and ended up having too many martinis to drive home. My friend makes them with peach schnaps, vodka and cranberry juice so they taste like candy but knock you on your ass. I had to drive to the party because my husband was in Olds to attend a memorial service for an old instructor of his. I would have taken transit instead but I had to go out to the North East before the party to pick up my father-in-law's drycleaning that he needed because he was going to drive to Omaha. My sister-in-law had been in another car accident and her parents thought that she would need their help. Turns out she is fine and noone is going to Omaha in the near future.

To me this sounds like a bad idea sit-com episode. I guess random is better than boring.

I went to a symposium tonight where 4 women doctor's gave talks about their career experiences. What I learned is that everything (stress, pressure on our time, demands from other people) gets harder from here, and then it gets even worse, and then it gets a little bit better. So, if I want to have kids before I am 40 I better do it now. From the stories I heard, I would be lucky to write a licensing exam while 9 months pregnant. It gets much worse.
I came home and told my husband this. He is 9 years older than me, so if I wait until I am 40 to have kids he will be almost 50, and that scares the crap out of him. Don't tell me men don't have biological clocks.

I keep meaning to write something lengthy, significant and well thoughtout for the new year. But either something more important eats up my time or my mind is tired or empty. So I write with nothing more important to say than I am back at school.

I am still sitting on a mountainous list of things that I meant to do over the holidays so I have been thinking a lot about resolutions. I tend to make resolutions on a daily basis, which tend to run along the lines of "Tommorrow I will do better. Tommorrow I will have more energy and be more focused. I will get done more things on my list, especially a couple of those things I really don't want to do. I will be more clever, less bitter and nicer. Tomorrow I will listen to more music and exercise. I will do my makeup, eat breakfast and wear clothes with no wrinkles. Tommorrow I will be prepared for class and will really listen. Tommorrow I will be do better."

Being a new year and the traditional time for reflection, I have been thinking that I should make a resolution I can actually keep. Something that won't leave me with that feeling of guilty failure by mid February. I first considered some specific things, like I will go to the gym in the morning (there was a time in my life that I exercised every day between 6:00 and 8:00am) at least three times a week or bring my lunch from home at least four times a week. Luckily a little self realization shone through and I have cast this aside. Then I was thinking of making more of a general 'change in outlook' resolution; something like trying to judge people less, or not doubt myself so much. This would at least be vague enough that I can't exactly break the resolution, but I don't think trying to change my personality is setting myself up for success.

So I am taking my husband's advice and my resolution for the new year is to eat poutine once a month. I love poutine but I never allow it to pass my lips because of nagging considerations of my underexercised waist line. I guess you could say I am making the anti-resolution but at least I will avoid that episode of February self loathing.

I hope everyone has a very happy New Year.

Just a few words.

The focus of my life for the past couple of weeks has pretty much narrowed to studying, so I have not had anything interesting to say recently. With three days left until finishing my tests and starting holidays I certainly don't have anything more interesting to say now (I have spent the past three hours in the anatomy lab, poking through pro-sections while listening to the Stephen Lewis Massey Lectures and it has left me in a strange sort of mood) but I thought I would at least let the faceless masses know I am still here. So I face another day of trying to cram my head with knowledge; armed with TIm Horton's coffee and hope that in some small way I might be able to make the world suck just a tiny bit less, if only I can pass this next set of exams.

But right now I think it is time for a nap.

It is day four of sub -25 degrees. You might think that I am harping on this weather thing a bit too much, but then you aren't here. It was -30C with a windchill of -41C when I left the house this morning. So, if you haven't been in this kind of weather before; this is what happens when it is -30.

The furnace runs all night even though you turned down the thermostat to save fuel and you are sleeping under three comforters to keep your feet warm which are so heavy that you can barely turn over.
There is nothing for breakfast because you haven't been to the grocery store even though it is only 5 blocks away because your car is buried under a foot and a half of snow and needs to be plugged in but walking that far with groceries means the fruit and vegetables and milk will freeze.
You shower in the hottest water you can stand because you don't know when you will be that warm again and dress in three layers with the extra fuzzy socks even though it feels stiff when you sit down (and feel grateful that you don't have to see patients today because then you would have to try to hide long johns under dress pants).
There is no point in making coffee because, even in a thermal travel mug, the coffee will be cold by the time the train comes.
The trains are late because people don't want to drive on the icy roads or their cars won't start and some of the doors won't open because they are frozen shut so everyone in the overly-crowded car has to file out of the end doors.
The busses are late and the shelters are full so you are standing in the wind pacing back and forth so your feet won't freeze which they do anyway despite the winter boots.
The snot freezes your nose to your scarf and your eyes are streaming with frozen tears and your rings feel tight on your hand and you feel horrible for the teenage girl who doesn't have a toque and is turning from red to blue.
The battery on your iPod dies in 20 minutes and you watch dies and your cell phone makes a funny noise when you dial and you realize that maybe you should have left your laptop at home today.
You get to school in double the time it normally takes and half the group isn't there and everything starts late but you still have the same amount of material to cover.
It is dark when you go home where you fight through the same crowds and you see the lock is broken and won't open and you go to the mediocre restaurant nearby for dinner and their furnace is broken so you eat your mediocre dinner in your coat.
You are exhausted and you still haven't done any studying today.

I have bad circulation. As much as I would like to think that I am a tough Canadian that can brave the cold, if I am outside for more than a few minutes my fingers go from burning to numb.

Maybe I should fill in some details for those lucky enough not to be living in a deep freeze (actually my deep freeze sits in our badly insulated back room so it is probably warmer in my deep freeze). CBC is reporting a temp of minus twenty one with a windchill of minus thirty. That is celsius if anyone is reading from the States, not that it matters when it gets this cold. Usually when it is cold you can count on it changing before you get cabin fever but they keep pushing any sort of reasonable temperture to the end of the five day forecast.

The good news is that now I don't have anything else to do but study.

My non-medical friends have now decided that I am definately weird. I spent 4 hours shadowing at an urgent care facility downtown; not a place any of them would chose to spend a Saturday afternoon. It was the best time. I have so much fun. And great motivation to get back to the books and fill in some of those knowledge gaps. It was not really busy, being a weekend and fairly early in the day, but the range of cases and patients was still amazing. It also helped that the doctor I was shadowing was awesome! Definately what I want to be when (if) I grow up. He is a family doctor that has done quite a bit of emergency and is now moving to doing exclusively urgent care. I am trying not to jump too quickly to a decision. I still have lots of time to decide a specialty and there is still lots of things I haven't learned or seen. However, based on my short experience yesterday I would sign up to do that everyday.

I think I might be over volunteering myself. I am double booked at 8 in the morning. Perhaps this is not that early for clerks or residents or surgeons, but for someone who is still recovering from a grad student's schedule having anything more strenuous than sleeping on the bus or drinking coffee is pretty jarring at 8am. Committing myself for meetings this early must be a clear sign that I should restraining my right arm, the one that seems to keep popping up everytime someone asks for help with this project or attendance at that event.

It is Monday morning after a long weekend. I dragged myself out of bed, across the snow to the train, and actually made it to school in good time for my first class. But, having shown up (half the battle I am told), I couldn't actually stomach sitting in lecture. So I grabbed a coffee and vowed to go through the lecture notes on my own. Instead I am blogging.

My husband registered his illustration business name this weekend. It is Expeditus Illustrating. Expeditus, by my husband's telling, is the patron saint of procrastination. Moreover there was probably never a real Expeditus, but rather the remains of a nameless saint that were marked for quick delivery. I am not sure what he is trying to say having a fake procrastinator as the name of his business but it is still an impressive sounding name.

I have 8 hours of lecture today. The first 2 hours have been designated for occupational safety and how it relates to MSK health. I spent the last three days with family, friends and heaps of food, so part of my justification for skipping class is that it would be more useful for me to review the anatomy that I was suppose to have learned last week. My older brother was married on Sunday so there were people in town and all those little errands to run that go along with large family events. As much as I resolve to get work done my will power is no match for a dinner or coffee or drink out with pretty much anyone. As a result I managed to get almost nothing done in a full three days. I have the next hour to make up for it.

Two AV guys and blank blue screens. Never a good sign at the beginning of lecture.

We reached our last full day of dermatology lectures today. After working through most of the rashes and blisters it was scarring and burns. These were our first lectures given by plastic surgeons rather than dermatologists. We don't get many lectures from surgeons, which is a shame because they tend to have the best photos. Which brings me back to my fascination with gory pictures. I know it sounds insensitive but the grosser pictures definitely keep my attention. Perhaps I should take up some extreme sport to get my kicks instead.

The most extreme sport I am presently doing is curling. I know most people think of curling as more of a senior's past time than an extreme sport but those people have not seen me on a pebbled sheet of ice. With my level of grace and balance stepping on to frozen water with teflon shoes is definitely enough to get the heart pumping. One of the best things my parents ever did for me was judo lessons. In judo they spend a long time teaching you how to fall without hurting yourself. It is probably the only reason I have, as yet, not received any sort of traumatic brain injury.

With 6 hours in I am enjoying derm lectures considerable more than I expected. I guess my claim that I am a visual learner might actually be true. Definately gross; I have been scratching my head constantly since yesterday afternoon. It could also be that the faculty has recruited more entertaining lecturers, at least for the first few lectures, because they realize that the vast majority of us are not clammoring to learn derm. Regardless of the reason, so far so good.

I am not sure if this honeymoon period will last. There is much less small group or interactive learning in this course compared to the last. I can see that being a problem for me. Hint - I am writing this in lecture right now. Even with a tonne of pictures I don't think that I can maintain attention sitting still for hours on end without even getting up to walk to another room. Apparently they are blaming 8 hour lecture days once or twice a week on our Christmas vacation. I feel like I am back in the corporate world, where people don't take vacations because they know that they are going to have to make up every moment of time they take off. I think it is time to skip out and get a coffee.

With our first class finished it is about time that I got back to blogging. However, I don't have very much to say now that I am between classes. We start skin, muscular skeletal, and sensory tomorrow. I doubt that any of these will end up being subjects that I can get really passionate about but it is nice to have the chance for a fresh start. Like any fresh start I am making all the extravagent resolutions thus associated. I will stay on top of the reading, I will make summary notes every day, I will do extra shadowing in the area, then I will solve world hunger and write an opera. Oh well. Hopefully I will at least learn from the mistakes I made in the last course and improve on them. Time to move on.

I should be journaling for my culture, health and wellness class. Tomorrow we have a session on immigrant and refugee health and wellness and we are suppose to journal our feelings and reflections before and after the class.

I generally have mixed feelings about our 'softer' courses. While I think the purpose of them is entirely useful, practical, admirable... the application is almost always annoying. Maybe it is because these classes tend to be haphazard and unorganized. The 'message' is usually lost in the mayhem.

I think the most annoying thing is that, unlike our other classes, there seems to be little acknowledgement of the variety in the class. They assume all of us are at square one, which I find odd since one of the criteria that they use to choose students is past expereince volunteering in a variety of things. They know that most of us have travelled and had experience with people in different settings but then treat us like we haven't left the city before. The result of this underestimation is that all of the discussions are pretty superficial. There is always a 'message'. Instead of a complex discussion the classes resemble fairy tales where we are suppose to get the moral. The result is tiresome; exactly the waste of time that proponents of the all hard science and practical skills curriculum claim.
Or maybe I am just starting to freak out about our first certifying exam and am mad at any distraction. 8 days and counting.

I have been pretty negligent in my posting so thank you to miette at Running with Scissors for tagging me and thus prompting me to write again. So here we go - 20 random things about me.

1) When I was a kid my favorite place was a big old poplar in the middle of a field about two blocks from my parent's house. The town I grew up in was pretty small and we lived near the edge. There were cows half a block to the west and a wheat field two blocks to the south. The tree grew along a branch of the irrigation canal and was great for climbing. During the summer I would crawl up onto the thick branches; read, hide and stare through the leaves. Occasionally I would nap, probably not the best idea 10 feet up.

2) I am in the middle of reading about 4 books. Two I started during my honeymoon last December, one I started about 3 years ago shortly after I quit my job and went back to school. The other one was cracked somewhere in between.

3) My favorite colour used to be blue. If I was forced to pick a favorite now it would probably be green.

4) I hate picking favorites. I think my mood is too changeable to pick a favorite anything that would suit all occasions.

5) I was married one year and 2 days ago. We celebrated our first anniversary in Lake Louise.

6) We have two cats. My husband named the first one Mattisse because she likes to play with paper. I named the second one Findley after Timothy Findley because he is a dignified older gentleman. He is sleek but a little over weight.

7) I have lived with my husband for 7 years, 3 years longer than we have been a couple. We managed to stay roommates across the hall for that long before fate, in the guise of an open bar, brought us together.

8) I don’t believe in fate.

9) One reason I quit my job was because I kept picturing myself trying to explain to my future grandchildren why I worked for an oil company, something that I hope will be considered reprehensible and archaic by the time they ask me what I did with my life; like anchormen smoking during newscasts or child labor (if only there wasn’t still child labor).

10) I always jump at the cheap scares in horror movies.

11) I love the podcasts Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me by NPR and This Week in Science.

12) I really don’t like Facebook. I know that I risk the cold shoulder by slamming such a massive and popular web 2.0 phenom, but everything about it just drives me nuts; the design, the function, the useless chatter. I also don’t like MySpace.

13) I am a pretty good cook. At least that is what my husband tells me. My specialties are anything with lamb, a 20 min meal from whatever is left in the fridge and BBQ ribs.

14) I am way more attached to my laptop than I thought I could be to any material object. It is probably the only thing that I would be truly devastated to lose. Which is bad considering it will probably self-destruct in less than three years, or at least be horribly outdated by then.

15) I drink way too much coffee, but I think that is hereditary. My parents both measure their daily intake in pots, not cups.

16) My optimistic naïve side thinks that most of the problems of the world could be resolved (or at least made a lot more manageable) if people spent more time thinking about the consequences of their actions on other people.

17) The worst job I ever had was house painting during the summer between highschool and first year university. For some reason, I was always sent up the ladder to do the highest parts. I think the manager thought that, since I was the smallest, I wouldn’t fall as hard. His math was faulty in general. He always underbudgeted the jobs so we usually made about 3 dollars an hour.

18) A friend of mine made up a 'punch list’. The punch list is three people who you would want to punch if you ever met them. Once they are on the list you are obligated to punch them if you do meet them (which led to an awkward situation between Alan Rock for one of our friends). Ralph Klein, Dick Cheney and Jeff Collins (the CBC afternoon guy) are on my punch list.

19) The farthest from home I have ever been is Thailand.

20) I jumped into medicine with both feet not knowing if I would like where I landed. I can't say that I knew enough about being a doctor to really be prepared for all of this. Thankfully I am enjoying med school even more than I thought I would. I am particularly enjoying communications and anytime we get to go talk to real patients. I am hoping that is a good sign.

Now to pass along the tag. I pick Anna, Tall Medstudent and sparkydoom.
Have fun.

I hate housework. I am not sure if it a cause or an effect of my hatred, but I am also very bad at it. Don't think that I live in pig sty or anything. I still pick up the broom or windex when it is called for but it makes me angry every time. In fact, I think cleaning is the only thing that I do regularly that I am truely horrible at. But there are still month-old scuff marks on the limoleum that I can't get off with any amount of scrubbing and that tub ring mocks me every morning.

Of course everything else must be going pretty well in my life if this is the only thing I can think of to complain about. Have a great, cleaning-product-free, day.