Sigh.

Making New Friends

Yesterday I had to leave a session to make a phone call. I do that on a fairly regular basis, when the session is a bit boring or to call my friends to brag about the rarity of the condition my patient has. This time, I ducked into an exam room to call a lab to check the cost of a test. I was transferred from the lab to the billing department and put on hold, and during the transfer I heard what might have been a bizarre, strangled scream. I have no more information about that nor does it lead to anything else later in the story; it just weirded me out.

I waited for an indeterminate amount of time. Bored, I looked to my surroundings for entertainment. Sitting on the desk in front of me was a stack of two Tupperware containers. The top one appeared to contain a clump of hair submerged in a bit of water. "Well that's werid," I thought, absently picking up the container. "Who cleans out their shower comb and saves it for the doctor?"

I checked the label. "[Patient's name]'s pin worms with eggs attached. Keep in water." Oh. Holy. Jebus. Picture me, sitting in an exam room on the phone, stuck on hold with a lab and a handful of presumably still living parasitic intestinal worms. "Quick" is an understatement describing the speed with which I set that Tupperware down. The one beneath the original nightmare contained what at first glance, still in my parasite-crazed mind, appeared to be folds of infested intestinal tissue. I soon realized that it was actually paper towels. Shut up, I was bracing myself for the worst. This one was just some pinworm eggs from the same patient. Just some parasite eggs.

Holy crap, who is this chick?! Where is she?! Did she sit in this chair?! Okay, done. Put the phone down, holding or not, and went to wash my hands. Up to the elbows. Several times. By the time I got back to the phone it was making a weird beeping noise, so I hung up and called back, only to be put back on hold. Very good phone system they have down at Baylor. At this point, the infectious disease doctor popped in to the room.

"Are you hanging out with my worms?" he asked, grabbing the disgusting containers.

"Yeah, then I had to wash my hands," I replied, then realizing that information was totally unnecessary, that now this doctor knew I was touching the worm containers, freaking out about touching the worm containers and worrying that worms could transmit their eggs through plastic to my skin. He didn't need to know that.

Broken.

Here is an amazing list of the things that I own that have broken recently.

1. My DVD player's sound amplifies the music and sound effects and minimizes the dialogue. This happened a while ago actually but I recently got Netflix so it's come up again.

2. Driving back to Chicago I realized a little door on the dashboard of my car won't stay closed. Some stupid plastic part of the hinge is broken. The corner of it digs right into my knee while I drive. It's great.

3. Got new headphones in the mail courtesy of a lifetime warranty! Whee! One of the earbuds exploded the other day (less than a month after receiving them) and I am now forced to half-listen to idiots on the bus and train. Thanks a pantload, Koss.

4. Took my necklace off today and the chain broke. Wonderful.

5. Had an allergic reaction to something on my legs that resulted in some extremely broken skin. Yeah, that's probably reaching. But it was AWFUL. Itching to the point where my legs were twitching involuntarily, it hurt to touch and my only option for sleeping was pounding a few Benadryl. Wow, when I put it it like that maybe I should have sought medical attention. Eh, it's clearing up now.

6. Laptop. This one's painful. The screen had been pink for a while, but thanks to the store I bought it from going out of business, my warranty couldn't be extended like I had planned. I put up with the pink for about four months (after a while you don't even notice it, I swear! Just don't put it near anything that's actually white) and then one morning the poor little guy flickered and went black. If I shined a flashlight on the screen I can see the icons, (what, this wouldn't be your first instinct?) but it's utterly unusable. Like trying to play a first generation Gameboy at night. Not gonna happen. I Frankenstein-ed it up to another monitor to extract my precious, precious data and sent it off and was hopeful. I got the call today with the estimate. $978.36. Nine hundred and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-six cents. So that's not going to happen anymore. I am no longer a mobile computer-er.

7. The cat's sinus infection is back so she's kind of broken too.

Hopefully my old computer won't explode when I hit publish. Also, I just remembered how bright and shiny and happy my last post was... Fancy New Kinsley, the Fancy New Manic Depressive.

NEXT!

Hard to believe I'm on my fifth rotation. It seems like just yesterday I was fearing for my life on the 4 down to U of C. Now I'm living it up on the X9 en route to Rush Medical Center. Woo! Much improvement here.

And I just found out a formerly weekly 8 am, hour-long lecture, one of which I was supposed to give (boo!) was changed to a once a month lecture with no student presentations (yay!).

And today, on my first day of my rotation I held a 5-pound premie twin my supervisor was too scared to hold. She said that noble deed earned me an automatic A for the rotation, and I WILL be holding her to that.

Also, I don't have to come to clinic tomorrow (no patients = no me) and there's an Air and Water show all this weekend - my supervisor printed me the schedule (!) complete with a "unique night show with a dazzling pyrotechnic display and streams of sparkling light in sync with music."

Everything's coming up Lisa!

Stay tuned, I'm liable to find an immortal, maintenence-free puppy that sheds rainbows and craps Reece's Pieces the way this day is going. Woo!

I know.

I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy with end of the year stuff. And look at what I have to deal with at home.One cleans windows with ammonium hydroxide. The other is dermatologist-approved to cleanse sensitive facial skin. They both come in blue packages and are currently sitting on the couch together.

I'm not saying my life is fraught with danger that keeps me on my toes and ever-alert. But I'm not saying it isn't, either.

I'll post when I can. Stay safe.

Podcast Pickiness

I have a strange relationship with music. One day, we're BFF. Singing, dancing... it's a great bond. Other days - most days - I can't listen to any song for more than ten seconds. Seems kind of silly for a girl like me to have an iPod, you might say. Shut up, I'll do what I want, I say in an immature reply. Enter podcasts. Talking on just about every topic under the sun, free for the downloading. I have a roster that keeps me sane on the public transportation here and I'm always trying to add new podcast friends to my playlists. To encourage me to keep posting here, I've decided to write about a podcast a week. I'll start with the ones I know I like and then perhaps venture out into new and different podcasts. Suggestions are welcome, so fellow podcast junkies, feel free to let me know who's chatting it up on your mp3 player of choice. Here we go!

Slate Explainer Podcast

In theory, this podcast is a fantastic idea; in practice, it's been a bumpy road. This podcast is a great exmaple of the importance of the narrator. I love this column on the Slate website, so when I found there was a podcast I literally squee'd with joy. (Squee: verb. To squeal girlishly, usually in conjunction with a positive emotion.) When I started listening, June Thomas was the speaker. She was all right aside from her bizarre accent. It sounded like a typical Scottish accent with the occasional word that would come flying out of her mouth and bitchslap me with the absolute ridiculousness of her pronunciation. Soon, I stopped enjoying the podcast. I began listening on edge, waiting for the next retarded word to arrive. Before long she was replaced, and her replacement made me long for the days of stupid pronunciations.

Michelle Tsai is the bane of my iPod's existence. Supposedly she's a writer for Slate, and she should stick to a medium that doesn't require me or anyone else with any hearing ability to listen to her voice. She speaks with the affected sing-song voice of a braindead Valley girl who would be booted from The Hills for being too ditzy and annoying. In Tsai-talk, every statement is a question, and every question is coquettishly overacted. I picture her flouncing into the studio to record each week and it infuriates me. Occaasionally some other guy reads the Explainer. Yeah, those are the good weeks. I was forced to give up listening to this podcast because I was going to have to feed my iPod into a wood chipper if if I heard that she was "Michelle Tsai and this is the Explainer podcast for Thursday, March thirtinkth" one more time. Thirtinkth is not a typo, it's an attempt to capture the spine-crinkling annoyingness of her voice. Thirtinkth. That's actually how she says it. Grr. Hang on, I've got to go punch something.

A few months ago, I would have only recommended this podcast to you if you had either a huge tolerance for Valley girl or a deafening love of trivia. Even then I would have pointed you to the web column instead. However, there has recently been a long-awaited changing of the guard. Other listeners must have felt the same way because Tsai has gone the way of the dodo. There's a new female narrator, which means that my boycott of the Explainer podcast is over! New girl has a minor problem with over-enunciation here and there, but for now I'm chalking that up to excitement about her new job. Time will tell, but I don't think she'll take the Tsai-path to eardrum distruction. She had better not, anyway. We saw what happened to Tsai. Well, technically I guess we didn't. But I have my theories...

Blast from the Past: First Rotation

Look at this! Look at all these entries! Look at me go! Whee! Here's some embarrassingly old stuff I wrote but never typed up. Let's go back... way back to the first week of my very first rotation. February something. Let's set the stage for this situation. I live in Lakeview, north of my classes downtown. My first rotation was at the University of Chicago. A couple of inches on the map, if that. Keep that in mind.

On the first day, I caught the bus with two fellow 1st years who are on their lab rotation at U of C. According to the CTA website, the best buses to take were the #147 and the #4. Not that that probably means anything to you, but just know that it's not a problematic route... on paper. After we boarded the #4, it came to our attention that this. Bus. Is. Exceedingly. Painstakingly. Ridiculously. Slow. Like, stops every block as we descended into the ghetto. For over an hour.

We finally arrived at U of C and headed to our separate rotations. That first day I observed a few cases, met a world-renowned cancer doctor and then headed back home. Unfortunately I left a few minutes later than the other two and had to write the lovely #4 alone. Well, I wasn't alone, but trust me. I was alone. I managed to score a seat right away, turned up the tunes and tried to breathe out of my mouth. Seriously, this bus was nas-McAssty. And as I'm sitting there, trying to remember what stop I needed for my transfer, I see a lady sitting ahead of me. No, maybe it was a gentleman. I'm not sure. I'm sorry, sir/ma'am. Perhaps you should consider at least one article of gender specific clothing? Some lip gloss? I dunno. Just a thought if you want a bitchy blogger to be able to identify your gender when she writes about you without your permission on the Internet. Anyway.

(S)he was sitting in front of me in one of the side-facing seats behind the driver. I'm innocently looking forward to any point on the oh-so-distant horizon that is NOT in the ghetto when what do I see in my peripheral vision? The ambiguous individual burying his/her/its head in a tattered backpack and inhaling very deeply and loudly through his/her/its nose. I'd use the word "snorted," but that's a pretty judgement-laden word, and I have no way of verifying what substance, controlled or otherwise, was given an express ticket to his sinus cavity. The flu is going around, maybe it was some Vicks Vap-o-Rub. You know, to clear the sinuses. For when he/she/it snorted coke later. See, we just don't know and it's really not fair to judge.

He/She/It disembarked quickly at the next stop, so I guess I'll never know what it was. I'm no drug-scent expert, but I do know that I didn't smell any mentholated, sinus-clearing vapor wafting my way. Just unidentifiable repulsive body-related odors. I remained a mouth-breather until we re-entered civilization, where I promptly got off the bus at the wrong stop and had to walk many, many blocks to find a bus that would take me back home.

So yeah, I had the best "first day" story that night at happy hour.