A Missive from Burlington
Right.
Here I am. It's the largest city in Vermont. It's Burlington. It's UVM. It's been more difficult than I'd ever dreamed.
I am not a person that takes most change well. I love my routines and pursuing a quiet grounded way of being. I do not love being uprooted and thrown into the middle of something wild and wooly.
My learning is good in most ways. I very much enjoy the juxtaposition of academic abstraction and the sordid day-to-day. Yesterday I sat in class for five hours, studying the use of therapeutic drugs to treat disorders of the gastrointestinal tract and having lengthy conversations about medical ethics. Today and Tuesday I was at the nursing home for five hours, cleaning the bottoms of very old people who couldn't 'do' for themselves, spoon-feeding them lunch while they dribbled applesauce out of the corner of their mouth, dressing various seeping wounds, and giving the occasional injection of anti-psychotic drugs.
By the way, you really can't appreciate how unpleasant human waste is until you've painstakingly cleaned a particularly putrid version of it out of every intimate crevice of someone's body. This also gives a new appreciation for how much it's possible to become entirely desensitized. I'm not actually sure what I find gross any more. Between the seeping chest wounds bubbling pus at every breath, the intimate toilet care, and the spatters of partially-chewed food that cover my clothes at the end of every meal, my tolerance has reached entirely new levels. I haven't yet performed a manual fecal disimpaction, but I'm sure it's coming. I've actually caught myself thinking, 'I can't wait until I get a chance to insert a urinary catheter!'
I adore my coursework. My Pathophysiology work is technically challenging and involves everything that I love about science.
As a sweet sweet side effect, watching House becomes increasingly more entertaining the more I learn (For instance, you know the episode where he caths himself? WRONG KIND of catheter! They get props for using what looked like a real catheter, and getting the procedure as right as it's gonna be if you're doing it sitting on your toilet, but since he left it in overnight it would have to be a Foley, and the prop was clearly an intermittent. Also, they put their stethoscopes on backwards half the time. On the other hand, the various diagnoses the team throws around are usually plausible. It really COULD be Lupus. Or a tumor.)
Despite Good Things, I am homesick. I came to Marlboro to be a normal person for a while. In the Real World I am not normal. I am proud of this, granted, but it is a Problem. I miss being in a place where I am known. I miss having a dozen close friends within a half-hour drive. I just plain miss my friends. I miss the Tea Lounge. I miss the woods. I wanted to meet new people, but I'd forgotten how overwhelmingly stressful I find meeting people to be. I am quirky, and my loved ones know to take that in stride and not hold it against me. New People see what they see, and sometimes the quirkiness isn't outweighed by whatever good there is in me. I'd forgotten how difficult it is for me to make friends. I'd forgotten how difficult life is without friends around.
Back to Good Things.
I have a Bicycle! It is a sweet and sexy vintage Schwinn, all ruby red with a dropped cross-bar so I can ride it through town wearing skirts and feel like a charmingly tomboyish co-ed from the '50s. Our house is wonderful. We have a lovely front porch and multi-bicycle garage and a gorgeous landscaped lawn full of gardens that will be amazing come spring, if we maintain them properly. We have all hardwood floors and a gas stove and a woodstove in the living room.
My housemates are wonderful, too. Ashley is chopping all of our firewood for the winter, single-handedly, using only simple manual tools. Gary cooks a mean vegan Pad Thai, has enthusiastically helped me install Linux on my laptop, and dispenses hugs liberally.
There is a lengthy folk music jam session on campus every Friday evening that is seriously short on fiddles. There is a lovely and large Quaker meeting where, nevertheless, folks are already learning my name. I joined the UVM orchestra; we're playing the symphonic dances from West-side story. I still have a cat; his name is now Aspen. My next clinical setting is going to be in a convent!
Life: often imitated, never duplicated.
Here I am. It's the largest city in Vermont. It's Burlington. It's UVM. It's been more difficult than I'd ever dreamed.
I am not a person that takes most change well. I love my routines and pursuing a quiet grounded way of being. I do not love being uprooted and thrown into the middle of something wild and wooly.
My learning is good in most ways. I very much enjoy the juxtaposition of academic abstraction and the sordid day-to-day. Yesterday I sat in class for five hours, studying the use of therapeutic drugs to treat disorders of the gastrointestinal tract and having lengthy conversations about medical ethics. Today and Tuesday I was at the nursing home for five hours, cleaning the bottoms of very old people who couldn't 'do' for themselves, spoon-feeding them lunch while they dribbled applesauce out of the corner of their mouth, dressing various seeping wounds, and giving the occasional injection of anti-psychotic drugs.
By the way, you really can't appreciate how unpleasant human waste is until you've painstakingly cleaned a particularly putrid version of it out of every intimate crevice of someone's body. This also gives a new appreciation for how much it's possible to become entirely desensitized. I'm not actually sure what I find gross any more. Between the seeping chest wounds bubbling pus at every breath, the intimate toilet care, and the spatters of partially-chewed food that cover my clothes at the end of every meal, my tolerance has reached entirely new levels. I haven't yet performed a manual fecal disimpaction, but I'm sure it's coming. I've actually caught myself thinking, 'I can't wait until I get a chance to insert a urinary catheter!'
I adore my coursework. My Pathophysiology work is technically challenging and involves everything that I love about science.
As a sweet sweet side effect, watching House becomes increasingly more entertaining the more I learn (For instance, you know the episode where he caths himself? WRONG KIND of catheter! They get props for using what looked like a real catheter, and getting the procedure as right as it's gonna be if you're doing it sitting on your toilet, but since he left it in overnight it would have to be a Foley, and the prop was clearly an intermittent. Also, they put their stethoscopes on backwards half the time. On the other hand, the various diagnoses the team throws around are usually plausible. It really COULD be Lupus. Or a tumor.)
Despite Good Things, I am homesick. I came to Marlboro to be a normal person for a while. In the Real World I am not normal. I am proud of this, granted, but it is a Problem. I miss being in a place where I am known. I miss having a dozen close friends within a half-hour drive. I just plain miss my friends. I miss the Tea Lounge. I miss the woods. I wanted to meet new people, but I'd forgotten how overwhelmingly stressful I find meeting people to be. I am quirky, and my loved ones know to take that in stride and not hold it against me. New People see what they see, and sometimes the quirkiness isn't outweighed by whatever good there is in me. I'd forgotten how difficult it is for me to make friends. I'd forgotten how difficult life is without friends around.
Back to Good Things.
I have a Bicycle! It is a sweet and sexy vintage Schwinn, all ruby red with a dropped cross-bar so I can ride it through town wearing skirts and feel like a charmingly tomboyish co-ed from the '50s. Our house is wonderful. We have a lovely front porch and multi-bicycle garage and a gorgeous landscaped lawn full of gardens that will be amazing come spring, if we maintain them properly. We have all hardwood floors and a gas stove and a woodstove in the living room.
My housemates are wonderful, too. Ashley is chopping all of our firewood for the winter, single-handedly, using only simple manual tools. Gary cooks a mean vegan Pad Thai, has enthusiastically helped me install Linux on my laptop, and dispenses hugs liberally.
There is a lengthy folk music jam session on campus every Friday evening that is seriously short on fiddles. There is a lovely and large Quaker meeting where, nevertheless, folks are already learning my name. I joined the UVM orchestra; we're playing the symphonic dances from West-side story. I still have a cat; his name is now Aspen. My next clinical setting is going to be in a convent!
Life: often imitated, never duplicated.