Forty-Eight Hours in the Life of Me
Monday
0000: I've been doing house chores for most of the afternoon- most notably, grocery shopping on bikeback with Gary, carrying all of our food home in internal frame backpacks, then helping with dinner, cleaning, and putting everything away. It's definitely midnight before I finish all of my homework and fall asleep.
0600: There's the alarm. My classmate is delivering Grand Rounds over at the medical school this morning (a once-monthly lecture for everyone in a given residency; this one's for family practice), and I want to hear her speak.
0750: I leave the house on my bike, running late as usual.
0802: Why do the medical students get the nice lecture halls? My classmate's lecture is excellent, but I have to leave early for class.
0900: I love the material presented in Pathophysiology, but three hours of Powerpoint at 9 am after 6 hrs of sleep is brutal. Thank goodness that half the material is a review of genetics. I doze. The other half I pay attention to: I'm fascinated by genetic disease.
1200: Thank God, it's time for lunch, and finishing all the reading for my next lecture.
1330: And back for two more hours of lecture.
1532: Because my class let out late and that's just the way my day is going to go, I arrive two minutes late for my first day of work in the molecular physiology lab. Luckily, it's a lab, so no one cares. I proceed to spend the next three hours mixing media, pouring plates, and learning about the research objectives of my new place of work.
1830: I bike home. I need to pick up cat food and decide what I'm making for dinner.
Tuesday
0100: I begin my new day by falling asleep. I was up until 2300 cooking dinner, cleaning up from dinner, and then making granola with The Boys. These were necessary tasks. Then we were up until Far Too Late discussing Life, the Universe, and Everything. This was not necessary, but did remind me vividly of dorm life. I love my friends, but I also need to sleep.
0600: That would be the alarm.
0645: Oh, dear. I finally get out of bed.
0710: I finally leave the house. I very much enjoy early morning bike rides. This morning I biked two miles, mostly uphill, on my three-speed, dressed in nice cords and a button-up shirt, with both my shoulder bag and my violin, in fifteen minutes, on five hours of sleep. And barely broke a sweat.
0730: Despite leaving the house ten minutes late, I am almost five minutes early to meet my ride over to the nursing home. R. is driving, and we pick up C. & K. along the way. I stop for coffee; an utterly necessary errand.
0800: Clinical. My assignment this morning is 'patient care'; this means lots of feeding breakfasts, bed baths, toileting, and hauling people around (from bed to toilet to chair). This is what I do, entirely nonstop, for four hours.
1200: Conference. This means I can sit down. My food is locked in R.'s car. I am too tired to go get it, and the smell of the nursing home invariably removes all trace of appetite. The only food items I can even consider consuming after four hours here are black tea or black coffee.
1230: Back to the floor. The afternoon is mostly feeding lunch. I've heard a lot about the horrible lack of nurses, but until this moment, when I'm sitting between two ill and elderly ladies, spoon-feeding them both simultaneously because there just isn't enough staff to go around- I never really got it. Right.
1415: Done for the day. I change my shirt in R.'s car to get the smell away from me. It really is pervasive. It invades my dreams. We stop at K.'s house to admire her tree fort, then it's back to campus for me. I now have half an hour to scarf some lunch before work.
1545: Made it back to the lab, finally. More mixing media. Still on my feet. Still going.
1715: The lab is out of tasks to be performed for the afternoon. I'll be back tomorrow, I imagine, to get on top of a new pile of stuff.
1730: Those couches in the nursing building look incredibly comfortable.
1830: They were.
1900: Orchestra rehearsal. We're performing the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein's West Side Story.
2130: Time to go home.
2200: I've eaten, and I have several more hours of homework to do before class tomorrow. In a fit of self-pitying exhaustion, I realize I have had virtually no personal time for the past two days, and watch an episode of Heroes and browse livejournal instead of doing homework.
Today
0022: Even if I go to bed at 0100 and get up at 0700, if you add in my nap this afternoon, that's seven hours of sleep! That's good, right? Right?