Meet Billy Rubin
Q: Mr. K, a 23 year old male, presents to his physician for evaluation of a large, yellow discoloration on his left thigh. He reports having initially felt slight pain on the left side of the discolored area, but the pain resolved within two days. How should his physician proceed?
A: The physician should inform Mr. K that he is simply a pussy who cannot handle a routine slap shot to the leg. He should further advise Mr. K that the only remedy is to grow a pair of testicles, get back out on the rink, and start diving in the way of more pucks.
(For some truly badass bruises, do a Google Image search on "bruise." Goddamn.)
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My last day of work was two Tuesdays ago, and despite a very nice farewell party in which I received a stethoscope and a coffee maker, I couldn't wait to leave. And not just because I made the embarrassing faux pas of cutting my own piece of cake and sitting down to eat it while everyone else watched. I was miserable. In my last two days I was given the assignment of training my replacement. As it turns out, nothing opens your eyes to how much you hate your job than explaining it in detail to somebody else. Little tricks that I was excited to show off ("If you get three rats by the tail at once, you can cut, like, 3 seconds off your changing time on each cage!") suddenly became ridiculous.
It certainly didn't help that my replacement reminded me all too much of me in my first week there. He had graduated from Penn State a couple years before I did and was looking to do behavioral studies. As he gradually started to see what menial labor the job entailed, the same look of panic that I once had formed on his face. A look that simultaneously said "But... but I have a degree!" and "I have to get out of here... but that'll be another 5 months of job searching!" The only difference between us was that I could resign myself to the misery more easily, because I knew I'd be out of there in the future. His sentence was indefinite, and an escape would rely heavily on his networking ability, which didn't bode well if his timidity was any indication. But as for me, having to relive my Cephalon debut made me eager to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.
I didn't write much about Cephalon over the past year, and for good reason. The vivarium had some pretty interesting characters, I'll admit, but nothing ever actually happened. It was so cyclical - change cages, clean them, set them up, and on and on and on - that it was hard to come up with some kind of narrative to drive my descriptions of my co-workers and their interactions. For instance, I have several pages worth of a post on Ed, the germophobic animal-lover-turned-crack-addict who got demoted from his long-held managerial position before I showed up, then resigned midway through my tenure. But it goes nowhere, because despite all of his idiosyncracies (when he pulled up in his run-down Jeep, he'd grab a tissue, stick his arm out the window, and open up the door from the outside), he never actually did anything. He just moped around the vivarium, organizing closets and labelling everything he could find with his Sharpie. Oh, and he cried a lot. The same is true for everyone else (the lack of solid stories, not the crying).
So that's why I haven't written much lately. On top of all of that was the general uncertainty pervading my life. I couldn't write about work because I didn't even want to think about it, and I couldn't write about anything else because I had too much angst to have a sense of humor. Now that I've had some time to relax, and now that I'm about to start a new and thrilling phase of my life (not to mention living on my own again, which is far more important than it might seem), I think I'll be getting back into the rhythm of posting again - though the tempo of that rhythm might be pretty slow, since I'm going to be saturated in physiology for the next two years.
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Which brings me to the last point for tonight. I'm thinking about creating a new blog. Two, perhaps.
I've been planning for a while now to keep an ongoing journal of my life as a med student - something not much different from what I'm doing now, but strictly about med school. So why separate it? Well, for one thing, I have a feeling a significant portion of what I write won't be of any interest to the people who read this Livejournal, or in any case will be more interesting for the people I meet at Drexel. Also, a medical school diary could attract readers who aren't necessarily friends or classmates - pre-med students, for instance - and I don't want to dilute it with posts like "Why Raphael Was the Greatest Ninja Turtle" or what have you. Those would stay here. Anyway, I'm still hashing out the details in my head. Look for more this week.
The other blog I've been thinking about creating is also related to medicine, though it's less of a diary and more of a blog as the media has recently come to define it. Last week, a book review in the New York Times pointed me to a site called Language Log, which features commentary from linguistics experts on all sorts of news stories relating to language, English or otherwise. Despite some occasional technical jargon on syntax or grammar, it's a pretty interesting and surprisingly funny site that I'd recommend to anybody who anybody who is interested in words and usage and whatnot. Anyway, it struck me that I could do something similar but with medicine, a blog where various med students contribute informed opinion pieces on current events. There's a huge pool of topics out there: policy issues, alternative health, new medications, ethical issues, "Grey's Anatomy." Sites like this do exist already, but none of them seem very well put together and I don't think any of them are strictly from a med student's point of view. And of course, this is all contingent on my figuring out how to create a site like that, and then actually making some friends, who in turn would actually want to contribute. Well, it's a thought.