operation highly respectable human being: success!!

After a lengthy hiatus, I am proud to inform you that I am re-instituting my habit of jotting down daily musings and happenings for the entire internet-world to behold.
Behold! It is the end of a long and productive summer, and still the beginning of what is hinting to be a much less miserable - perhaps even enjoyable - year. Rather than delve immediately into my profound ideas on the state of the world at present, I will spend a brief time outlining the components and structure of my current existence, as since I last wrote, everything has been altered.
First: I said goodbye to my job as Data Manager in the hospital's program for Bone Marrow Transplant, trained all summer as an EMT and took a part-time job as an Emergency Department Technician in the ER at the hospital where I was already employed. It was the best decision I have ever made in my life, aside from the impending poverty that has already reared it's ugly head, according to my personal online bank statement. The point of this change was not to get rich though, but to make more time for school and likewise get more clinical experience in medicine. In this realm the plan has panned out with great success. And, worry you not, there are many, many stories from the ER to come.*
Second: I moved! No longer do I live in an apartment that one might term as "squalid," but in a beautiful three story house at the end of culdesac in Old Cambridge, complete with backyard (mostly dirt right now I guess), gardens, and porches galore. Even a clothesline! Next, I am getting a piano. Having spent last year maintaining virtually no contact whatsoever with any friends, I now live with two of my best friends from high school and one of their old college roommates. Finally I'm in a place where I can burp in front of my co-inhabitants and sing themes from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without hesitancy.
Last-ish: everything else. I'm running the Chicago Marathon in two weeks, but it is bound to be a slower race than I had hoped. After a depressing 20k through the slums of New Haven a few weeks ago at the US 20k Championships (aka the New Haven Road Race) I decided that running under 3:05 in the marathon was going to be a stark impossibility, and that I had best work on my shorter races this fall instead and get some speed back before I attempted to run both long AND fast. It seems to be working - I can run a bunch quarters around 82 seconds now (woot! sounds like high school track!), and, if I am not permanently crippled over the next two months from having twisted the crap out of my lower back pushing 400-pound patients on stretchers all over the hospital for their freaking CAT scans and x-rays and cardiac catheterizations to look through their enormous globs of FAT at all the bodily DAMAGE that their being FAT has caused, I may just have the best cross-country season ever since the glory days atop the Hopkins Hill in New Haven. The marathon will be nothing more than a mid-season frivolity.

And now, a few of what shall become daily pearls of wisdom from the ER:
1- do.not.smoke.
2- do not get fat. you will someday need CPR and it will not work.
3- if you have pus coming out of your genitalia, go to the hospital. You are septic and are dying. The EMT's will not be able to save you.
4- don't use IV drugs. You will contract a number of diseases that your terribly accident-prone ED tech is bound to get exposed to via blood-splash, whom, upon discovering the gravity of such a possible exposure, will burst into tears in front of the entire ER staff at the center nurses's station. Good bye, med school, good bye.


*All of which will be de-identified and/or told with permission of persons involved. Luckily, amusing ER cases are so frequent and so uniformly categorized into a) cardiac arrest/code blue occurrences b) hilarious drunk people c)trauma involving the loss of an extremity or a whack on the head that causes the victim to sing disjointed nursery rhymes all night ("no more...no more monkeys...jumping...on....the...bed!), that for someone to read one of my blog-renderings and identify themselves as the subject would seem nearly impossible, and definitely impossible to prove.