July 2011
1 post
All I can think about is how good it is to be home, and it’s VERY distracting from my studies.
I went to the Temescal Street Fair today, and wandered the street in perfect weather…when I was supposed to be working on my paper.
Yesterday I went on a hike at Wunderlich Park in Woodside…when I was supposed to be working on my case presentation.
I’m working on a case...
April 2011
2 posts
I have so much school work piling up in the homestretch, so obviously it’s time to get back to the blog.
I struggle with prenatal visits. While I’m totally fascinated by all the physiological changes a woman’s body goes through in pregnancy, I’m so much more interested in gynecology than obstetrics. I’ve been trying to explain my disinterest, but it’s...
I love when Bill is in town! He got in on Thursday, and in a few short days we went to:
The Levee: We tried to go to the beer garden across the street, but even on a Thursday, it was too crowded and intolerable, so we went to the reliable Levee and drank Jim Beam and cream soda. It’s better than it sounds, I swear.
The Commodore: Also totally crowded on a Thursday! Clearly I need to get...
March 2011
1 post
Well, after weeks of rigmarole, I finally started my clinical rotation at Harlem Hospital today. The process of getting “clearance” was arduous. It took a month of emails and phone calls before I even heard back from the woman who was supposed to set up the process, and when I did hear from her, it was in the form of a terse email that simply told me my appointment was for 8:30 the...
February 2011
1 post
Yesterday, I had a three hour break between classes, so of course I used that time as any productive member of society would choose to: I came home and took a nap.
I didn’t fall asleep right away, and it seemed like I was just going to lay there with my eyes closed for the whole hour I had allotted, when suddenly I was walking with Margaux under great redwood trees. It was just her and...
January 2011
2 posts
Last night, I went out to see my friend Whitney play music in the LES. Totally fun! Of course, though, the punishment for having fun late at night is that it takes me like a year to get home. I took the D to the 3 to the 1, relatively painlessly, except for some longish late night wait times. Whatevs.
When the 1 went above ground at 125th St., I saw that the rumored snowstorm was beginning....
December 2010
1 post
I remember going for hikes in the rain when I was a little girl, and I really liked the way everything sounded inside the hood of my raincoat. There was this sort of magical effect added both to sounds I made and sounds that came from outside my hood. For some reason, it’s hard to describe childhood sense memories, even when I re-experience them as an adult.
I was walking down the street...
November 2010
2 posts
Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I totally love the subway. I guess that’s why I don’t really mind so much that I live an hour away from everything. I love that it runs all night, I love that you always see crazy people, I love watching people fighting to stay awake, I love getting up to offer my seat to a pregnant lady, I love watching tourists be all confused...
I had this great experience for a moment today on the subway. I was coming back from Trader Joe’s on the 1 this afternoon, and at 103rd Street, I suddenly heard really loud trumpeting. I thought it was probably someone playing music in the station for money. But I looked towards the sound, and saw a woman leaning out of the car with her trumpet, playing a quick fraction of a tune at...
October 2010
3 posts
Today in clinical, I actually got to do a bunch of speculum exams. So exciting! It’s not always so easy to find the cervix right away, but I’m getting better at it. I was commiserating with a classmate the other day about how the cervices can be sneaky, which made both of us feel a little better.
One patient in the afternoon was on the exam table, and as I was inserting the...
I finally paid a visit to the new Upper West Side Trader Joe’s today. It probably made me happier than any grocery trip should. Picking out all my familiar California snacks…ahhhhh, yum. I’ve been to the Trader Joe’s at Union Square twice since I moved here, and the experience was insane enough to keep from going more than once every 6 months. Grocery stores in New York...
So, this is dumb: I didn’t realize until just the other day that when my professor said, “Progesterone is the hormone of pregnancy,” she really meant it. Pro-gestational hormone. Progesterone. Duh. Somehow I never noticed this obvious meaning until I was reading something about medication abortions that described mifepristone as “antiprogestational.” I hate when I...
September 2010
7 posts
The rain totally made me want to stay in bed forever and ever yesterday morning. But then I remembered that it was diaphragm fitting day! I squirmed my way through two long classes in cramped auditoriums, both taught by a professor who repeatedly mispronounced the word “pharynx.” You’d think if you used this word professionally all the time, you’d know that it’s not...
Ephemeral New York →
Old timey New York pictures and stories! Thanks, Zacho! Of particular interest, since I was just in Barcelona, is Gaudi’s vision for a really tall building in Manhattan.
This week in Comprehensive Women’s Health, we covered cervical cytology, which of course includes a long discussion about HPV, one of my favorite party topics. Since I had my own personal cervical dysplasia debacle several years ago, I’ve gotten a little uppity about the subject, wondering loudly why HPV isn’t one of the standard STI tests, and why there isn’t a test at...
I’m quickly getting back in the swing of things here. I found out a few days before I came back that I’d be at Planned Parenthood for my clinical rotation this fall, which had me pretty stoked about the coming semester. I flew back from Rome on Monday night, and started classes again on Tuesday afternoon, leaving me enough time to get myself together on Tuesday morning, but not...
July 2010
9 posts
So.
I gave my first pelvic exam on Monday.
!!!!!!!
The women’s health students take a lot of classes together with the midwifery students, because there is a lot of overlap in our scope of practice. Pelvic assessment is, of course, one such area of overlap. The midwifery student practice pelvic exams on each other, whereas the women’s health students learn with GTA’s,...
Do yourself a favor and check out some cervices, because they are AWESOME. I’m a little in love with this website. Probably bodes well for my future career, huh? Apparently the girl who started the site got her boyfriend to wear a mining helmet with a light on it to take the pictures. Love it.
Microphone Guy update!
OK, so it was shockingly appropriate that I posted a Muppet video to go with my story about Microphone Guy. Today, I was sitting in my room and heard what I thought was a woman screaming at someone who’d seriously done her wrong. Turned out that Microphone Guy has added a Very Angry Puppet to his act, who screams profanities at everyone she passes. Including, at some point, some kid who was...
Aaahhh…it’s cooled down to a brisk 85 degrees, so my brain is once again capable of composing complete sentences.
This morning, I had a physical exam check out for my pelvic assessment class. Last summer, the physical exam check out was totally stressful for everyone, 20 minutes of torture graded by a stern TA who would ding you for the smallest infraction. For example, I got graded...
Well. Last night I went to the legendary Crif Dogs around midnight. Um. I kind of can’t believe I ate a hot dog that was wrapped in bacon and THEN doused with avocados and sour cream. It was the first time in my life that I’ve ever enjoyed anything called a Chihuahua. It was…pretty epic. I had a bite of Marc’s corn dog…dude. I don’t even like corn dogs. But...
Last week, Hope and I took the bus up to our local farmers’ market, because I mostly refuse to buy the produce at C Town. It was like a million degrees outside. When we left the house, I pointed out some ominous looking clouds hovering over the Hudson. I was like, “Hm, do you think it might rain?” but totally didn’t go back in to get my umbrella. We caught the bus, and...
June 2010
1 post
Oh jeez. I’m a really bad blogger. But you know, I was finishing my first year of school, visiting California for 3 weeks, studying for the NCLEX, starting classes again, hanging out with Mom for a week…I’ve been busy. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I officially became an RN. This is pretty mindblowing. I’m still a little bit in disbelief that I can actually say the...
May 2010
1 post
The other morning, I was taking patients’ vital signs at the ungodly hour of 6am. I really, really hate waking people up that early. Like, really hate it. My last patient that morning was this middle aged Jamaican guy, who has been so lovely in the few days that I worked with him. He comes from a huge family, and coincidentally, he and my preceptor are both the fifth child of nine. Crazy.
...
April 2010
2 posts
Oh YUM. At the end of my night out with Demelza and Ben on Saturday, we went to this restaurant and bar called Rye on South First in Williamsburg, for one final cocktail. The place is really inconspicuous, and apparently D & B have been walking past it for months, wondering about it. It’s beautiful, all dark wood and mood lighting. And you know what else is beautiful? A Stone Fence...
Man, I’m a bad blogger! I swear I’ll get back on track.
I started doing night shifts at a rehab floor at Cornell a couple weeks ago. The night I started, I was reminded of this phenomenon I’ve been noticing since I started the program: a HUGE proportion of nurses wears gigantic diamond engagement rings. It’s uncanny. Mostly either the classic, single huge diamond, or...
March 2010
4 posts
Man, what a long week. I just took a 3 (or maybe 4…) hour post-class nap because I’ve been sleeping an average of 4 hours a night all week. I’ve got a take-home test to muddle through this weekend, but omfg, I’m totally planning to sleep extensively.
Monday we had a lecture about pain management. The professor’s main point was that you ALWAYS believe the...
I feel like I unintentionally made it my New Year’s resolution to get out of the Heights as much as possible on the weekends. Friday we had a snow day, so I spent a lot of the morning (OK, fine, early afternoon) watching the snow fall, because it’s still totally magical to me. In the evening, Dan and I made the trek to DUMBO to see his friend Alyssa’s piece in the Dumbo Arts...
February 2010
8 posts
Washington Heights Neighborhoodr! →
Neighborhoodr is a pretty great idea, I think. Right now, it’s mostly people posting a lot of pics of snow in the Heights. Ha, just like I’ve been doing!
On my way home from school today, I needed to get milk. I was determined not to go anywhere that wasn’t directly on my way home, because the weather was ridiiiiiculous today. Wet, slapping wind, basically. I’m so happy to have my red raincoat. Even with the raincoat, though, I was walking around feeling kind of like a wet cat all day. Anyway, I stopped in the corner store at the end of...
Good weekend!
On Friday, I took a test that I was embarrassingly unprepared for. I checked my answers afterward, and I’m pretty sure I somehow got an A because I happened to study the right thing. I was so excited that I came home and promptly passed out at 10am. Not even Tim Gunn could keep me awake.
After nap time, and what I felt was well-deserved loafing, I went to Williamsburg to...
I’m finally on my last clinical rotation of my first year of nursing school. Crazy, right? I still have eight more weeks of “integration” from the end of March to the middle of May, but this is my last of what are called the “five by fives”, so named because they are five five week clinical rotations in different areas.
ANYWAY. This one, med/surg, is the one...
I finished my OB rotation this week, leaving me with only one more 5 week class before I start “integration.” I can’t believe how fast this first year is going by! I guess I better start studying for the NCLEX…where did I put those flashcards? I keep wanting to sign up for the test now, so I have a date to work with, but I can’t sign up until I’ve done all the...
January 2010
14 posts
Bringing Up Burrito
Today, Demelza and I tried our luck with Friday afternoon studying. Turns out we have a slightly shorter attention span on Friday afternoons, especially when we plan to reward ourselves with margaritas when we’re done. We got a few solid hours in before Ben came and met us, at which point we started researching local burrito joints on our phones. We settled on Benny’s Burritos,...
Yesterday, I was standing in the nursery, surrounded by newborn babies, watching huge snowflakes fall from the sky. It was so far outside my normal experience. Babies? Snow? Wha? The snow was beautiful as it landed on the trees outside the windows, and it was very satisfying to be able to soothe the baby who had been spitting up on himself all morning. When I met his bizarro high maintenance...
Man, I’m so glad I took advantage of the long weekend. Mine included Tuesday as well, since that’s how we roll in nursing school.
On Friday, I went to this bizarre party in the basement of a clothing store in SoHo, where apparently the Beastie Boys and Chaka Khan used to hang out. OK, pretty cool. Manlexis and I ran around with his big fancy camera, taking pictures of the crazy...