I live in Vermont now.
My backyard is a ten-acre meadow.
The place next door is a big stone mansion. It's the music building when regular school is in session, and it was also the inspiration for Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
I have eight housemates, and they all seem interesting and cool and impressive in their own respective ways.
We nine have the entire campus nearly to ourselves, until Fall.
Today I held a little chunk of pure magnesium in a flame, and as advertised, it glowed and sparked and totally burned right the hell up under the fume hood. This is my job now; playing with (and thereby learning) science.
There's much, much more, but I need to go put 24 beers into a cooler because there's a barbecue starting in about half an hour.
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At work, I'm a respectable professional. On my blog... slightly less so.
About Me
- Febrifuge
- Here's the logline: I'm a Gen-X'er, a trained actor/writer, a former cubicle monkey, and I'm using all that as prelude to my newly-minted medical career as a PA-C. This blog covers educational, personal, and pop-cultural areas of interest, to me and presumably to the handful of people who read it. I graduated in 2009 from a very good PA school (that would be Physician Assistant, please note the lack of an apostrophe-s), and therefore much of the adventure has to do with maintaining speed up a steep learning curve.
Links: Medical and otherwise
- M. Giant's Velcrometer
- Jon Hunt's Hatesexy
- Bryan Lambert's YouAreDumb (Angry Nerd as Pundit. Totally works.)
- Are You a Doctor? (PA-style medicine)
- Movin' Meat (Emergency Medicine in All its Glory)
- Ten Out of Ten (Rocking the Suburban ER)
- GruntDoc's Blog
- Dr. Kevin Pho: Kevin, MD
- Overheard in Chicago
- Overheard in Minneapolis
- McSweeney's: stupid humor that's also smart
- The Student Doctor Network forums
- Google News: constant info, nearly unfiltered
Please note: any story that involves patient contact is heavily edited, amalgamated, and obfuscated to obscure and protect identities.
2 comments:
Yo Feb!
Really glad to hear that the move went well and that the next phase of your sojourn is underway.
I am jealous that you and your coterie of mad scientists are settled and fully engrossed and engaged. I am also happy to hear that you decided on md/do.
This past Spring semester at Umass Boston brought me a 3.68 in 4 classes plus lab (BioI, A-), while I was also taking an EMT-B course at Northeastern; I'm challenging the exam in a month. I am, as one might expect, happy that it is summer!
But, alas, no rest for the weary. In a bizzare bit of serendipity, I sold my mountain bike to a guy whose wife is a very prominent MD-researcher at Children's Boston. She's the PI at a genetics lab where I start work as a research assistant next week!!!
The fall means physics and chem at Harvard essentially every weeknight, but I am so so stoked that everything has fallen into place so beautifully for me. I feel very settled into my path for the next 2 years and am just plain focused and confident as I remind myself that this is exactly what I wished for during my moments of doubt last fall and winter.
Now, of course, I am insanely reviewing DNA synthesis, coding sequences, exons, introns, nucleotide polymorphisms and the wonders of that mechanism we call genetics. Wait till Bio...you'll see the world in a totally different way!!
Hey, give me a shout and tell me how things are going...maybe I'll take a drive up one weekend.
Oh, for fun, try wrapping the wiffleball in magnesium, lighting it up and then playing in pitch black.
WoooHooooo!
-Chris
Ock! Great to see you!
I didn't think I mentioned the whiffle-ball... unless it was on SDN. I've been too busy to even know where I'm at most of the time.
For the record, there's been no adulteration of the ball, but we did play til 2am one night last weekend, "Point Break" style with headlights illuminating the yard/field.
Your story illustrates an important principle of medicine: always be nice to the guy you sell your bike to. You never know what might happen.
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