I swear to god, I can’t even fake it anymore.   You SUCK!

Pistachio Kernels

I just had black coffee and Pistachio kernels for breakfast, mostly because I have nothing else left in the house.

I don’t know what to say, I’m getting pissed off left right and centre with this application process. Consider this example. In order to do a formal clerkship, we need to be enrolled in our final year of medicine. This means that the only time I could have done clerkships abroad would have been this past summer. UCC only expects us to complete 4 weeks, total, I did 8, just to beef up the old resume a bit more….the University of Chicago, about which I was SUPER excited will not consider any foreign applications unless you have 3 months of clerkship experience in the US…assuming that Canada counts as America’s hat, I have 2 months….when was I supposed to get that third month of clerkship?

I looked through their list of first year residents, and I did not see a single person recruited from a non-American University. I can’t bad mouth them, cause they’re awesome….but I’m so heart broken….I felt kind of like a kid who had stood in line for a roller coaster ride for 5 years only to get to the front of the line and see the sign that said “you have to be this tall to ride”, and I’m just about a cm too short.

All I wanted was for them to look at my application. This is painful. Back to my nutritious breakfast I guess.

When I was 17, I fell in infatuation with a boy named Mark. I was in grade 12 and he was in OAC when we met. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so obsessed with him, but at the time, he occupied my every minute.

Being a crazy nut, I decided to write him a letter towards the end of the school year confessing everything I felt for him. I heard years later that he read this letter out to his friends in class, and that it was the source of much amusement for them all. He wrote me back after a very long time, a shitty letter using lots of big words to sound intelligent and a line that went something like, ” I see you more as my little sister”.

I guess at the time, this was soul destroying…now it’s a funny story I tell my friends when we’re playing the I-was-a-bigger-loser-than-you-were-in highschool game.

This morning, I received a message from him on Facebook (old faithful!) It was one of those moment in life every high school girl dreams of. One day, I’ll be too hot and too smart for you, and you’ll search for me on Facebook….

Ah….that felt fuckin good. High five.

Tooo many textbooooks…

Oh man, I seriously think that I blew a fuse today. I can’t even decide exactly what did it? For the past 6 months, I’ve had a pile of papers in the corner of my room called “lecture notes”. I have no idea what’s in there. In fact, I have no idea what we’ve been lectured on this year. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that not all lectures are put online for us to download….and when we are examined, the questions may or may not come from the lecture material.

This leaves us with a bit of a problem. Medicine is a huge huge subject. When the course objectives are gross generalizations, like “an understanding of the physiology and pathology of pregnancy”….then as a student, I’m not really sure where to start…which means I don’t start.

The exam we had in medicine  last month really broke my soul. When I told Harry that we’d had a hard exam, and Martin interjected wit”I’ve heard mixed reports”…..ya, I think that’s when the fuse blew.

Part of the problem may be that I have spent about 50% of my energy this year worrying about electives, fees and immigration bullshit….of the remaining 50%, we spent at least 30% in the hospital. This leaves 20%  for studying, doing useless spirit-drenching assignments, sleeping, eating, shopping, and the occasional night out. So, basically, this leaves with 1% of my time for studying.

I’m beginning to understand why people begin to skip clinics and just go to the library. At the end of the day, no one is going to give a shit that I talked to 5 patients, when I only had to take one history. They will however question me on the side effects of the oral treatment for hyperthyroidism…and if I happen to be blanking on that particular piece of information at that moment…well then fuck me….though later, there may be mixed reports on that.

I just wish someone would hand me one book and say, look read this.

Too windy to study!

I actually can’t keep track of the deadline for all these major and minor assignments we have to hand in. Of course, I’m no longer surprised that we have absolutely no information on when, how many and what exams we’re having at the end of this year. Fourth year has been a strange mixture of too relaxed and too anxious.

Yesterday, I managed to motivate myself and Keith to make it to the library just after lunch. It was a very rainy, windy day…but hey, if I was going to stay indoors every time it rained I would never leave the house. About 40 minutes after I had arrived, there was an announcement on the PA. The library had to close down due to the weather.  Was the library getting blown away? Then I found out the entire campus had to shut down because there are trees. Only in Ireland….

The security guards went home happily and got paid for the rest of the day.  Clearly,  it was too windy to study.

A Garbageface style post for the new year

This has been a good trip, even though by all objective measures, I haven’t gotten anything done. My loan is not fixed, my elective is not fixed, and my study plans are definitely not fixed.  Even though the trip  was just under three weeks, I’ve only had about 5 days of actual contact time with people, so it feels kind of stressful.

I feel like Toronto is a place full of unacceptable emotions for me. Feelings that are all so dated, they are no longer legitimate…but regardless of their legitimacy, they’re here. If  I could erase 2005 from my life, I would be a very different person. I still feel rejected by this city, by it’s university, by the medical system…and the bullshit I’ve been dealing with just to set up a simple elective has brought to surface a quicksand of insecurities about the future that I left behind when I moved to Cork.

My relationship to Toronto is frozen in time. It’s still 2005 here for me. I’m both disgusted by the idea of not returning here and by the idea of returning here. I’m still angry but I still miss you.

This coming year holds a lot of important decisions for me and my classmates. I can only hope to make the right ones.

Here’s hoping that in 2009, U of T will come to its senses and let me do that bleeding elective so I can at least properly decide if I want to come back here.

Nausea. That’s the only feeling I’m left with having spend my evening speaking to Royal Bank representatives on the phone. My financial state currently can be described as NOT OK!I watch my debt get bigger and bigger literally before my eyes. Any hope I had for the Canadian dollar to recover has disappeared, and I’m left here with my 29000 euro tuition converting to 47000 Canadian before any living costs.

Trying to solve my financial issues with a part time job is like giving a patient with malignant cancer a tetanus shot. If my bank account was a patient, I’d tell it’s relatives that the only thing left to do now was to pray!

Today we had a girl who fell backwards in a bar and then someone stepped INTO her eye with a stiletto heel. That basically sums up my feelings towards my current opthalmology rotation.

I have a hard time believing that it’s only Tuesday! I feel like I’ve been on this surgical rotation for months. It’s not that it’s not interesting, I actually quite like it. Plastics is a strange field. It’s all very mechanical. Cut. Must fix cut. Boob too big, must make small. Boob too small, must make big….and so on…it seems to lack the detective work and mystery of a lot of other surgical and medical specialties.

I can’t really explain why it is that I feel so tired. It’s so hard to stand there and watch someone else operate for 4 hours. Sure, it’s interesting, but I think I’m at a point now where I’m just sick of observing. Time goes by so much faster when we’re actually allowed to do something other than watch and answer the occasional question.

The highlight of the day has to be getting shot in the face! There is a consultant who gave us a tutorial and if he asked you a question and you gave the wrong answer, he’d shoot you in the face with an imaginary gun and make the sound of a gun…That’s pretty awesome. I can’t wait to be able to shoot some students in the face myself.

It was a conversation with a classmate of mine that got me thinking about this. I asked her what she was thinking of doing her summer elective in, and she told me that the only thing she was certain of was that she didn’t want to be a doctor. She said that it had never been her idea in the first place. Shes said she’s unhappy.

After my initial anger had subsided (I can think of about a thousand qualified, enthusiastic candidates who have not been accepted anywhere despite repeated efforts), I began to reflect on what she was telling me…..

…..and it dawned on me that happiness is certainty. Happiness in your career is the certainty that you will have employment next month and the certainty that there is room for improvement. Happiness in love is the certainty of some kind of a future. Confidence is the certainty that your capabilities are real….Happiness in life is that you chose the right career, the right girl, the right boy, the right city….and so on….

…and all the misery in our lives can be reduced down to some sort of a lack or loss of certainty. You become unhappy in your career when you start doubting your choices and your prospectives. You become unhappy in your relationship when you become uncertain of fidelity and the future….and insecurities are uncertainties about our imagined capacities.

I think regret is a decision made in spite of certainty to the contrary.

Habits are behaviour based on certainty that certain things, people and places are going to be constant. When you break up with someone, when somebody dies, when you move to a new country, that certainty is taken out of your life.

It’s rare and difficult to be certain, precisely because we have nothing to measure our choices against. We can never know what would have happened if we had not broken up with person X. Or what would have happened if you had applied to that extra school, or chosen this elective over that, or this partner over that, and so on….

Which is why, when very rarely we are granted with even the smallest sense of certainty in any aspect of our lives at all…we should just run with it.

And it has dawned on me, that while I have and do experience some unhappiness in my life as a result of on and off uncertainties, there is one area of my life which brings me constant happiness. I have noticed that the happiest hours of my days are when I’m in the hospital. The rest seems to be routine padding.The only thing I can say with absolute certainty at this point is that I have made the right career choice. Even on the days when I get yelled at for not knowing the answers, or when I’m told that a female getting trained to be a doctor is a waste of human resources, I am certain…and I savour it.