Where to Begin: pull up a seat on the porcelain throne

I have wanted to start blogging for a while now. The urge typically comes after I experience something totally awesome, something terrible, something that makes me lose faith in humanity, or the inevitable event that restores it. Eventually, I slip back into the routine and buzz of my day to day life and the starting of a blog quickly drops down the ladder of important things I need to accomplish, but not today/night/whatever though. Today, I will start typing while Jimmy Page rips apart the Stairway solo at 0200 on 2/6/14 and I am on night float at the hospital.

Where to begin...

This is not a place to tell my life story (thank God right?). Though I love my life and look back on younger days very fondly, I feel the purpose of this blog should be to pick up where residency started.

Why then?

June 2012 by the way...

Because that is the time that also coincided with graduating medical school, a big move away from family/friends, recent news that I would become a father in 9 months, and to add some fear sprinkles to my delicious anxiety cake, I had a one year position in a specialty I hated and I had no idea what/if any job I would have at this time next year.

Stop whining right? I was/am married to a beautiful and smart woman, was technically a doctor, owned my home, had a kick ass dog, and was going to be a dad!

But something happened. I was supposed to become an orthopedic surgeon dammit. Hell I played football in high school, did respectably as far as my academics, and thought I nailed most of my interviews. But it didn't happen for me (likely for several reasons, that if you're dying to know, I would be happy to recount the painful details for you). I had to scramble for a one year position as a general surgery resident in the same city that my wife matched in her specialty. I had climbed the mountain of getting in to and through medical school only to fall off the mountain, cursing myself the whole way down. I hated to see my stupid face in the mirror and felt like a dog rubbing my own nose in my stool after an in-the-house accident.

With that mind set I started my "residency" on two months of night float. Starting out as a "doctor," I felt terrified that a situation would come where someone's outcome would depend on me. And of course it did. More frequently than I liked (at first anyway but more on that later).

OH and by the way this blog will be littered with stories of events that were memorable (to me at least.) They will also be injected at random and totally interrupt my previous thought. And the grammar will always be bad always.

Barely over a week into residency, I got called to the ED to evaluate a patient for "bleeding." A man coughed while watching TV and blew his AV fistula (<-- site for dialysis access) in his arm and had a suspiciously blood tinged gauze wrapped around his arm. I unrolled the gauze wrapping and once the pressure was released, blood shot the wall to my left.

I wrapped it back up quickly and called my chief (<-- senior resident for supervision although not always in house). He asked, "You ever do a figure-of-eight stitch?" I said I was familiar with it (<--saw a picture in a book). He then said, "Good, grab a med student to hold pressure and throw one in quick." So I did. I took a mega-eager medical student, (always happy to help), had him first get face masks for everyone and then got my supplies ready. Once all set, I had the med student squeeze the arm tight and I quickly undid the bandage. Blood again shoot out, only this time it smoked the med student's shirt, face, and (thank God) mask. The "field" was simply red and the patient's blood pressure was low. I took my needle bites, tied my knots tightly, wiped the blood away and held my breath.

It held! And I felt like my nuts drug the ground. The patient? All he said was, "Yo doc, can I get a sandwich in here or what?" I got him a sandwich.

And so it went for the first part of the year. Periods of crippling depression at the perceived hopelessness that I would never be an orthopedic surgeon or any type of surgeon at all. The odds for someone in the position I was in were very poor. I neglected my increasingly pregnant wife (for which I still apologize today) and just wanted to sleep (and drink) all the time. I did take the gumption I could muster while at work to try and show my face with the orthopedic residents at my hospital in an attempt to seduce them into taking me on as one of their own next year. This felt as fruitless as it probably was and didn't do much other than make me not like some of the snarky assholes I so desperately wanted to be a part of.

BUT

Things. Got. Better.

More on that later though. This is way more than I intended to write for the first go (once I start talking about me it's hard to stop). I suppose next post I'll pick up where things started to get more hopeful last year and try to quickly catch up to now so I can drop more funny day to day stories (funny to me at least :P).