datbat72

[datbat72]

Shadowing

So yesterday was a fun day and my shoulder is still not very excited about it.  Turns out having fibromyalgia plus anxiety plus depression plus IBS while shadowing a surgeon for an entire day can be really exhausting.  It was nice though that the other girl that I was shadowing with was tired at the end of it, too.  It just goes back to what that counselor said, that everybody seems like they're doing well and are happy because what person wants to present their problems in public?  I just wish I could know whether being exhausted by everything and everyone was normal or not and I wish I could remember if I felt this way working at the lab or not.  I feel like it wasn't that bad just because I feel like I was happy, but I had a severe tooth infection while I was in Paris so I don't know if my happy memories are retrospectively remembered as happy or if I actually had a good time despite not being able to eat for two weeks.   But anyway, so at the beginning we come into this lobby that is completely deserted save for a bag full of snacks that look really tempting, I mean there are cheezits and I only had toast and tea but there's a man asleep on the couch with his hoodie pulled up over his head and he's a little too far away to stake a claim on the cheezits but like he'll know that this woman in a doctor's coat is fucking stealing cheezits so I decide not to and sit right in front of the elevator.  I mean the chairs are slanted so you come off the elevator and you're sitting there like a villain over the terrace overlooking the first floor of the hospital.  I'm wondering if I should try to pee again before the doctor gets there.  Water just runs right through me and if I'm not careful I will be close to peeing in the OR.  I wonder if that's happened before.   But finally the other girl shows up dressed nice but I mean like business casual casual whereas I'm in business casual and my coat and in that moment you could tell we both felt like complete idiots.  So I took off my coat and stuffed it in my bag and now I'm going to have to iron it again.  We sit there for ten minutes and it's 8:09 and there's no sign of him.  There are plenty of important, very tall people walking by into the surgical suites, and I don't think that I've ever seen that many tall people in a row before.  I'm 5'10'', so seeing multiple people taller than me not at my family reunion is really disorienting, and I already felt small but awkwardly large at the same time.  Like a really annoying bug that's buzzing around really slowly so you know you could kill it but then you'd have a dirty hand or a dirty napkin and you just took out the trash so you don't want to put it straight into the wastebasket because then the dead bug will just become part of the wastebasket but all you can focus on is this grotty slow bug.  But in reality I'm sure I came across as more of an ostentatious fountain pen that doesn't have ink in it.  Finally the doctor shows up and takes us through the door and we get in to the surgical suites area, get our scrubs, and are ready to go. As we go into the locker room,  I am very thankful that I have the chance to pee again.   Their shower has become a space for spare shoes, and I'm tempted to leave my shit in there, but the other girl is changing inside a bathroom stall so if I leave my stuff in the shower with old gross shoes the girl will probably not be cool with it judging by her cleanliness standards.  Like standing on her flats before she gets on her sneakers standards.  So I just start opening random lockers trying to find a guest locker.  But for some reason there aren't labeled guest lockers and this locker room is much bigger than my lab's locker room and I really miss when I was with people I knew well enough that I could tell them I liked their pun underwear without it being weird.  Or maybe it was weird.  So we stuff our stuff under a bench which isn't that much better than a shower storage closet but it won't raise questions of why were you looking in the shower room.  We walk out and follow the doctor into the various hallways and put on bonnets and facemasks and I feel better this way.  I'm a pretty vain person and seeing myself in hospital scrubs with the bonnet and the face mask on always makes me feel really badass.  My eyes fucking pop in that get up.  Which is why I don't always wear foundation but I always wear mascara when I'm wearing a face mask.  You can see yourself in the reflection of the windows on the doors and you gotta be happy with that few inches of your face that's showing.  And you have to wear studs.  Clearly the girl and I were on the same page because her eye makeup and studs were killer.   Everyone's also level when they're all wearing the same thing, and I'm not advocating for all of us wearing the same thing all the time because that's boring but you can't really look any better or worse than anyone else in a bag.  It's not that it puts the focus more on the job because it doesn't, I mean I sit there analyzing everyone's few inches of face, but I guess camaraderie is better?  I don't know we're all blue clouds and I like it.   So the nurses sit in one corner and there's a clear hierarchy with this one tall skinny woman in charge of the rest of them, and she reminds me of a confident but harried soccer mom not in a bad way, but in a way that she knows we're all idiot children and knows how to handle us without being condescending even while she's giving us orange slices and telling us not to touch stuff because it's sterile.  I enjoyed that four of the nurses each told us at least twice not to touch wrapped or blue stuff.   There's a doctor and a fellow and later the pa and resident come in and there are three people monitoring anesthesia and vitals and lung capacity and they're tented off in their forbidden land of the patient's face like seriously she's divided from the neck up in this partition and what goes on there is this mystery.  I did see them put up something that looked like a battery to her face to make sure that her face isn't paralyzed according to the resident, but I like to think that the tented people were making Frankenstein jokes.  She's prepped and wrapped and given a catheter and wiped down and the field is sterile and then they can start the procedure. Then I know this isn't the case because the second operation an angry walrus comes in and asks for everyone to be quiet and begins sending a chest tube down past this woman's vocal cords.  It's clear by everyone's behavior that this man is the super uptight one and there's joking going on behind his back not about him, but because it's behind him and muffled it seems as though it might be.  But there's no ill intention to it, it's just that you can tell people to be quiet and that things are a no-fun zone but people have different attitudes towards work and can still be respectful and good at their jobs so if you act like a drill sergeant people are going to find a way to still joke around at work.  But they appease the walrus and he leaves and they can start openly talking about survivor again.  They make a few incisions and start, and the most interesting part to me is the robot.  The robot comes in and I swear that it's moving by itself around in the chest around the lungs but then I look in the corner near the door and the doctor or the fellow are in this little virtual reality box that looks like if an arcade game that has a steering wheel had virtual reality goggles and joysticks instead of a wheel that lets you move the robot arms around and there are pedals and everything so he's off to the side while the pa and the nurses are next to the person switching tools and collecting specimens.   It's weird how detached the doctor is from the whole process, and that there are at least five screens showing what the robot is seeing inside the chest.  But he's off to the side in his wizard of oz screen and you can hear him talk but it's muffled and echo-ey and it's like he's contacting us from another dimension and they're all talking about reality shows and it's great, but I still can't get over him being so far away.   The whole time, we're debating staying for the second surgery.  The girl is not contributing anything, and it slowly dawns on me that I have to make the decision.  So I tell her hey man, i don't give a shit, like be honest if you wanna go we'll go united front but if you wanna stay we'll stay like united front it does not matter to me really.  And she's like me either.  And it's like last chance motherfucker we're fucking staying.  Because I'm not gonna be the one to wuss out and be like oh we don't care that much we don't want to stay I'm getting this good recommendation out of this.  But after that things are weird. Like lunch is weird. And I'm initiating all the questions, and at some point her phone comes out and so does mine and I analyze how annoying I might be.  Is it that I don't really like to hang out with everyone so I've been marked as that weird lady? Or I've been too loud?  I've always been very loud.  And then I just decide not to care and go about my day, I mean who knows she's tired I'm tired I'm overanalyzing.  She's perfectly nice and I'm still thinking about how this cafeteria lady told me about a man who died while doing maintenance in the basement.   But we make it through lunch bravely and finally we get to the end of the day.  We have to shove our scrubs at some random woman because we don't have badges to get into the scrub disposal system and she's so uncomfortable so I just say look man we don't know we're just doing what we were told and then go and my grabbing of this woman and handing her my dirty clothes probably comes off as very aggressive to the girl and I mark that as another way I might be annoying and/or a grotty bug.  

[datbat72]

Oh man

Anyway, sorry again this is really just for me to figure out if I have anything to say.  Considering we're in angry orange america I do want to say something, but I'll figure it out as we go.   So we're in angry orange america, and the first thing I want to say is what the fuck He's trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and he has no plans for replacement.  Harvard doctors just released a statement that 44,000 people could die each year.  And that's a conservative estimate.  Sorry I apologize, he says he has a plan for replacement but hasn't told anyone what that is.  Sorry guys, that's called fucking bluffing why would we let the president get away with this.  I get it; maybe you don't want to believe Harvard doctors because you don't trust the establishment and science and vaccines and the environment but seriously, in the words of the girl you really wish you hadn't started a conversation with at a party, learn a book.  I mean I could reference thousands of papers on how the science itself is sound, I mean no one is asking you to marry these scientists, I wouldn't want to most of them have their heads up their asses.  It doesn't change the fact that science is true whether you believe in it or not.  I'm not sure when science became a religion, when it most certainly isn't. Anyway, then the whole immigration shit.  And then the wall (which ok we're going to build it and then ask Mexico to pay for it?  That's like destroying your neighbor's home and then making them pay for the bulldozer you rented to do it.  Like they're already angry and not fucking listening to you, what makes you think that they'd be down with that.  Then fucking keystone, then fucking the epa and badlands national park being badass, there are countless things wrong and going backwards which leads me to my endorsement of whatever California army will arise in resistance to the conflict that will inevitably arise in the face of Governor Brown's declaration that California won't go backwards.  So my plan is to attend these awesome marches and keep being an obstinate impatient cow and eventually joining up with any form of resistance and become an army doctor.   But in the meantime join the science marches!  http://www.scientistsmarchonwashington.com/ And oh I fucking forgot about the whole abortion shit.  You know what that's for later I'm super pissed about that.  Like it's not enough that we're taking away funding for projects that save lives constantly and help refugees, now we're assaulting the rights of women and prioritizing unborn lives over those of the women that are currently in need.  No one loves abortion.  Everyone would rather not need it at all.  But we're never going to have 100% no abortion.  Forcing women to have children isn't accomplishing anything.  All it's doing is destroying the lives of the women and children being brought into this world.  It's a necessary evil, one that we need alongside actual quality sex education and contraceptive availability.  You get rid of obamacare, you're going to have an uptic in abortions, because you're fucking taking away birth control from women.  So I hate all of you and fuck everyone who thinks this is ok especially you feminists who are prolife who think that just because you're telling a woman what she can't do with her own body you should still be able to call yourself a feminist.  You're not, fuck you, get out.  Ok goodbye.