this is my life.

An update on what I'm doing these days:
4:30 or 5:00 wake up and get ready
5:30ish At work; once there, I start collecting information on how my patients have done overnight, look up their new labs, see if any of the values are abnormal, think of a way to correct whatever is abnormal, and calculate how much the patient ate, drank, and peed. Then I go look at the patient and hope that I can understand whatever I'm seeing (I asked for backup the other morning because I didn't know if a baby had an abnormal heart beat or was just hiccuping. Thank God it was hiccups). Then I write all the things I discovered on a sheet of paper that will go in the chart.
7:00 my Senior Resident comes in and I tell him what I found and what I think, and he tells me whether I'm being reasonable or being an idiot (luckily I'm on pediatrics and the people are too nice to ever actually tell me I'm an idiot even when I am one).
8:30 lecture one some educational topic. Bagels are provided (yay!)
9:30 rounds are scheduled to begin
10:15 rounds actually begin. Try and sound competent while presenting my patient. Pretend not to be thinking "WTF?" when asked if I think that my patient is on an adequate dose of a drug that I memorized for a test I took last October (I have no idea, but I can tell you that its side effects include loss of taste, cough and a rash!)
12:15 meeting re: Medical Ethics. Ethics training in one hour. Lunch and cookies are provided.
1:15 lecture about some pediatric problem. The last one was about UTIs and the resident brought us candy.
2:30 see interesting patients and try to absorb some drops of knowledge from the attending physician.
3:45 hope that I don't have enough experience/authority/power to do anything else useful for the day, so that I can go home. (I'm willing to stay and do stuff if I can actually DO stuff, but more often the medical students are forgotten because everyone is busy with patients and we wait around for a while until someone notices that we're there and then dismisses us)
Afternoon/evening: attempt to get my life together, study for the shelf exam, write a 10 page report about a patient, etc.
8:30 go to bed pooped.

Highlights: I figured out why I don't have any financial aid, and it should be coming in later this week. I also diagnosed a patient with milk-alkali syndrome this week (you get it from eating lots and lots of Tums while drinking lots and lots of milk) proving that the hours I spent looking up random useless info on Wikipedia last year weren't completely wasted!
Lowlights: my hand hurts really bad and I'm about to start writing aforementioned 10 page report. booo.

DC wedding weekend

More to come later (if you're lucky!) but here are a few pictures from last weekend when my cousin Alex got married at the meridian house in DC:

This is when Uncle Dan said that Anna didn't look very Mexican
Three generations of Nelson descendants with the matriarch:

My Cousin walking down the aisle

Me and my sisters in the linden grove with Anna

Um yeah their faces aren't in this picture but that's why they hired a professional wedding photographer.

apartment pictures (mostly for Shannon)

Here's what my apartment currently looks like. I still have a few things to do but it's mostly put together.

from top of stairs: I think it's required for every Texan to have either a giant metal star, a state flag, or a pair of longhorns somewhere inside their house. At the very least, they should have a large collection of Mexican crosses (I have 5). The coffee table is from Ikea and I put it together myself! the wall unit is older than I am--It's built for VHS storage. And yes, I do love books.

looking from dining area into living room. I got the architectural poster from the Uffizi in Florence--It's a plan of the duomo. I got the Uzbek Suzani in Selcuk, Turkey from the man who owned our hotel. To hang it up I had to stand on some molding that decorates my staircase. My mother refused to watch and told me that if I even ATTEMPTED to hang the tapestry that way, I would DIE and then my dream of a career in surgery would be OVER!!! (Seriously)

Here's my bedroom-- this is the other Uzbek Suzani I brought back from Turkey (this one is silk... ooh la la!) the bedspread is from Pottery Barn a few years ago, and the "vanity" is composed of a desk that I had to screw a leg back onto and a mirror that my mom didn't want anymore. I'm thinking of getting a headboard from World Market that's dark wood with a subtle floral motif painted onto it.

The kitchen.. I couldn't get it all in in one shot.

I love my cow-shaped butter dish. It's from Target. I was tempted to buy the matching cow-shaped creamer, but I already have one creamer that I don't use and I don't need two of them.


My next step is to get some black and white photos of friends, family, and pretty places I've traveled to and hang them up like an album next to my kitchen table. After that I think I'll really be finished.