Travels

It's been a great month for traveling for me! After a busy Neonatal Intensive Care month in April (hence, no blogging) I'm now on my elective in Dermatology which includes a week of vacation. Additionally, earlier in the month, I was able to attend the Pediatric Academic Societies conference in Hawaii where I presented a poster of a project I completed earlier this year. I spent a couple days at the conference and ... a couple days not at the conference :) Those days I spent snorkeling, relaxing on the beach, hiking up Diamond Head and not really working too hard.

Then, this past week I spent 6 days in New York City where my friend Cari got married in Manhattan. It was the first time in NYC for me and it was a busy few days since I was in the wedding but I did happen across some of the famous things and places such as the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Herald Square, Empire State Building, Central Park, Madison Square Garden among other things. One of the neat things for me since I read a lot and have seen a lot of shows and movies based in New York City, I now have at least a basic knowledge of the geography and layout of the city and neighborhoods. Otherwise, I spent the time with about 6 friend from med school, many of whom I haven't seen since I graduated so that was great too.

I'm going to try a new thing where I upload my pictures to some web albums and I'll include a link here so you can take a look if you'd like. Most of the pictures of people, less of the sites ...

New York: http://picasaweb.google.com/njlohr/NewYorkCityMay2008?authkey=vC3JajR8FWs

Hawaii: http://picasaweb.google.com/njlohr/HawaiiMay2008?authkey=wIAAK0OwUxk

St. Lucia

It's been a long time since I updated this but I think maybe I was just waiting for something fun to report. Well, I found it! My friend Karla got married in St. Lucia the weekend before last and I was lucky enough to get to go! It was one of the most fun 3 days I've had in a long while. Some highlights included the amazing villa I shared with a few others at the top of one of the Piton mountains, the rehearsal dinner that was really a "cruise" on the pirate ship from the Pirates of Caribbean, and of course the beautiful wedding and reception on the beach. It was a small group and everyone was so welcoming including all of her husband's family who I hadn't met before so that made it really amazing too. Above pictures are the view from the balcony of my villa including a plunge/infinity pool, the group picture on the beach after the wedding including a rainbow in the upper left part of the picture over the resort and finally a little goofing off during the dance at the reception.

Otherwise I'm on a month in the ER which explains the few days off I had since we do mostly shift work. It's going fine and I'm liking it better than I did last year. Not too much else new to report but I'm eagerly awaiting spring and more importantly spring-like weather.

Happy New Year!

I must apologize for my hiatus from blogging for the past month. You all know how Decembers can be and this one was no exception. I hope that you all had Happy Holidays. I thought of many of you over the past few weeks and lamented that I didn't send cards out but my goal next year is to do that! If you're reading this, please keep sending the Christmas cards my way because I love hearing from everyone!

For the month of December I was working in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit taking care of some pretty sick kids. I enjoyed the challenges related to treating very complicated illnesses and children but stressed out a little bit over the on-call problems which tended to be more in depth and serious than my previous months. I learned a ton, however, and by the end of the month felt a whole lot more confident about managing complicated medical problems. Overall, I liked it better than a lot of months I've been on. Not enough to want to take care of intensive care patients for the rest of my life, but it sort of reaffirmed my interest in taking care of sick (vs. well) children. It will be nice to take care of sick kids but to know that if they get really out of control, there's a place to send them where they can be managed (i.e. an intensive care unit).

After working all month, I finally got back to Iowa for Christmas on Dec. 30! My parents were generous enough to hold off on most of their Christmas until I got back and that's where I still am enjoying both a holiday break and a week of vacation at the same time.

The part of my month not spent working was nice too. I did some gift exchanges with some friends from Indy and even got out to our Christmas Holiday party and to see the play, A Christmas Carol which is done by the local theater every year.

Finally, some New Year's resolutions! I hope that by putting them on here, you all can periodically check in on me and see if I'm actually following them.

1. Exercise, eat well, yada, yada, yada. Okay, no originality here but it's always a good thought after the holidays, right?
2. Continue my new budget! I started it about 4 months ago and have had some ups and downs with it. The first couple months went great, but the second couple months got significantly side-tracked when I had that little hit and run experience I talked about earlier. Turns out the police can't/won't do anything more and since the damage was at my deductible + the cost of a rental car when I got my car fixed, the whole $600 fell to my expenses. I guess the good news is, if I hadn't been doing the budget, I would have been in a whole lot worse shape. Anyways, so aside from that setback it's going well. And last night, I finally put the whole thing to an Excel spreadsheet so I'm going to be able to keep track of things more accurately!
3. Umm, get Christmas cards out next year!
4. Try to focus less on myself, and more on other people. I feel like in residency, it's really easy to get wrapped up in everything that's going on in my life and forget to give my tine and attention to other people, which is really what's most important. So in short, be less selfish.

there you have it, that's my last month in a nut shell. Drop me a line if you get a chance!

Happy Thanksgiving (a bit late)

So I had two days off over Thanksgiving and was lucky my parents made the long drive here to spend it with me. I fixed turkey with all the trimmings and it didn't taste to bad. The rest of the weekend I've been working the 6 pm to 4 am shift in the ER which isn't my favorite but my last shift is tonight. I feel a little anti social not seeing anybody during the day and working all night.

Yesterday I felt like I had a minor breakthrough with a couple of patients. One of the challenges of Pediatrics is dealing with parents who have not very sick children but come to you wanting you to fix every little thing they perceive is wrong with their children. I saw a couple of infants yesterday whose parents came in because their kids have "nasal congestion." Now who, during this time of the year doesn't have congestion??? There was a recent movement to pull all the infant cough and cold medicines off the shelves because of some bad side effects and lack of efficacy. So basically, we can offer absolutely nothing to the parents of those kids. The break through I had yesterday is I walked into the rooms knowing I couldn't give these parents a magic pill to make the kids feel better but instead had the time to just talk and mostly listen to them for awhile. I was thrilled when they actually left happy! I mean you learn that most of the time patients/parents just want you to listen to them but sometimes you feel like people won't be satisfied until you fix their problems. In this case I couldn't do that but all three of these parents seemed pretty satisfied with the time we spent together. Additionally I discovered more information about the patients' home in that the parents all smoke which is going to cause congestion in babies because of the irritation of the smoke. Hopefully I might have made some inroads into getting them to think more seriously about quitting if not for their own but for their kids' sake.

Weddings, Hit and Run and other news

Above you see a picture of me with a bunch of the residency girls at a fellow resident's wedding. That was the first of two weddings I've been to in the past few weeks. The second was for my former college roommate Beth and was just this past weekend. Have you noticed that my main social events seem to be weddings? I think I've been to five so far this year.

In other news, this weekend I had the unfortunate experience to be a victim of a hit and run car accident. Fortunately no one was hurt but it was a weird experience. I was driving along when the car in the lane to the left of me decided to merge but obviously didn't know I was there and ended up side-swiping my car. When that happened I started to pull over to the right but then noticed that they weren't pulling over, in fact, they were turning left off the road we were traveling on. So I sped up and got their license number. It ended up being just a scratch on the driver's side of my car but I have a feeling the small scratch will end up costing more than I expect. The police were able to figure out who owns the car that hit me so hopefully they have insurance and it will all get taken care of with a minimum of inconvenience.

Finally, my newest favorite song is Easy Silence by the Dixie Chics. It's not actually new but I just sort of discovered it recently. yep, i think the southern influence is taking effect as I'm generally not a fan of country music though have always liked some of the Dixie Chic's music. The song is sappy and romantic but also very pretty. Check it out if get a chance.

Back to Iowa

I just returned from a week off in Iowa with my parents. It was pretty low key. I'm on a Community month this month which is where we don't do a lot of clinical work but learn about a lot of resources around the community. I did some interesting things this month including learning a little about public policy and advocacy, public health, disaster preparedness plans etc. We also are required to do a couple of projects, one with one of the community organizations and one quality improvement project for the hospital/residency. Since the month is on the lighter side of things, I decided to take Step 3 of my USMLE exam. It was a two day test this time and I think after a fair amount of studying, that it went okay. Even though it's a multiple choice test, I won't know the results for a couple months. Since I spent the majority of the month studying for the test, I kind of put off my other projects until my vacation week. So even though it was 5 days off at home, I spent the majority of the day working on the projects. I did, however, spend the evenings with my parents and just kind of bumming around. We went and watched my highschool's volleyball team play (they won and they're ranked 3rd in the state) and in general did a lot of reading too. It was nice to get away!

I came back a day early and was able to do some touch up work, spackling and painting, in my bathroom because of the removal of the old countertop and sink. I also went on a Haunted Hayride last night which was kind of fun! It was one of those outdoor fields with a corn maze, a couple of haunted houses and the hay ride. So, I didn't dress up for this Halloween (I'll be on call on the 31st) but did get to enjoy a little bit of the festivities. This coming month I'll be doing an ER month so that means shift work with some weird hours but at least I'm in my own bed everynight! Nothing else too much to report...

The Saga of Big George

Kelly Bienhoff visited this past weekend. We were in my office/guest room and were folding up the bedding when we noticed Big George (a large, hairy spider) scuttling across the floor. We both shrieked and neither of us had any shoes immediately available. However, my TI 85 graphing calculator (a rather bulky, heavy calculator) was at hand so I threw it on Big George. Big George proceeded to push the calculator off himself and scurried under the couch. We folded up the rest of the bedding and then looked under the couch and poof, Big George had disappeared. It appeared he had some sort of magical powers. The rest of the weekend we pondered as to the whereabouts of Big George as he was nowhere to be seen. As Kelly packed her bags on Sunday she even wondered if it was possible that Big George had crawled in to her things and he may turn up in Kansas City! I thought it was very possible and proceeded to put him out of my mind ... until this morning. I walked out of my bathroom (in my bedroom) after showering this morning and noted some quick movement across the room along the baseboard. AHA! It was Big George, he had simply moved across the condo instead of flying to Kansas City. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for Big George, I did have a sandle at hand and proceeded with great vigor to dispatch Big George to his next life. (it took 3-4 very good thwaps). I then used about 6 kleenexes all wadded up to pick up Big George (so as not to actually feel the dead Big George inside them all) and sent to him a watery grave with a resounding flush. So ends the saga of Big George.