Lucky...

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I went back to Des Moines Friday night, we went out to eat with Brendan's roommate, Chris, & his gf, Michelle, and our friends Greg & Kat. (Greg is another former 4 Valley guy and is doing his 1st year of residency in DSM, too if you remember from Match Day!) It's nice to have ready-made friends in the DSM area for both of us. We're sure gonna miss Greg & Kat when they fly south next year (alligators and hurricanes and swamps - who needs Florida anyway?). Brendan's job is going well from the sounds of it. He's doing Out Patient Internal Medicine Clinic. It's been nice for him to be able to ease into residency a bit as you have no call responsibilities on outpatient months. In August he will be on ICU, so that will be a bit of a different story! He now has his official Brendan O'Shea, M.D. LONG white coat and Resident Physician badge and has his DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) number for writing prescriptions, so he's pretty official now! Tho as he says, he'd prefer no one in social situations knows because he doesn't want to be called upon should something happen!!! haha.

Anyway, back to the weekend -- we left Saturday morning and drove up to St. Paul for the wedding of Brendan's HS buddy, Hannes. It was nice to talk on the drive up. Brendan was telling me about some of his interesting cases from work, and then we had a little conversation about how amazing it is how much you even learn in just the 1st year of med school. Granted he still has to dumb down the diseases, etc, for me, but overall the vocabulary you learn first year means you can have a conversation in a language many non-medicine people wouldn't understand (and that i wouldn't have understood just 10 short months ago!). They say you learn more new words in medical school than what you already have in your vocabulary. Since every word has a new medical word, i'd believe it!! (for example bruise now=ecchymosis; redness = erythema, swelling = edema). So that brings me to the point of the post... how lucky I am. For research I get to be in the hospital, so everytime I'm in the elevator or walking through the halls I see people with M.D. on their badge. During the year we get so caught up in the hell of it all, but summer is nice because it does give me time to really think about how incredibly LUCKY I am. I feel so incredibly fortunate that I get to do this. The fact that God gave me the desire to want to practice medicine, but also gave me the circumstances and talents to actually be able to pursue that dream. I won't glamorize medicine and especially not the study of it. It's very, very hard, and along the way every new step just brings new frightening responsibilities, but the fact that I get to be here, and that I get to do this makes me feel SO, SO incredibly LUCKY. I came across my acceptance letter the other day and still get chills reading it. I get so excited when I get to sit in on presentations in the Ob/Gyn department, when I get to learn about medicines used for labor induction, OB emergencies, etc etc. To actually have something that I can't get enough of, to truly get excited about learning new things about it, and most importantly, to know that I am lucky enough to get to do this with my whole life is pretty amazing. Don't fret, I'm not so naive that I think it's gonna be great, grand, and wonderful all along (trust me I already know that's not true!), but if you have to struggle and deal with badness, having the good side of it be really, really good makes it much more do-able! Someday i'll post on just how the path was laid out for me. When you look at the last 4-5yrs of my life as a whole you will be amazed at how God seemed to be helping at every corner (that's not to say it didnt' take a lot of work, hours, and loans that He made me do myself, but He sure seemed to open the doors along the way!).

Ok, that's enough for now. I just have been thinking a lot about it lately, and I felt like I needed to write it down. Now on to the hospital charts that I am "lucky" to get to extract ;) Hope everyone is well! Much love, Andrea