I'll see you in the ICU!

Still on West Coast time

No matter what I do, I can't get to sleep at a "decent hour."

The other night, the fire alarms kept going off starting at 1:30 am and I think they might have gone off about another 20 or 30 times before morning. I went out for the first one, and the second one. We evacuate the building and stand on the wet sidewalk and watch the tall FDNY saunter into our building with gigantic axes.

Then they saunter out--they knew it was an alarm malfunction, and so did we.

The turn out for the second alarm was much smaller, and less than half an hour after coming in from the second one, the third one went off, then the fourth, fifth, etc.

By that point, I put the pillow over my head and kept sleeping.

It's amazing the things you learn to sleep through.

So, essentially, when I get back to the Bay Area, I won't have any time adjusting to do, since I wake up around 10:00 am here, and go to sleep between 1:00 and 3:00 am.

The weather's been holding out--not too unbearably hot just yet. I'm hoping it holds out for the real heat until the end of the semester, so I can miss most of it.

Anniversaries this week:
Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of my first biopsy. I remember thinking to myself, "it's Bastille Day...nothing bad happens on Bastille Day."

Wednesday the 16th marks the one year anniversary of getting the phonecall saying the results of the biopsy was "a little bit of cancer, there." I remember thinking how this poor MD was trying to soften in, by saying it was a little bit--something we nurses are taught, clearly, is how not to do this sort of thing to patients--not to give them false hope, not to de-personalize it (it's not "the breast" it's "YOUR breast", etc) Physicians don't get this as part of their training, it seems. I don't hold it against him, I just remember the moment. Clearly.

I had all my hair.
I was in a tee shirt and underpants because the phone woke me--I was sleeping days and working nights. I was kneeling in the doorway to the kitchen, because I had called George on my cell phone to "be with me" while I got the results. He overheard everything.

That day was only just a year ago, yet it seems frozen in time...so long ago, yet only just yesterday. If I had known then just how hard the year ahead was going to be, I don't know if I'd have had the courage to go through with it.

Fortunately, we never have to do more than just one thing at a time, be present in more than just this one moment before us, so it was possible--however, looking back at the whole...makes me want to not look back, much.

I have classes until 8 pm toinght.

I did really badly on my first pharmacology test (got the lowest score in the class) because I didn't know we were having a test--the professors, who pride themselves on sneakiness buried the syllabus with the test dates in a folder called "class files" online, and so I didn't see it (I was looking under "Syllabus" Silly me.

I did significantly better on the midterm, studied my butt off, and now there's only the final to worry about.

Other classes to worry about now are Medical Genetics, in which I have to write a term paper on my pedigree (the tree you draw out from yourself to your great grandparents indicating life-span, illnesses, and death.) Obviously, I have been working with a geneticist at UCSF, and have the information at hand, but the actual writing of the paper is proving to be difficult. I really dislike writing, lately. Maybe it's the subject (cancer in my family genetics) or maybe it's just the APA style formatting that's killing me. I'm not sure.

In any case, I'm counting the days until I can go home!
(Nineteen!)

posted by sketchmonkey @ 7:42 AM