So far, no Amish...

It takes 1 hour and 15 minutes to get from my house to the clinic in Lagrange (which means "farm" in French). I arrived at 9:00, more or less. More or less. Dr. B. likes Flamingos. A lot. She has a good dozen of them all over her office. She's also computer less-than-savvy, which means she teases me about Taika all the time. She also runs marathons. Real ones. What a cool doctor. Got there, introduced myself, asked about dress code and was told I looked fine like I was. Started chatting immediately. We get along well. Yay. She's lots of fun; her stepfather was a family doctor and she got into a big corporate practise right out of residency and then bought out three years later to start her own up in Lagrange. It's what I want to do. Mostly OB and paediatrics, some geriatrics (she doesn't like doing them either), and a lot of paps today. We saw a couple of OB checkups and on the third or fourth, she handed me the tape measure and the portable Doppler and said "Let's see it." Shadowing her for the first day my ass. She's going to make me do it after the third or fourth time I see a procedure. I love this woman. So I measured fundal height in pregnant women, and used the portable Doppler to get foetal heart rates. And excepting the one where I dropped a tens and got 193 on the first try (and the one where I had to learn how to get up to the full fundal height) I did good. It was very reassuring. Also reassuring was the way she looked at me when C asked about the flashes in front of her right eye. "What do you think?" Me? Visual disturbances, opthalmologist has seen her and said no eye problems. Get an MRI. "My thoughts exactly." She listened to me when I suggested adding an oesophageal scope to M's list of screening tests; agreed that I was right in thinking she should be screened. We saw two ADHD kids, one of whom, P, was a whole 'nother diagnosis to boot, I think Will have to describe her to Dad. And the hypochondriacs, and the woman with a list of problems a mile long who came in wanting thyroid tests by the schedule and something else entirely when she got there. Got to see ear tubes and lichen chronicus, play with small children and schedule a C-section for when I'll still be with her. The nurses are wonderful, they're going to teach me blood draws and injections and let me do as many as I want. I have a list of things to look up that's a mile long, and I want a pocket paperback Tarascon without buying it. Had lunch with a drug rep (mmm, Applebee's salads to go) and ice cream cake from another. Today was supposed to be a headache screening day, but they couldn't find the forms to do it for him, so they just didn't do any. Krispy Kremes in the morning, the usual quota of notepads and pens (I have some new, pretty ones), and an accident to peek out the doors at in the afternoon. EMS + Rescue were on the scene, extracting someone. It was most interesting. RP tonight also went well, despite the fact that I was completely unprepared. Hurrah for modules that are practically perfect for my metaplot without modification. And hurrah for several weeks' travel time to play with peoples' heads and not beat them with metaplot. Everyone is amused and thinking more or less properly now. Quotes will be posted when I get around to formatting them. Tomorrow: Should put in an appearance at the family reunion in N. Manchester. May or may not. Plan to sleep in for a good long while and then spend a fair amount of time acquainting myself with my PDA textbooks and how to use the little bastards. Must also memorise important things like, oh, practising a complete physical and some of the more important things to examine on a focussed exam of any one body part. I want to be good in the OSCEs. Really good. Or maybe I just want to be mediocre so I can be much improved in fourth year. Today was good, wonderful. But we've begun thinking about vehicles in all seriousness. I'm commuting about 45 miles each way to Lagrange, four days a week, for four weeks. 1600 miles. I'll be commuting 115 miles each way to Indianapolis, every weekend I'm down there, for something like five months, plus driving the 10 miles into town and back every day. A lot more miles. On Michel-Ange, who is 18 years old and has 233,000 miles on him now. Gas mileage is good, especially for an old car, but we should probably consider the possibility that this kind of hard use is going to run him into the ground. Maybe we should start putting some money aside to buy me a new car, because I'll probably need one by the end of fourth year at the best. Eyeing the Honda hybrids - I adore Hondas, and the hybrid is just such an oeconomical idea - and the Minis. But not seriously yet. We have to think. And we have to get a new dishwasher that doesn't wash only the bottom rack half of the time, and a digital camera for us, and a thousand other things yet. And the idea of coming up with even more debt in loans...Gah. Letting my mind roam, not able to linger on any one topic for long. I think I'm going to close this, and return to finishing up the quote formatting.