Where to begin...

Business first: Welcome who apparently discovered that I'd randomly added him via the wonderful magic of clicking on the lj-user tag and added me back. Hope it suits your standards. :) Spam next: Saturday morning, Quinby and company arrived around 9 AM. Welcomes were exchanged. Quin called her parents as agreed, which could have gone better but also could have gone worse. Then, naps were taken by some. I couldn't sleep; my cough was too bad for me to do much of anything. So I gathered up a few people and we went to Sam's Club. Then we came home with meat and good stuff. Then we got everyone together to go to Wal-Mart and then to see Pirates of the Caribbean, either the 4:10 or the 7:20 showing. Mom called while we were making plans to do this. She said she and Tom might want to go along; but would we like to come over for dinner? Mom, there are eight or nine of us. We'll have sloppy joes! Well, who are we to turn down a meal? So we went to Wal-Mart and realised we were never going to make the matinee showing, so we called to tell her we'd be over before the 7:20 movie to have dinner. I love my mom. We walked in the door, and she handed us jobs to do to help her get ready for school. Labelling popsicle sticks, sharpening pencils, loving the cat...it was a good time for all. And then we went over to Jefferson Pointe at about 6:45. The line for the theatre was all the freakin' way down the stairs and back to the Red Star. There was no way we were going to make the ticket counter before 7:20, let alone get into the movie. So we had a brilliant idea, and called home to Dad. Can you order our tickets online for us? He tried, but Pirates was sold out. *pout*. We random-mobbed over to the Verizon store and Barnes and Noble's, bummed around for a while, and Lily was fiending for Blockbuster so we went there after going home. They watched movies, I played Alice (yay for Sam's Club $10 games), and Angel and Quin and I went to bed around midnight, while everyone else watched Equilibrium. Got up in the morning and took Quin to church. The youth played choirchimes for the offertory, my directing, and I was so incredibly proud of them. They sounded great. Put the adult chimers to shame, that's for certain. I need to get them cards for congratulations. Came home, woke everyone up, made sandwiches and took a handful of us to the mall, where we spent far too much money buying new anime and Disney DVD's. Far too much money. Ah, well. We have it to spend, briefly. And that feels good. We've finally paid off the debt accumulated when we were saving up to buy the house - when we needed as much cash on hand as humanly possible. We bought our tickets in advance, online, this time, and went out to see Pirates matinee at 4:10 on Sunday. Much enjoyment was had, much enthrallment over Johnny Depp's swishiness. It was sold out again. Good thing we advanced. The ticket machine ran out of tickets halfway through spitting them out, and the guy behind the counter had to refill it. That was sort of cool. Then we came home. The Chicago group left for Chicago. Quin and I went shopping for stroganoff supplies. We came home and made stroganoff with steamed vegetables. Well, sort of. The steamed carrots came out very nice. The steamed green beans...well...I have a basket steamer. It goes in a pot, you put water in the bottom of the pot, and you steam. I did quite well with the putting the basket in the pot and putting the beans (Quinby learned to snap beans) in the basket. It was the putting enough water in the pot bit that I sort of failed on. So they sort of burned. But not enough that they weren't repaired by the addition of a little salt and butter. We watched The Last Unicorn, some really bad quasi-medieval porn, and a lot of anime music videos. We had a chance to talk, some people and I, a little. And it was good. Went to bed around one or two, something like that, made it up in time to go to work this morning. My new paediatrics clerkship: As far as the doctor's office went today, Drs D&D are positively marvellous. I had a wonderful time, with mini-lectures between every patient it seemed. I learned about neonatal jaundice, about well child checks, about occult fractures of the elbow (quick quiz, : what is a fat pad sign?), and about the importance of reading charts (oh, you mean he was previously suspected of GERD but not medicated?). I saw a six-year-old gymnast do one-handed cartwheels without taking her other thumb out of her mouth. I played with six-day-old twins who were now only yellow down to about the chest, did yearly physicals and poked at a four-year-old whose only words were "thank you" after she got the grape-flavoured tongue depressor. She was interesting. I talked to a boy who's entering sixth grade but looks like fourth, who said very little and was most certainly unnervingly withdrawn. That might be because he was the second-oldest of seven children. It might be because of a complicated family situation. It was most interesting, however, to watch his twin sisters demand that I examine them as well. Three pairs of ears, three mouths and throats, three hearts, three sets of lungs, three scoliosis checks. It was most intriguing. Got home, picked Quinby up, and went to Curves. It was weigh-day. And every measurement she took she made good noises. Since last month, I've lost four pounds and two point five inches. The inches - those can be attributed to any number of things. But the pounds...that's halfway back to what I weighed when I started. I can do that; I can keep doing that. One pound a week. Not so bad. And the personal: Got a page, and a call tonight. It's her story to tell and I'll let her tell it when it's time, but needs your prayers and your good thoughts. I finished watching Patch Adams now, finally, because I've been told too many times to count that I should watch it. The most recently being tonight, after I told my Chavaling that "Part of being a doctor is treating all of the patient, not just the disease present." Apparently, as I learned not too long after that, it's almost a direct quote from the movie. There's a spoiler here in my thoughts; I'll maybe go into it more later. It's late now, and I want to let Patch Adams percolate for a while. I'm not that unorthodox; I neither need to be nor have the temperament to be. But it hit close to home...very close. This is a long post, perilously close to rambling at this point. Perilously close, because it's late and my mind is full of a jumble of things. I'm reminded of something I wrote a while ago, something I keep thinking I should send in to the MS-JAMA for their creative writing, and I think I'll close with that. It's behind the second cut, O Best Beloved, an old piece of poetry because I have yet to find words in my heart that better express my thoughts than those I wrote not long after my first anatomy lab:

There is a press and pace of words,
     ebb and flow.
         We close our eyes to see.
Hands that pass hesitant and slow
  hold scalpels poised,
     flesh like any other
           until now.

What mystic power does the mind possess?
   Clad in white, solemn, young
         and ready to learn.
  We poise our pens and scalpels
                  and seek out healing
in the still equilibria
       of death.

   There is a press
  and pace of words
            and mortal minds
      that strive to see.
We are flesh, fallible,
          like any other,
       even now.
     NsB 04-09-2001
          "white coat"

And the really personal: I hear once in a while, O Best Beloved, that what I say touches you. I hope it does. I hope so fervently that it does. Because if I didn't mean it to touch you, make you laugh and cry and feel a little bit of what I feel, I wouldn't leave these entries public. I wouldn't stop during the day and look at a patient and think to myself "you have something to teach people, more than just me," and make a little note in my notebook. Sometimes, it's just an initial, and a symptom or a quote. Sometimes it's a sentence or two. But it makes everything so much more real, to know that I'm not the only one experiencing it. So thank you for listening, for putting up with my long-winded soliloquies, and for being part of me and what I'm learning and what I'm doing. Because we really are all doctors, in a way, and all patients. And that really does mean something great.