The last few days I've been struggling through orientation, memorizing ACLS protocols in the daytime and spending my evenings with the other brand-new interns, telling stories and salsa dancing and drinking beer on warm patios. It's a nice life, although I think we all have a little bit of a calm-before-the-storm feeling, that sense of the proverbial ball about to drop. "Starting to seem more real?" one of the third-year pediatrics residents asked me as I walked into a session on shock yesterday. I remember thinking that I didn't really know how to answer.
In some ways, I feel like medicine is one long journey through a strange galaxy where there's nothing that isn't unfamiliar and alien. Especially from the healthy, happy, well-rested well-fed side of the canyon, "real" strikes me as a bizarre word. I still feel like I'm not totally sure what I'm about to get into.
But it is, if anything, beginning to feel more inevitable. Today I read a friend's TB test and signed my name, with an MD at the end, in the blank for the healthcare provider. That was such a simple act, but it felt more important than all the 5-minute talks about the VA hospital police force and hand-washing. It isn't lost on me, the power of my name now, what I can wield with a simple signature.
Ok, I'm honestly scared to death.
But I know I'm not alone in that, and I think this fear is ultimately a good thing. Hopefully it will help me to stay humble and conscientious, to put my patients before my own agenda, ego, or busyness.
Today on my run it started raining. Yes! I am not kidding. All day the sky had been showing these clouds that, in New Orleans, would've had us all running for cover, parking our cars on high ground. Here, evidently, even though rain may actually fall out of the sky, it's usually so dry that the rain rarely makes it all the way down to you and me. Don't you think that's the craziest thing ever?
But today I really did feel raindrops while I was running. And, I'll have you know, I was not the only one. During the whole entire block or two while it was raining, the wind kicked up all this crazy dust into the road and I passed a bunch of cars with the windows down and all these hands stretched out into the streets, grasping and clutching those drops of water, like they needed to make sure they were real. Wow. There was joy in those hands that you could see from way down the street. I'd never seen anything like it.
Normally, I am a big wuss about rain. Part of this is about where I'm from: New Orleanians have had more rain in the past few years than any human beings should need to endure. We know too well about the destruction, violent or mundane, that rain can cause. Even a long time ago, though, if I walked outside and it started to rain, I'd usually just turn right around and go back home.
But on my run today I welcomed the rain. I stopped in the middle of the street, gazing straight up into the grayish pink sky. Wind whipped clouds of yellow dust around me and the drops made indentations on my arms and I still kept standing. I didn't need to hide or run away from all that water. Instead, I felt like I was being blessed then, running down the street with those little drops splashing my shirt, all those car windows open with the hands thrust out, cupping the rain, holding it, all of us out in the whirling world around us, so grateful and unafraid to be immersed.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
It’s Gonna Be All Right
I’ve been hesitant to write here. Not because there haven’t been infinite beautiful and puzzling things to write about; not because—believe you me—I haven’t had time; I think it’s more that I’ve been relishing this transition time lately, the in-between-ness and rootlessness that comes when you leave one home and haven’t yet begun another. I’ve known since I was young that, for me at least, if I write something down it becomes true in a way it wasn’t before. You can’t take it back after that. And so I’m realizing that, happy as I’ve been these last few weeks, I haven’t been jumping up to write “I live in New Mexico.” There’s finality there, those words staring back. I think I haven’t been ready for that yet.
But I guess I just did it. That’s something.
I’ve been missing New Orleans in both bizarre and predictable ways. The other day a Dr John song on a friend’s CD made me cry, but I could’ve told you that 3 months ago, when I knew I’d be leaving. Or there’s this thing that happens, which I totally expected and was prepared for, which is that when I tell people here I’m from New Orleans, they say, “Oh. Were you there when all that stuff happened?” (I mean, that’s ok. What else are people gonna say? And it doesn’t make me torrentially sad, or angry, like it used to when people said that, it’s just one of those “oh, yeah” moments, like when you come back from a life-transforming journey and people are like, “that sounds cool.”)
That stuff doesn’t affect me too much. I think that in a process of nostalgia or longing, it’s the stuff you didn’t expect to provoke strong emotion that ends up taking on extra meaning, even if it just makes you grin, or wonder. Here’s what some of those things have been for me lately:
The fleur de lis on a friend’s hat in an old photo.
A stranger on the street wearing a “Make Levees Not War” T shirt (aww.).
The red beans and rice I cooked for some friends the other night, the way they just didn’t taste the same.
The mailman. He comes every day, in the morning if you can believe it, and he actually brings mail that’s addressed to me, and nobody else. It’s astounding. But we don’t say hi, and he doesn’t know my name or that I just graduated from med school, and he’s never shown me a picture of his adorable 2 year old daughter.
The university hospital, which is shiny and bustling and actually has—yes—a cafeteria.
These crazy yellow flowers—I don’t know what they are—jumping out of bushes and all over the sidewalks and, really, kind of getting in everybody’s way, and they smell just like night blooming jasmine. In the desert! Could you believe that?
Hummingbirds. They are everywhere. My grandfather loved hummingbirds, and every time I see one I feel his spirit with me.
The streets: not their relative silence but that one time, one day, when I heard faint strains of what may have been a trumpet, wafting over a balcony and a fence into the warm rosy street.
But I’m totally not wallowing in sadness and homesickness. Things here have been beautiful and full of—I don’t know how else to say it—potential. There’s more to say but for now I’ll give you a little list of just some of the things I’ve already started to fall in love with:
Bike paths! Oh my gosh, they are everywhere!
Recycling! It comes every week and you don’t even have to pay for it!
The sunsets. I’ve found a couple of hilltops in my neighborhood where you can see for miles, all the red and silver rooftops glinting this weird orangey-gold light, and if you look over to the east the mountains are bright pink.
Lavender, which grows everywhere and makes the streets smell like crisp laundry.
Salsa dancing, which people do everywhere: in jam-packed bars with people dressed to the nines; an unassuming sports bar called The Tavern; a steakhouse (I am not joking); this beautiful amphitheatre place outside of the museum where people dance on the stairs and the balconies and between the seats, and right next to enormous metal sculptures.
The way everybody’s like, “Wow, really? Welcome to New Mexico! We’re so glad to have you here!” whenever I tell them I just moved.
Art is everywhere. People make art out of anything. (That reminds me of home, too).
My neighborhood library, which is in Ernie Pyle’s old white house, which is tiny and white and cute and has a garden outside, and there’s this twinkly white-bearded guy behind the desk who not only knew the name of every single kid who came in while I was there this morning (like, 14 kids), but also what kind of books they’d like. “I think this would be beyond most 8 year olds I know,” he said to this one red-headed girl with skates on, “but I bet you can handle it.”
The guy on Central Avenue tonight with a huge telescope in the middle of the street. “We’re looking at the moon tonight,” he declared to anyone walking by. “Wanna see?” And the telescope was so awesome that you could see canyons and plains and mountains on the moon, and after we were done exclaiming how cool it was the man said, “let me show you something really amazing.” And he repositioned the telescope to some random-looking place in the sky and when we looked through, there was Saturn! With rings!
“How’d you know where it was?” I asked.
“I have great aim,” the guy said.
The fireworks we saw coming home last night (from an outdoor concert! At the zoo! Where you could go look at the polar bears during the set break!). The fireworks weren’t for any major occasion; apparently they just do them on Fridays at the Isotopes games. We pulled over in a clearing by the park to watch them, which I thought would take about 5 minutes. But it just kept going and going. These fireworks were serious. So loud they shook the car, explosions of red and blue and purple raining down on the city. About 30 minutes later I was like, “wow. They really aren’t stopping.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said from the front seat. “They’re pretty intense about fireworks here.”
I can live with that.
But I guess I just did it. That’s something.
I’ve been missing New Orleans in both bizarre and predictable ways. The other day a Dr John song on a friend’s CD made me cry, but I could’ve told you that 3 months ago, when I knew I’d be leaving. Or there’s this thing that happens, which I totally expected and was prepared for, which is that when I tell people here I’m from New Orleans, they say, “Oh. Were you there when all that stuff happened?” (I mean, that’s ok. What else are people gonna say? And it doesn’t make me torrentially sad, or angry, like it used to when people said that, it’s just one of those “oh, yeah” moments, like when you come back from a life-transforming journey and people are like, “that sounds cool.”)
That stuff doesn’t affect me too much. I think that in a process of nostalgia or longing, it’s the stuff you didn’t expect to provoke strong emotion that ends up taking on extra meaning, even if it just makes you grin, or wonder. Here’s what some of those things have been for me lately:
The fleur de lis on a friend’s hat in an old photo.
A stranger on the street wearing a “Make Levees Not War” T shirt (aww.).
The red beans and rice I cooked for some friends the other night, the way they just didn’t taste the same.
The mailman. He comes every day, in the morning if you can believe it, and he actually brings mail that’s addressed to me, and nobody else. It’s astounding. But we don’t say hi, and he doesn’t know my name or that I just graduated from med school, and he’s never shown me a picture of his adorable 2 year old daughter.
The university hospital, which is shiny and bustling and actually has—yes—a cafeteria.
These crazy yellow flowers—I don’t know what they are—jumping out of bushes and all over the sidewalks and, really, kind of getting in everybody’s way, and they smell just like night blooming jasmine. In the desert! Could you believe that?
Hummingbirds. They are everywhere. My grandfather loved hummingbirds, and every time I see one I feel his spirit with me.
The streets: not their relative silence but that one time, one day, when I heard faint strains of what may have been a trumpet, wafting over a balcony and a fence into the warm rosy street.
But I’m totally not wallowing in sadness and homesickness. Things here have been beautiful and full of—I don’t know how else to say it—potential. There’s more to say but for now I’ll give you a little list of just some of the things I’ve already started to fall in love with:
Bike paths! Oh my gosh, they are everywhere!
Recycling! It comes every week and you don’t even have to pay for it!
The sunsets. I’ve found a couple of hilltops in my neighborhood where you can see for miles, all the red and silver rooftops glinting this weird orangey-gold light, and if you look over to the east the mountains are bright pink.
Lavender, which grows everywhere and makes the streets smell like crisp laundry.
Salsa dancing, which people do everywhere: in jam-packed bars with people dressed to the nines; an unassuming sports bar called The Tavern; a steakhouse (I am not joking); this beautiful amphitheatre place outside of the museum where people dance on the stairs and the balconies and between the seats, and right next to enormous metal sculptures.
The way everybody’s like, “Wow, really? Welcome to New Mexico! We’re so glad to have you here!” whenever I tell them I just moved.
Art is everywhere. People make art out of anything. (That reminds me of home, too).
My neighborhood library, which is in Ernie Pyle’s old white house, which is tiny and white and cute and has a garden outside, and there’s this twinkly white-bearded guy behind the desk who not only knew the name of every single kid who came in while I was there this morning (like, 14 kids), but also what kind of books they’d like. “I think this would be beyond most 8 year olds I know,” he said to this one red-headed girl with skates on, “but I bet you can handle it.”
The guy on Central Avenue tonight with a huge telescope in the middle of the street. “We’re looking at the moon tonight,” he declared to anyone walking by. “Wanna see?” And the telescope was so awesome that you could see canyons and plains and mountains on the moon, and after we were done exclaiming how cool it was the man said, “let me show you something really amazing.” And he repositioned the telescope to some random-looking place in the sky and when we looked through, there was Saturn! With rings!
“How’d you know where it was?” I asked.
“I have great aim,” the guy said.
The fireworks we saw coming home last night (from an outdoor concert! At the zoo! Where you could go look at the polar bears during the set break!). The fireworks weren’t for any major occasion; apparently they just do them on Fridays at the Isotopes games. We pulled over in a clearing by the park to watch them, which I thought would take about 5 minutes. But it just kept going and going. These fireworks were serious. So loud they shook the car, explosions of red and blue and purple raining down on the city. About 30 minutes later I was like, “wow. They really aren’t stopping.”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said from the front seat. “They’re pretty intense about fireworks here.”
I can live with that.
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