a little deluge

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.