You look like a prisoner
by fiona
Minnesota, hats off to thee! True and strong and something we will ever be! Lah lah something that rhymes with be! RAH! RAH! RAH! RAH! MINNESOTA! RAH for the U of M!!
Ladies and gentlemen, the University of Minnesota fight song (or a distant approximation thereof). I think I learned this in elementary school music class with Ms. Fossel (NOT "Fossil," children) who subsequently died of cancer. Sometimes this song pops into my head when I think of my homestate, and it makes me think that someday I should look up the words to it. But then that seems like too much work and I move onto other things - like why do some coffee shops give you paper cups if you say For Here? This upsets me. But then I look up and see a Sweet Corn stand across the street, and I remember the crickets that sang a constant background whine to my late night walk with my brother last night, and I think about how close I am to the Mississippi river right now, and I realize that I am very glad to be back in Minnesota.
I am currently doing an away rotation in Emergency Medicine at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, MN, my hometown. This is a "month long interview," as some people refer to it, in anticipation of the very difficult decision of where I want to do my residency. This is the first week, and though I have not yet worked my first shift, I have gone to several orientation sessions, a brutal four-hour long computer introduction, a workshop on emergecny eye care, and lectures on ankle injuries, the elusive prolonged QTc, and how to deal with aggressive psychotic criminals on meth . Turns out a show of force is the way to do it - collect a group of large burly nurses and ask again nicely for the patient to sit down on the bed and take their medication and stop threatening to stab the hospital staff with forks. During the lecture someone asked for a show of hand of how many residents and physicians had been "slugged" by patients, and a dishearteningly large number of hands went up (someone actually had been stabbed with a fork). Awesome. This was also the presentation when a resident, in describing his interaction with a particularly aggitated patient, used one of my new favorite phrases: "He was dropping the F-bomb left and right." Dropping the F-bomb! An oldie but a goodie. This leads to the new, perhaps more subtle phrase that my brother and I are putting into use, which is to "drop a pain-bomb" on someone or something. I find this endlessly amusing.
What I did get to do was go on an ambulance ride-along. This was awesome. In contrast to the 12 hour ride-along I did in Portland, where I was in the "rig" with two paramedics who seemed very uninterested in conversing with me for an entire day... this time I spent most of my evening hanging out with the guys at the fire department on my street. I did get to go out on two calls, which were quite interesting, but the rest of the time I was just kicking it with the firefighters. This involved watching some of the ball game, watching Fear Factor, watching the last 15 minutes of The Missing starring Tommy Lee Jones and Kate Blanchet as some wild-west dudes who needed to kill a bunch of people, and then watching Rescue Me (hands down the firemen's favorite show- its about firemen!!) - all of this on their enormous 9-foot TV. I also got to watch their very organized cleaning regimen, was repeatedly offered pasta and ice cream and popsicles, and, because I asked nicely, GOT TO SLIDE DOWN THE FIRE POLE! This was quite exciting, and also ripe with various inappropriate joke opportunities. All in all, those dudes renewed my faith in humanity because they were so nice, so welcoming, so good at introducing themselves and asking me questions about myself, and so dedicated to helping people. I love the midwest.
Another important fact that we all need to pause and appreciate: I have been issues tan scrubs. Tan. This odd color choice is designed to differentiate the medical students from other ED personnel, especially the real doctors who are sporting a regal dark blue this season. Tan. As I emerged from my room, displaying my new colors before heading off to the firehouse, my brother's only comment was "You look like a prisoner."
I'm a prisoner in a glass cage of emotion.
Posted on August 24, 2006 | Comments (6)
