Adventures in Medical School

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When the Universe plays a hilarious joke on you.
by fiona

For the past few nights I have been plagued with insomnia. It came upon me gradually, night upon night of sleep that was a little more long in coming, a little more restless when it came, bit by bit more tenuous and elusive. It culminated last night in a fitful period of desperate sleeplessness that lasted from 2 am til after 7 am.

Now, I know that there are many bad things that can happen to a person. I recently saw the Last King of Scotland. I read two hundred pages of The Kite Runner last night, which filled my mind with images of horrible loss and desperation and suffering. (that probably didn't help the cause of me trying to find sleep). I know that me getting less than 2 hours of sleep falls pretty low on the list of Horrible Things Human Beings Have Been Forced to Endure. Nevertheless, insomnia is an awful thing. You know that feeling when you are so exhausted, craving sleep more than anything else in the world, and yet for some reason it continues to escape you? And the fact that you cannot sleep begins to dominate your thoughts, filling you with a frustration that is physically tangible and ultimately incredibly counterproductive? That. If you are me, you read, you try to convince yourself to fall asleep with the light on, you try lying there and counting forwards and backwards, you read some more, you cry a little, you move to the couch, you try to convince your cat to give you a back massage (which he often does when you lie on your stomach), and your cat responds by repeatedly scratching at the front door and then scampering all over the apartment.

You see light beginning to creep through the windows, and hear the sounds of the neighborhood awakening: the recycling truck and its horrible explosive crashing, the sounds of traffic, of alarm clocks going off, of showers turning on, of the downstairs neighbors talking, of someone softly singing. And each sound is a jarring, cruel reminder of the fact that you are STILL not asleep.

It feels like you are in the midst of an epic internal battle... but against who? The clock? Your own mind? The injustice of human existence? The inevitable passage of time?

I finally drifted off for a couple of hours, comforted I think by my own resignation to my sleepless fate, and the soothing arms of a very kind man who had to get up and go to work.

I have waged the war of insomnia before. Once in a while, usually during periods of great stress or emotional upheaval, often the night before anything remotely important, sleeplessness will rear its ugly bastard head. Like when I was studying for Step 1 of the medical boards. So why has it come back to visit me?

Well, I guess I am done with medical school. My last little rotation had an anti-climactic end last friday, and now I am faced only with planning for the future. Packing, selling books, buying a car, trying to get more loans to buy a car, filling out employment paperwork, planning a last-minute trip to Australia (!!!).... now that's all I have to worry about. That and the pressure to enjoy my last days in portland, and the pressure I put on myself to be productive, which is promptly followed by the deep dissatisfaction I feel when I am not.

- - - - - -

Today I am in a daze.

Have you ever noticed how sleeplessness makes things go slightly wrong? Maybe its clumsiness and thoughtlessness from the lack of the mysterious rejuvenation that sleep brings, but I swear that stuff has gone disproportionately wrong these past few days. My front brake cable snapping yesterday, my new bike light breaking without warning, my library pin number not working and the line to fix it shockingly long, the guy at the coffee shop not putting enough loose-leaf tea in my tea bag, me forgetting my laptop power cord (ok - that one was my fault).

And today. Check this out. Two hours after I fell asleep I was awakened by a phone call, which, in a state of incredible confusion, I mistakenly answered. And then I was prevented from returning to my dearest sweetest loveliest sleep by the sudden intrusion of a very loud noise. Someone appeared to be power-washing the floor directly above my head in the apartment above me with a machine that was likely developed to clean mortar debris from soviet tanks. And when the incessant hissing and churning sound moved on to a floor that was not directly above my head, it was replaced by the sound of steady dripping. I got out of bed to explore and found that a brown liquid was leaking through my kitchen ceiling and into the light fixture. Very soon, this brown liquid completely filled the light fixture, casting a sickly murky glow when I inadvertently turned the light switch on (and quickly off again). Then this brown liquid began to overflow, creating a very surreal fountain that cascaded in splatters from my ceiling to the floor below, soaking through my kitchen rug, pooling along the base of my cabinets.

I honestly thought I might be dreaming. If not dreaming, then in the middle of perhaps the funniest and most well-executed joke of all time. Good one, Universe.

Soon after that there were strange men with ladders in my kitchen as well. I tried to drink my tea and eat my oatmeal like a normal person who got a normal amount of sleep while the nice man fixed the brown liquid kitchen fountain.

Seeking solace, more caffeine, and a quiet, non-leaking place to compose my muddled thoughts, I left my apartment and found my way to one of my favorite coffee shops. Literally less than 10 minutes after I sat down (a mere hour ago) A PARADE OF SMALL CHILDREN descended upon the same coffee shop. This seemed like an even funnier joke than the one with the brown water pouring out of my kitchen light.

For a while they were standing outside the window near where i am seated (guided there by the hands of satan himself), cupping their little pre-adolescent hands to the window, making gregarious faces, chanting to eachother, occasionally banging on the glass. One of them did a funny little dance in her oversized rubber rainboots. Then they all came inside, wearing little fluorescent name tags, inexplicably on some sort of coffee shop tour. They were relatively well-behaved for a group of thirty 6-10 year olds, and they were of course appropriately supervised. But I thought it the most perfect and beautiful practical joke ever designed that the place that I went to to escape the weird chaos in my apartment, after a brutally sleepless night, was promptly overrun by literally dozens of energetic little children on the world's first and only coffee-shop tour for montesorri students.

Touche, Universe. You have really outdone yourself this time.

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