Hair nets and tin cans...........

So today Chris and I got the chance to go to the cannery for the first time. I guess we decided that in an emergency situation our families are clearly too far away for us to live off of their food storage, so it was about time we start building our own. It's not much, but at least we have a start.

One of the cannery leaders sealed up an empty can and offered it to us, saying that it made a great bank account because you can't get into it without a can opener. I told him I didn't want it because I have enough money that I can't get a hold of. Chris and I did contemplate taking it for a storage place for all the loan statements that we keep getting in the mail though.......

Now I just have to figure out what meals I can make with macaroni/spaghetti noodles, powdered milk, sugar, flour, beans, and wheat....add all those up and you don't have much flavor do you??

Art and balloons!

Just wanted to share a few pictures from some weekend activities over the past few weeks. First, we went to a new park downtown called "CityGarden" (oddly enough, we found out about it after my dad read about it in the Deseret News and called and asked if we knew about it). It's just a few blocks from the Arch and has a bunch of interesting statues and art and a nice fountain to run through. It seems like a fun place to hang out, maybe have a picnic. The sumo-stretcher piece was my favorite (that and the random flamingos around...sorry no pictures).

Then last weekend was the annual balloon glow at Forest Park. It was a lot of fun again this year. I picked Linzi up from work, and we walked over to the field where the balloons were. We were able to meet up with the Allens, but that was pure coincidence...cell phone coverage is non-existent at this event, so we just had a no-signal message all night long. But we got to wander around the balloons (the wind was blowing them around pretty good...it was kind of funny because all of a sudden one of the guys holding the support ropes would just go flying by you trying to keep it from toppling over...slightly reminded me of Mr. Pitt on Seinfeld with Woody Woodpecker), watch the fireworks at the end, and of course, enjoy the biggest corndog we've ever seen. All in all, a very fun night. We can't wait for next year (maybe we'll figure out a way to get a ride in one of them).

Sorry, these are the best balloon shots we got...a nice b-day cake and goldfish. There was one with rats on it that I wanted to get a shot of, but must have forgotten. :(

What is that sound?

So this weekend I finished (finally) my Internal Medicine rotation. It's the longest of the rotations this year, 3 months! I spent one month at St. John's doing outpatient clinics, one month at the VA, and this last month at SLU on one of the geriatrics teams (sorry Mom and Dad, Scott and Colleen, but it didn't quite entice me to go into geriatrics). I think it was a great way to start out the year, and hope that it was a good foundation for everything else this year. I took my Shelf exam on Friday and it was a doozy...I definitely could have used another hour to get through it. But as long as I did better than the 5th percentile I'll be just fine. Tomorrow I start my 6 week rotation in Family Medicine...I imagine that it will be pretty similar to outpatient internal medicine.

Anyhoo, I should have shared more funny stories from the past three months as they happened, but never really did. Something funny did happen the other week. I saw one of my patients (who had broken her femur and was extremely hard of hearing) in the morning before rounds with the attending physician. I went to the area where our team was going to meet and started to write my note on my patient. After a few minutes I noticed there was a high-pitched buzzing sound, kind of like some feedback coming over a sound system. It was extremely annoying, but I tried to forget about it and keep writing. Another student was sitting with me and asked me if I could hear the annoying sound. I said yes and we both expressed how annoying it was and that we hoped it would stop quickly.

As we went on rounds, the buzzing was still with us...it was in the hallway, in each of the patients rooms, it was especially loud in one of the doorways of one of rooms we went into. Weird. I thought it might just be a problem on the 9th floor, but it was just as loud an annoying on the 8th and even the 7th floor. I was very annoyed and was planning how I was going to figure out the cause of the sound after we finished rounding. I wanted to find out who was responsible for this and let them know that it needed to stop.

Then we started talking about one of our last patients. He was another elderly gentleman that was hard of hearing. My attending said that we might want to use the "Pocket Talker" with this patient as well. When she said this, I immediately felt like an incredibly huge idiot. Why you ask? Well, first of all, a "Pocket Talker" is a little amplifying device...it's basically a microphone hooked up to some earphones. My attending had lent me one for the last week to help me to talk with my patient. It's a great little device and had really helped with my patient, but as with any other technology or electronic equipment it's only as useful and helpful as the person who's using it. I reached into my pocket frantically and switched the On/Off switch and IMMEDIATELY the sound vanished. Just think, in a little under two years this Einstein is going to have an M.D. behind his name and might have a little more responsibility than just a little Pocket Talker. I'm just saying you've been warned. Needless to say I felt incredibly foolish and apologized profusely to my team for driving them nuts for the last 40 minutes.

It's tougher than it looks for some of us :)

The White Coat

So now that Chris has started his clinical rotations, he has to wear his white coat every day. Keep in mind that they make the students wear the dorky, short white coat- to keep them humble I guess. (I think that a bunch of doctors got together and said, how can we make these coats so that they look horrible on whoever wears them. Oh yes, we can make them short and wide and make all the sleeves fit too short and put lots of pockets on it so the students think that they have to fill them with all the books and instruments they will need to impress us.)

So my question is how much does the typical med student weigh vs how much does he weigh when he puts on the pocket filled white coat?

an eye witness

so the other night Chris and I watched a 20/20 episode about a woman who had been abducted in a mail parking lot. Most of the show centered around her eye witness of the man and how she was able to describe him to a sketch artist. ...none of this really matters....but it led to later that evening when I asked Chris how he would describe me to a sketch artist (you know, in the emergency case that I was abducted and all of the pictures in the world got burned somehow).

Well, I was in store for a real treat. He thought about it for a minute and then said something like this, "Well, I would tell him that you have a long face, a thin nose with a jump on the end, brownish/green eyes, and a big smile, you know, with all of your teeth." Don't I sound attractive????

Finally, a need for a passport

So a while back (and by a while back I mean sophomore year of high school) I got a passport because I was going to go on a school trip with my friend Kathryn to Italy and some other countries that I have forgotten over the years. I got a passport and new luggage, but then the trip got cancelled. Kathryn still went to Italy with some friends but I decided to save the money for another opportunity (a decision that I have regreted for many years). Well, 8 years later I have still never used that passport and I have never stepped foot out of the United States (unless you count Tijuana and I just refuse to because I saw nothing but dirty roads and dirty men).

Well, my time has finally come in a time when the old passport is no longer valid (due to getting married), the luggage is broken and the money is long gone. I got picked to go to Brazil for my community nursing clinical. We will be spending 3 weeks there and will be working in clinics in rural and metro cities. I don't know if I should be excited or scared but I can't wait. Please feel free to teach me any Portuguese that you know that may help me on my adventure! (I mostly need to know how to say Help, I am being robbed, Where is the bathroom, and perhaps, Where can I buy some chocolate)

The miracle of life.....

I got to see my first vaginal delivery today. It was amazing. I was speechless. The woman had no epidural (crazy if you ask me) and delivered a 9 lb baby (which was nothig compared to her previous 10 lb baby). I couldn't help but laugh as she kept telling her husband to shut up and that he talked too much while he was trying to support her during the process. All in all, the most life changing 30 minutes of my life!