brb, grabbing every scrap of music I’ve been dying to revisit over the last few years but couldn’t without an accompanist.  I foresee the irritating Thursday gap being filled with faust, the medium, jazz standards, and improv. 

does this ever go away?

Today I decided that I must have cartilage debris  in my knee and/or a new meniscus tear. 

The concurrent care approved story is that a jerk stepped on my knee with cleats (twice) when I was 12, and that I’ve had degenerative change since then. Osgood schlatter’s runs (or rather, doesn’t) in my family, but I don’t and didn’t have the avulsion fractures. Maybe I have a chondroblastoma in my tibial plateau. Maybe I got an infection. 
Or maybe I just still have osteoarthritis in my knee and jumped over a wall twice to prevent my stupid cat from eating neighboring ducklings.

algarot asked: How much do you and your classmates worry about paying off your student debt? I think it scares me more than anything.

If I actually thought about it all the time, I’d probably be terrified stiff.

Between undergrad and the first three years here, I’m rolling around 150G.   I have a lot of faith in the universe that everything will work out, and I keep trying to put things in perspective. A lot of people run cash only clinics (which are successful!) that totally skirt around the stupid insurance problem, and people will pay 200, 300$ for a minor surgery procedure that’ll take 20 minutes. It seems outrageous. The MDs up the street would charge $1200 so it’s actually a bargain, and since we have more time with our patients, our scars are usually smaller. 
For childbirth, the low end cost of prenatals  and attending is $5000, so those loans are going away chunk by chunk by chunk. It’s all a matter of balance. In a rural area, doing births and surgeries, I have a very good chance of being extremely successful. I’m hoping to be out of debt in 20 years, and that includes buying land somewhere and building a beautiful cob house with a little witches hat tower-study. 

It helps that my sugar daddy makes a good solid wage, too. And that we don’t live outside of our means. Budgeting and planning are required. 

Drew up and administered digit block, removed a toenail, did the dressings and repacked the surgery kit for the autoclave.
That’s what I call a return to the quarter!

GPOY: finals

• Spend daytime continuing the ultimately futile exercise of trying to contain the disaster area. Bonus points for not putting the baby’s food directly on the floor, because we all know it’s going to end up there anyway.
• Attempt to keep up with social obligations (visiting classmate to bring her food as she just had a baby, her milk came in while I was there, I am the lactation fairy of goodwill, bearing cornish hens, leek/onion latkes, and oat muffins. Also I took the gremlin to a birthday party for one of his little friends.) 
• Various small errands- cleaning the cat box, taking out the trash, coordinating diaper drop offs, cooking dinner, preparing tomorrow’s lunch. putting the baby to bed at 6.
• studying furiously in the very few hours I have to myself.
• taking, and passing the neonatal resuscitation online portion of the test. 
• Having an emotional breakdown where in I cry and have a 30 second tirade ending with “and everyone has more fun than me” which rather takes the maturity away from the stress. 
• Continue studying and getting ready for tomorrows classes because there’s no rest for the wicked and the righteous don’t need any. 
• Exhaustion. Utter exhaustion. Every. Single. Day.

last night I got two hours of sleep, and then was up for an hour, and then another two hours of sleep, and then my gremlin decided it was time to be up for the day and shenanigans ensued and somehow he found some banana and shoved it in my toes while I was dozing on the couch. 
Suffice it to say, I was less than enthusiastic about going to school today. 

When kiddo went down for his first nap around 6:45 am (it’s never a good day when first nap is before 8), I crashed back out. Then my husband got home from work and said things like “Honey, are you ok?” and “You have to leave for school in half an hour, are you going to put clothes on?” while I groaned and flopped around the house. 

So, my husband got real cuddly, and wrapped an arm around me…and looked up the einstein vs stephen hawking epic rap battle of history and played it right in my ear. Then he played me some thrift shop. Then he convinced me it was epic hat friday. And slowly but surely, my spirits have risen. 

When I got to school, there was free coffee, free scones, and free bacon. 
Also free samples of cal:mag. 

So HAPPY FRIDAY, EVERYBODY!
What do you do to psych up to school?

I usually do the application on the first, but I was dragging my feet this year

Looking at the balance of my student loans and the interest already accumulating made me sick to my stomach. I better be an awesome doctor, because this is a doodle that can’t be undid on low wages. 

The good news: 4 years of undergrad and (so far) 3 years of post grad, and I’m under 150K. Get your scholarships, kids. If I hadn’t been on 3/4 scholarship for my entire undergraduate career, we’d be a lot closer to 200K. Maybe even over it, counting my husband’s student loans. 

Can you believe people are mad that my generation aren’t buying houses and cars? 
 

intubated a plastic baby head mounted to a board in a little less than 20 seconds. Plastic baby head is going to make it, I’m sure you were concerned.