Resident Life

I've graduated medical school  and have already been in residency for 2 months!

I spent the month of July in Vascular Surgery learning all about bypass surgeries, AV fistulas,  abdominal aortic aneurysms, etc. I was overly anxious in "stepping up my game" to take care of patients. Most importantly I learned that time management is going to be one of the most important skills to master.

During August I worked on the Orthopedic service spending a lot of time in  OR doing joint replacements, arthroscopy, and fixing fractures. Outside the OR I have learned more about performing  knee and hip examinations. My personal area of most improvement has to be shoulder exams. Who knew that joint was so complicated? Shoulder pain can be caused from arthritis(2 possible joints), rotator cuff tears, labral tears,  or tendinitis.

Poor David has been left to fend for himself since I'm out of the house at 5:30 am and don't get back until 7pm. Once I do get home, I make him be my test patient for practicing examinations. In these two months he has expanded his cooking repertoire and adjusted his sleep schedule for the new resident schedule.  Hooray for husbands!

Guilty

I am guilty of neglecting the blog, but today my guilt has finally moved me to post an update. During one of the weekends in January David and I both had a Friday off and decided to visit the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Here is our day in picture form:

David standing in front of the museum and some other building in the square.

The entrance to the museum.

One of the first things you see after you enter are these

wonderful shallow reefs with brightly colored coral and fishes.

See there, underneath the lights? That's where you see the coral and fish. The death star-like globe on the left part of the picture is the planetarium. We watched the "Journey of the Stars" on the 75 foot wide screen. It was my first planetarium experience and I will say that I enjoyed it very much.

The aquarium portion of the museum included tanks of the Phillipian coral reef and the Northern California coast. In the California Coast exhibit they had lots of rockfish. And the coral reef exhibit had brightly colored fish, including small neon pink fish.

I think these are rockfish.

The only picture from the entire day with both of us in it.

The four-story rainforest is all contained within this giant dome. They maintain a temperature of 80 degrees and humidity of 80%. It did a number on my hair.

This is on the fourth level in the "canopy" of the rainforest.

There were 100's of butterflies fluttering around.

This is what the "The Living Roof" on the building looks like. It is completely

covered in plants and the windows over this hill open and close

to maintain temperature or ventilation within the building.

After the museum we headed over to the Cliffhouse for desserts. The walls

facing the ocean are all glass and you get to watch the waves crashing into

rocks and large ocean liners make their way towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had meant to take pictures of the desserts before we began eating them.

As you can see we got to them before the camera could.

So yet another fun day trip with my handsome husband within San Francisco. David's birthday is coming up and he is determined to go on a trip somewhere. We will see where that takes us. Any suggestions for him?

The Killers

Today I got out of clinic early, so I have cleaned my house and now have some extra time to make a post. Way back in September, David and I went to The Killers Concert while they were here in the Bay Area. We had tried to go to some of their previous shows but one was sold out and the other was on a Sunday. After two failed attempts I was very excited to be going to show. I bought the tickets back in June and didn't give David a chance to object to the purchase.

Come to the week of the concert and David came down with a cold. We nearly nixed our plans of seeing the show due to David's cold and overall exhaustion. Thankfully he toughed it out and we had a blast! The groups playing before them included The New York Dolls, who were also great to see since we were somewhat familiar with their music.

The Killers played so many of our favorite songs and it's always fun to be singing along with a crowd of 25,000 people. Everyone knew the words to Mr. Brightside, Somebody Told Me and When You Were Young.

Both the lead singer of The Killers, Brandon Flowers, and the original bass player for The New York Dolls, Arthur Kane, are mormon. Which I love! Too often I get caught up in thinking that Mormonism is a culture, instead of a religion/belief system. Maybe this stems from being too critical of myself, but I appreciate the talent and choices of these individuals. Arthur Kane was featured in a documentary called New York Doll that tells of his life as a member of band, his current life situation and his dream of reuniting the band some 20 years after they disbanded. (It's really good.)

I believe I have come to love going to concerts. If they weren't so dang expensive I'd go to a lot more. Last weekend I tried to buy Taylor Swift tickets but apparently she's hotter than I thought. I tried buying tickets within 2 minutes of when they became available and was told there were no more tickets available. Later that evening David heard San Francisco's R&B station playing a Taylor Swift song, I guess that shows how popular her songs are.

Halloween & School

I am in disbelief knowing that I'm well into the middle of my 3rd year. School has changed now that I have clinic 4 days a week and only having to go to the classroom on Thursdays.

This month I am working in the Surgery Department at St. Mary's hospital. So far it has been fantastic! I get to scrub and assist with ANY surgery that occurs in the hospital. So far I have helped remove an appendix, drain a lung abscess, and mesh a skin graft! I wish there were

pictures to help share my experiences you will all have to imagine. (update: today I was able to watch a 2nd toe transplanted to replace a thumb that had a mishap with a saw. Crazy!)

David and I had a great Halloween week. We had to forego our annual trip to Half Moon Bay to pick out pumpkins, but we managed to carve pumpkins with our friends from school and visit some festive neighborhoods on Halloween night.

Tennessee Valley

A few weeks ago we went for a little hike with Rob & Candi. Tennessee Valley is the name of the trail that we took and although it was a short walk we saw plenty of wildlife. We spotted a coyote on the drive to the trail head and Rob nearly stepped on a snake at the beginning. The trail ends at a little secluded beach that is contained by large bluffs on both sides. It has been so nice to have all of David's family nearby to do things together. It makes doing things, like hikes, alot more enjoyable.

New Arrival

Today we welcomed the arrival of a new nephew! Here is as picture of baby Dallin:

Home Improvement

David and I have been working on several home improvement projects lately. We have found that working on the house can be tough when both of us have other responsibilities during the day. But during the process we have learned a lot and now possess a large collection of tools. One of the most frustrating aspects of home improvement is the many unexpected trips (and expenses) one makes going to Home Depot or Lowe's to get something for the project you intended to start that evening. Or even more frustrating is finding tools that would have made the job a lot easier if you had known about it before!

However with my family coming at the end of the week we have been working overtime trying to finish some of the projects that we have started.

For this post we will concentrate on the progress of the floor.

We began with ceramic tile that can not be described by color, yellow vinyl flooring and pink carpet. The strangest thing to us about the flooring in the house was that there was carpet in both the dining area and vanity area.

Demolition is both the easiest and hardest part of the entire process. In the beginning you get a dramatic change in a short amount of time. But once all the large pieces are gone it takes FOREVER to clean and prepare the area for the next step.

p.s. below you can see the pink carpet...who does that?

Done with the easy part...At this point we had to scrape all the previous thinset off the concrete subfloor. At this point we did not our way around a home improvement store yet. We figured that it was a small area and we'd simply scrape off the ridges in no time. Wrong! We spent several nights chipping away at these stubborn ridges with a hammer, pry bar and small 3" metal scraper. A week after finishing scraping all the thinset off the floor we saw the actual floor scraping tools at the store which would have made our lives easier for those few days. Not only did we find the actual tools for the job but we also saw that you could rent the various specialized tools at the store! Oh well, the job was at least finished. Next David put out some self leveling concrete to even out the two concrete slabs that run through our unit.Finally, some tile on the floor!

The dining "room". ;) That pink carpet keeps rearing it's ugly head into all my progress pictures.the kitchen. please don't judge the mess. We are living in a full on construction zone as you can tell by the choice foods on display.Finally inserting all the cut edge and corner pieces. We are almost finished! The past two days we have spent grouting the floor and I am amazed at how much work we have done ourselves. Our house looks much better with some updated flooring. Now we just need to get rid of the rest of the pink carpet.

I just got done reading Anita's post about this gloomy June weather and I could not agree more! A couple of weeks ago we were driving to Dave's parents house via the Golden Gate Bridge. I could not believe how foggy it was for being in the month of June! Hey California, Where's the sun?