So here's a little story about...

So here's a little story about those times in life that you just have to laugh at yourself.  It was one of those amazingly mundane yet profound moments that nobody really realizes has this intense effect on you because it's just a part of their regular day.  Like I happen to know, for a fact that this moment held no weight or impact on either of the two other people that it involved.  If asked about it in a month they probably won't even remember it happened.  But for me it was one of those 'what the fuck am I doing here?!' kind of moments.  One of those moments you just have to laugh at yourself and say 'chill there girlfriend, you were kinda just taking things way to seriously there for a second'  then buy yourself some ice cream and call it a day.

So I'm in this dietetic internship right now, right.  And right now the majority of my day is spent doing the work that real dietitians don't want to do.  So whenever an A1C screen come through- A1C being a test that can indicate pretty well what someone's blood glucose has been running over 3 months, which is especially important for diabetics since it tells me that while you claim your blood sugar runs 'somewhere between 90 and 120' that really it's more like 190 and you're a lying asshole.  Anyway.  The hospital I'm working at screens; meaning we look through the patient lists for our floors and just browse for specific criteria for why we might go see a patient- we screen, for an A1C level of over 8%.  This means their average blood glucose level is ~183 which is much higher than the norm ~90 and your diabetes is getting out of control, you're going to lose the feeling in your fingers and toes... blah blah blah *dietitian talk*.  So anyway, we screen for these A1C tests and we have to go discuss with the patient why their blood sugars are running high and like 99% of the time it is because the person genuinely doesn't give a fuck.  Not to generalize the diabetic population; how undietitianlly of me. But at the very least my small. tiny. insignificant experience tells me that IF your A1C levels are running high, and have been for a while, you don't want to hear about carb counting and we're both going to sit here with smiles on our faces talking about things neither one of us wants to talk about.

Those are the kind of people I get to go see during this internship.

So I've got this patient.  And in an attempt to not break HIPPA we'll call them Daffy Duck.  Now Daffy Duck's condition I can't really describe either so let's just say that Daffy's principal problem is that someone ate his peanut butter.  Now along with someone eating his peanut butter Daffy also has dementia.  The doctors describe him as 'pleasantly demented' but he has it never the less.  So I'm in Daffy's room and my plan is to go through my typical laundry list of things I talk to patients about, bowel movements, nausea/vomiting, how you eat a home...the good stuff.  So I'm talking to Daffy and first question in he starts going off.  He's going off about how scary someone stealing his peanut butter is and how he doesn't want to be in the hospital because it scares him and how they got his diagnosis wrong and really they just THINK someone stole his peanut butter but really it's just someone playing a prank on him and they just hid it under his bed.  And so on and so on in a sort of gibberish, demented, smile and nod along sort of way.  But still I'm starting to feel Daffy's emotions and starting to connect with him when I realize I haven't asked any of my questions!.... So I panic.  I decided I have to interrupt Daffy.  I really didn't want to do this but it was getting to be to long, out of my scope of practice and I did have other patient's lives to save.  So I do it. I interrupt Daffy right smack dab in the middle of this really heavy conversation.  And I ask. I ask, in my grown up *loud and slow* so the patient can understand properly voice,  I ask, "SO HAVE YOUR BOWELS BEEN MOVING ALRIGHT RECENTLY??"

So I made this huge mistake...

So I made this huge mistake last week.  This wasn't any old, left my hair straightener plugged in all night and now there is a char mark next to my sink kind of mistake.  This was a brain mistake, the kind where I screwed up my train of thought out of purely selfish actions.  And now I'm writing about it to help myself understand and get back on track.  This is for me, not you.

So I finished my food service rotation of this internship that consumes my time last week.  To remain politically correct about the experience, I learned a lot from it.  And that's all I'm saying, fill in the blanks on that one, mind reader.  To celebrate the fact that I was done I spent the weekend preparing for my next rotation... CLINICAL!  To answer your question, yes it is a scary as it sounds!  My name is out there in the medical field- after only 4 days there I am officially official.  If something gets fucked up with one of these patients my name is on their chart.  Legitimately Legit.  So, in order to prepare for this rotation I... studied from old textbooks, reread some old case studies from college, took a prequiz, tried to relax, and dusted off and watched some episodes from one of my old favorite shows, House. Ok, that last part wasn't exactly a way that I was preparing for my rotation but I was bored and House was on the 'flix.  This was the huge mistake I made.

I go into my first day of the rotation a nervous wreck just trying to make it through.  The first patient chart I look it was pretty standard.  Coronary artery disease, which like most other heart failure patients had run it's course in the rest of the patient's body.  This lead to some elevated laboratory findings, some renal issues and a nutrition consult.  So silly me, after watching like 13 hours of a television show about a doctor dedicated to only solving the cases that others can't, my mind starts freaking out! What does that lab mean? Is that the only thing going on with them? How do those medications react with those ones? What about all the crazy underlying issues that we haven't tested for yet? Are we going to test fro them? What kind of healthcare workers are we? How is this going to progress to a more complicated case? Don't they all do that??  I forgot to remember that like 99.9% of the people that end up in the hospital are standard patients whose problems run a standard course and there is a standard treatment that, if followed properly, will lead to a discharge.  So now I'm grounded from watching House and I'm not allowed to assume someone's prognosis is immediately going down hill.  SORRY for caring...

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time there was a pretty pretty princess.  The princess lived in a tiny, secluded, and protected part of the northeastern part of the country.  We'll call this place "Vermont".  I'm going to tell you a gripping story of how she dropped her glass slipper (who wears shoes made of glass), let down her beautiful hair, and moved half way across the country.

Growing up:
So... there was this princess.  Most of the life she could remember happened in tiny little 1 hour radius in the Adirondack region of New York, with 130 other people her age that knew every single thing the princess did from the moment she stepped into her first kindergarten classroom to when she tripped and fell across the stage at high school graduation.  I'm saying- EVERYONE knew EVERYTHING.  They knew when you picked your nose, they knew how you liked your milkshakes, they knew exactly why you weren't wearing your NHS sash during said graduation. Now, the princess didn't exactly love where she lived growing up- standard teenager complaints, nothing to do, nowhere to go, boring people yadda yadda yadda, but she didn't exactly hate it either.  There was enough room in her street that she could play roller hockey with the neighbors until the street lights came on, she had best friends that would do anything for her- like punching someone in the face after they tried to push your friend out of a moving vehicle- and there was always adventure to be had in the mountains on the weekends, well the weekends that she didn't have basketball or track practice.  The princess had experienced other parts of the country too, ski trips to Colorado, visiting family in Chicago, flying to Disney World to hobble around the whole week with a questionably sprain ankle... and recently a vacation to Barcelona, but that deserves a separate story.  The princess was by no means "sheltered" but she also was not exactly well traveled.

The college years:
The princess spent a lot her first year of college- we won't call it miserable- but... without a proper social outlet.  She was struggling to find her niche at such a wonderful place and could not grasp how people made new friends so easily.  Don't get me wrong she had friends that she went to go get pizza with at 2am, and would let her into their rooms while her roommate got busy with the guys down the hallway, and granted some of it had to do with the fact that she lived on a primarily sophomore status floor she couldn't help but to be jealous when she saw people getting to know each other around her instead of with her.  Now the princess got very lucky toward the end of the year freshman year and made some wonderful friends that she would eventually go on to live with and spend the next 3 years of college making amazing memories with, but like I said she got lucky and she did this with the help of one specific and very special friend.

Post coital I mean college:
All through college the princess' confidence was growing and by the end of college she had blossomed into quite the young lady.  While her group of friends had shifted somewhat she was a part of a group of people that had gone through a lot together already and had much more coming for them, and she was proud of that.  After college the princess was terrified to venture out into the world alone.  She claimed time and time again that she was only moving if she had someone to do it with, after all who just goes to another city without and friends or plan or anything to do??  The princess continued to live her new-experience'ly' challenged life (and I hesitate to call it that, I did have some major adventures, they all just happened in New England, but I couldn't figure out what else to call it) until one day she decided to move half way across the country...

Ok she didn't just decide, she was forced somewhat by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the IUPUI dietetic internship program, and the inability to attain those things we call "dreams" without fulfilling a certain amount of supervised practice hours which based upon selection criteria has landed the princess in the flattest part of the country.

Opening a new chapter:
So the princess moves to a city who's population is larger than the population of the entire state that she moved from, that she had never even been to, and into an apartment with 7 other princess' in the same situation.  And you know what she's learned so far.. she's learned that when you know where you're going and you avoid the hours between 7 and 9 in the morning and 4 and 6 in the evening, you barely even notice the size of the city.  She's learned that even though it's a bigger city, there still is very little to do, very little that costs very little at least.  She's learned that you can make your city seem smaller by going to even larger, dirtier, meaner cities (sorry Chicago).  And she's learned that making friends takes practice.  She learned that all those kids at the beginning of college, or those people that start a new job and are immediately part of the team, aren't necessarily better people or more charismatic, they just have more practice at meeting new people.  They've had the opportunity to make mistakes. And life is all about making mistakes; and learning from those mistakes.  That carries over to meeting people: you meet someone, you talk for a little while to see if you're on the same page and if your not you find out how to be.  When you've done this enough times it becomes second nature, but if you've never had the opportunity to meet people that are different from you (like never leaving New England for more than a week at a time), you don't get to have the opportunity to practice.

Now, I don't know if you could tell or not but, drum roll please... the princess is me!  Yes, moving to a new, big, scary city has been quite the learning opportunity... I'm getting lots of practice meeting new people and I flipping love it!  When I got visit home in December I'm going to be the friendliest mofo you've ever seen!  And to thank you for your time here is a little preview to the holiday card the IUPUI Internship Class of 2015 will be putting out this season.  Side note, we got yelled at by our teachers for laughing too much during this photo shoot. We hot cause we fly mother fruckers.