From the Morgue

Yes, I am doing autopsies. What a way to start the new year. We have been busy... could it be because it is July?

I was waiting for the elevator this morning and there were two patients standing near me. One pointed to the fading sign that has hung near the elevator for the last 2 weeks: "New Resident and Fellow Orientation (up arrow).>

"This is why you never go to a teaching hospital in July," he said to his companion.

"Huh, why not?"

"Because July is when all of the new doctors start and they don't know anything. They might kill you."

Could this be the reason why we've been dissecting for ~12 hours a day this week? Or is it just because July is a big month for teaching and autopsies are a good teaching experience? Or are all the newbies just gung-ho about consenting families for autopsies? Food for thought.

The End of Intern Year

The clock is ticking slowly today. I mentally checked out awhile ago and am just going through the motions at this point. There are a few things to follow up on, a nice signout sheet to make for the incoming resident, and I am done.

I headed over to Starbucks at lunch time to buy myself a little treat for my last day. There was quite a line snaking out the door, so I settled in for a wait. As we crept up a bit I was standing in front of the pastry display. All of a sudden there was a crash and a plate of coffee cake that had been balanced on top of another coffee cake display fell off its perch and lodged itself precariously against the edge of the display case.

One piece of coffee cake got stuck with the top edge of the plate bisecting it in half. That piece of cake started to stretch, and stretch, and stretch. Gravity was pulling it towards a free fall to the bottom of the display case and it was holding on with all of its might. It literally took a couple of minutes for that cake to stretch itself to the point of breaking. When it finally fell the people in line around me and I all started laughing. "That was the most exciting thing I have seen all day," said the elderly woman behind me. "But maybe that tells you something about the kind of life I lead."

Perhaps. But the trajectory of that coffee cake pretty much sums up these last few hours for me: a very slow march to the moment when intern year will plummet into the repository of past life experiences, where it will sit like a smushed piece of coffee cake against the glass, bruised yet visible, and certainly not forgotten.