I blame Colin

Dear Bono,

Again, weeks and months even have gone by without a single note.  I shall lame the bulk of the blame squarely on my job.  Residency was tough-crazy patients, sick patients, long surgeries, long clinics smelling of urine.  But in order to practice as a physician, it was something I had to do.  And it wasn't even that bad-for the last six months.  That is, once the annoying attending physician we had left, and once I got over my deep depression at the fact I hadn't matched into a fellowship spot.

Which makes it a bit ironic-the fact that now that I have a fellowship spot, I hate it and want to quit.  Fellowship is something people do for extra training in a given field-mine is pediatric urology.  I could be urologist without it, but in the U.S. one has to do a pediatric fellowship to be able to sit for the boards for pediatric urology.  And I like the surgeries, and I like the patients.  I hate my boss.  He is horrible.  I decided part of his issue is he doesn't think that women are full people.  This makes it hard to get any respect from him.  Luckily, I have the fellow a year ahead of me (there is only one of us a year) to comiserate with, as she is a woman, and she got screamed at by him in a very nice restaurant in Miami.  She understands my pain.

And last night, I had a dream.  Our program is putting together a conference next week for visiting faculty to learn about some other elements of pediatric urology.  I dreamt that one of the other attending physicians was asking me a question during it, and my boss got mad at ME and then told me to do all kinds of other paperwork because I was whispering while these speakers were here.  And when he told me this, I stood up, and told him I quit, and walked out.  And I felt free.  All this weight I have been feeling, this dread, this ulcer-inducing stress, was magically gone.

And then I continued to dream.  I went to Washington DC where I was in the same political internship program I was 11 years ago during college.  (The students seemed young-I am clearly not 20 anymore.)  And we heard that David Bowie was coming to play an intimate acoustic set in Waldorf, MD.  And I had front fow seats.  And it was amazing.  Although I was mouthing to him that  I liked his shoes during it (they were pink/purple sparkly things) and he appeared afraid of me (not unlike how in my REAL life, Nicholas Cage looked like I was about to attack him when I had to get my stuff from a chair behind him during filming for a movie I was an extra in, but that is a different story for a different day.)  Irregardless, it was a fantastic dream.

But that's all it was.  I had fallen asleep with the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice on.  Those Darcy eyes must have penetrated my soul and all my true hopes played out while I slumbered.

-JP