I maintain that some of the best meals of my life have been tuna sandwiches, eaten within 1 mile of some coast. In fact I can't eat one at all without thinking of the first I ever voluntarily ate: on the Ground Floor of a Megalithic spanish shopping complex in Alicante Spain 8 years ago to the day for all I know, for one euro. I lovingly ate that sandwich at noon almost every day for a month. More recently I had a tuna sandwich somewhere on long island at the house of the 88 year old mother of my Plastic Surgery mentor. Once too in college, I visited my favorite philosophy prof and his wife at home to drink terrible coffee with wonderful tuna sandwiches. Nikki's mom makes a delicious and simple tuna salad that I usually end up eating cold from the fridge around midnight between 2 slices of airy italian bread. And finally I just had simple meal of baby spinach, olive oil, cracked pepper, some goat cheese, and a basic tuna salad crossed with tarragon vinegar and dried currants- scooped up with an almost stale crusty lemon-basil baguette form the bakery around the corner. All this while watching the sky drip shifting colors into the bay.
routes of the city covered in 2 consecutive days' strolls. Blisters are becoming an issue. My first day off is tomorrow and so is the final match of the World Cup 2010. What a coincidence. More to come, but for now I have a date with a local beer and the roof at sunset...
or "he was a bold man that first ate an oyster" - J. Swift
As of yesterday I finished my first week of six on the Internal Medicine Service at Cal. Pacific Medical Center. Routines are starting to emerge. I wake up at 6:00, eat, make my daily 3 minute 11 second commute from the door of my apartment to the door of the Residents' Lounge where I grab a cup of coffee and look up the day's lab reports on my patients. The next 3 or so hours are spent seeing patients and writing SOAP notes, which are brief reports of the patient's overnight events along with the day's plan for them. At 10 o'clock Rounds begin, where a team of 2+ interns, myself, a senior resident, and an attending doc form a circle in some hallway on the hospital floor, creating a clot that sometimes infarcts the whole corridor. By day five I learned that there is no such thing as a place out of someone's way and have learned to live with it. From 10 to noon we report on our patients and get 'pimped' which is have questions thrown at us by the resident of attending. As was so aptly noted on Scrubs, it's like a game show. Noon to 1 o'clock is a teaching conference, usually a lecture on a topic like sepsis or some specific aspect of hospital life along with FREE CATERED LUNCH- an unheard of luxury. Today I had (4) lamb and beef pita sandwiches with greek salad. When I finish easting I usually pretend to have been paged and sneak out to get a cup of coffee and give Nikki a call while looking out the 5th floor window over the Golden Gate Bridge. After lunch I have more coffee, and finish my chores usually finishing up around 2 depending on which day of the 5 day Admit Cycle my team is on. Yesterday was ' medium call' where we admit patients from the Emergency Dept. from 1pm to 6pm. Today is 'pre-call which means that because tomorrow is the meaty long call evening, my team didn't admit patients and spent the day following up on our current ones. Tomorrow we will be admitting until 8pm, where we will pick up the bulk of our patients for the next week.
I have yet to have a day off, but often escape by 3pm and so have 6+ hours of daylight to play with, though I usually nap 3 of those away. Go to the gym, come home, drink a beer on the roof at sunset, have a light dinner and read until falling asleep. For the past 2 weeks I've walked a couple of blocks to a local restaurant that serves $1 Washington Oysters all day on Tuesday. Tastes like a thousand thousand years of salt and wind- with horseradish!
many liters of saline, grams of antibiotics, dozens of cups of coffee later and I'm still enjoying this job immensely. It's such an incredible arrangement: wake up early to free breakfast, run around saying hi to people high above the city of SF overlooking the golden gate bridge, getting them things that make them feel better, looking at my watch and realizing it's the afternoon and time to go home, right after a free catered lunch. Not bad at all.
