The Grand Tour

The Tour De France is over and FINALLY Cadel Evans has won. I have bet on him many times in the past and this year I've finally been rewarded. This year is supposedly the cleanest year in tour history. Read about it here. I almost cried watching him standing on the podium listening to the Australian national anthem. I think it was a good thing that he didn't win yellow until the last day as that jersey seemed to weight him down in the past rather than give him wings. I'm so happy for him.

Yesterday I did a tag-team 8 hour mountain bike race in temperatures over 30 degrees and humidity over 40%. Many people were pulled from the race with heat stroke. After 5 laps each, my partner and I had to bow out - her with stomach issues and me with leg cramps. It was still a fun day of riding my bike!

Wow. Yesterday was the day of trends. Started the day with 4 c-sections. 2 planned and 2 people coming in with rupture of membranes before booked repeat sections. Then there were a couple of vaginal deliveries and then it started... the big babies came. In total I did 14 deliveries yesterday and 2 were over 10 pounds, another 3 over 9 and an 8'15. Shoulders were tight on one, everything was tight on the other 10 pounder. One woman was told she was having a small baby and her previous baby was only 7'5. This was a bit of a shock and she did not have an epidural... What a tough lady! She was a champ.

It was an exhausting day but I really felt like I enhanced some people's birthing experience and all but 1 baby was healthy (there was one expected fetal demise with genetic defects). And there were beautiful twins that didn't have to go to nicu. all in all a good day on L and D but I'm exhausted.

Cooking day

So, today I decided to make the ultimate veggie burger from Fresh Restaurant in Toronto. Recipe found here.

This is one of those recipes that I hate because you need to go to the store and buy a bunch of stuff you may never use again in another recipe. And then you have to go to another store because your grocery store doesn't stock millet. Thankfully my grocery store (Fresh co. formerly known as Price Chopper) has a very large ethnic section so did have tamarind paste.

If I was making it again I would:
1) put the tamarind in when I whiz the carrots, tofu etc. in the food processor
2) make it as a loaf - it tastes and has the texture of an awesome meatloaf more than a burger
3) add an egg white. I'm not a vegan and I think it would bind it a lot better
4) adjust the quantities - I doubled the recipe and ended up with 16 burgers

What I did:
cooked 3 today for dinner and lunch tomorrow and froze the rest on baking sheets in the freezer. I then cooked one from frozen for Ben's lunch tomorrow and it stayed together better when cooking from frozen.

You know, all day I made difficult decisions, deal with many personalities, bring life into the world but then I come home to my most difficult conundrum: what to make for dinner. Because I'm a pesco-vegetarian the options although numerous are often a bit higher maintenance. I make a lot of fish, but this drives the husband crazy because although he enjoys fish, he hates the smell it makes in the apartment (even with the extractor fan on). I often get all excited about making recipes and then realize that most of the ingredients are not in my cupboards and in order to make said recipe for two, I'm left with huge left over packages of many random ingredients.

So, I'm still left with the question, what to make for dinner...

directionless

Is anyone else in the world utterly clueless when it comes to a sense of direction? I have managed to get lost twice in the last week, once mountain biking and once driving. Well, I guess 3 times because I got lost on my way to mountain biking too.

I just have no sense of which was is north/south/east/west and my best way of finding where i'm going is to go the wrong way and then try to find my way out of it. I can read a map, but starting off always needs a sense of which direction the map directions correspond to.

Was I born without some internal compass?

Every time I unpack a box I look around and think "how can we have more stuff than this" and yet, there are more boxes. I ahve thrown out more stuff in the last week than I knew I had. I have learned how many random sports we've tried and then abandoned but kept the equipment - baseball, volleyball, climbing, badminton (just the husband), golf... not to mention the sports we still do. We have 6 bikes (soon to be seven), two snowboards, full camping gear, yoga mats, myofascial release logs and two sets of cross country skis. We have a first world problem: too much stuff. I hereby declare a moratorium on gift giving that makes more stuff. We have more pillows than two people can ever consume in a lifetime and have been pawning them off on people to take to their cottages. Not to mention the doubles of items from our separate apartments - irons, microwaves, dining tables. I'm going insane.

an addition for Dr. J: this is a myofascial release "roller" which I think looks like a log especially because mine has a kind of bark pattern on it

ok. the college is really pissing me off now! They still haven't sent the names of the new certificants to the CPSO and there are only 3 business days left until I need to register with McMaster for my new fellowship. No CPSO license = no fellowship!

Dear College of Family Physicians

I am waiting for my results of the exam to be sent to the College of physicians and surgeons so I can get my independent practice license before July 1, when I'm supposed to start my fellowship. Seeing as the results have been out for almost 2 weeks now, do you think you could please send said results to the college so we all can move on with our lives? Yet again, an example of how much of a waste of my money that very expensive exam fee was that's supposed to cover administration. Website errors, wrong dates, over filled exams, and now poor communication with other licensing bodies. I'm pretty disappointed with my college.

I need to re-certify my ACLS, do PALS and re-cert NRP... this is all very costly and time consuming. My fellowship doesn't specify that I need any of these but I feel like I need them for my own education as I keep hearing that certain ACLS protocols have changed this year. Does anyone know if there's a central registry of ACLS courses?

aaaand

I passed. Phew.

So, residency is winding down. Two years has gone by SO FAST. I'm actually getting glad that I'm doing a fellowship. A month or two ago I would have said that the fellowship was a bit of a waste of time and I felt ready to go into practice. Now, I'm glad I'm doing it because I feel unprepared to do all the business side stuff of starting a practice AND if I failed the exam then I'll have time to study and take it again in the fall. The exam still looms over my like a dark cloud and there is still another week and a half until the results come out. Someone told me they'd be out on the 15th - not sure if that was just a rumor. Was talking over the SOOs with a colleague yesterday and feel even worse about them now than right after the exam. I wish I could stop thinking about it but it seems every day someone asks me if I got my results yet. Sad me :(

I need to start thinking about how to pack up and move all my stuff! 2 apartments worth of stuff, 1 apartment, interesting conundrum. Good thing Ben is really low on furniture and his place is a 2 bedroom. I'm tired of moving but we'll probably end up moving out of the waterloo place sooner rather than later because it's ugly and sucky. Maybe we can finally have a place with a dishwasher that isn't named Kate!

I have a knee effusion. It only feels better when I ride my bike without falling off. Can I have a doctor's note to say that I need to not fall off?

I have sciatica. It's only better when I ride my bike. Maybe I'll be able to get a doctor's note to skip work and bike every day...

This is REALLY important to watch if you're in healthcare.

The trip was wonderful and I never wanted to come home. Nothing like no TV and no internet to make a couple focus on each other!

I'm taking the husband away this weekend for his birthday. We're going to a surprise place and I"m excited because I think he'll really like it. I hope. Things have been tough with our living apart these past two years and I'm really looking forward to being together, finally, come July.

Saturday is going to be an epic road ride - a metric century (100 km). Hopefully the weather holds up!

I hate it when you call a consultant because you don't know what something is and you're afraid of a dangerous diagnosis and then they make you feel like an idiot for not knowing what it is... kind of defeats the point of them being a SPECIALIST and me being a GENERALIST, dontchya think?

So,
First mountain bike race of the season today. Had an alright day, fast on the double track, sucked on the muddy singletrack. I just need some help with my mud riding, it's all about being dynamic on the bike, which I find super hard when I'm tired. I need to go out on miserable days and ride in the mud more even though I hate it. I almost beat the girl that I really dislike but she got me just over the line by 2 seconds. She really irks me because she gets up behind people in singletrack and yells at them that they need to go faster instead of just passing or whatever. it's super annoying. She needs to just ride her own race.

As the days go on I'm becoming more and more convinced that I've failed the SOO portion of the exam. I keep thinking of the things I missed and the problems I should have looked for and it's really interfering with my sleeping etc. Why can't they just come out with the results sooner? This 6 week thing is pure torture.

The Exam

So, my morning starts with leaving 2 hours to get there. It takes an hour, but I like to be prepared. On the radio on the way to the exam they say there are some road closures because of the Sporting Life 10k run... I get downtown and avoid those streets. As I'm trying to get to the exam, I am confronted with the North/South street I am taking being closed, so I ask the police officer for an alternate. He tells me to go to Bay street. I get to by street and the crossing is closed, so then I am told by the cop to go to Bathurst. I get to Bathurst and it is closed to get North. I break down and start crying and ask Cop #3 who tells me to go down this road to the next lights and go North. 5 minutes later I'm seeing the SAME COP again because he gave me the wrong directions. He gives me another set of directions. This time I call my parents bawling because I'm not sure this road will be open. My Dad gives me directions on how to get to my destination. I have 5 minutes to get there. I get to my destination and there is no parking because THERE IS A POLICE PARADE circling the venue. I dump my car near a fire hydrant and pray I'm far enough away. I get to the venue with 2 minutes to spare. I'm sitting there and some of us are asked to stay behind. They confess that they overbooked the exam by 6 people and can only accommodate 5 so they're looking for a volunteer to do their exam at 1 pm instead. After a few minutes I volunteer because let's face it, I'm a mess and have a puffy red face. Waited for 3 hours, did exam. First station, someone I know is the freaking examiner so they have to scramble to get someone else to do it. Slightly shaken, I continue. Exam is ok, but not stellar. One station I fucked up royally. Hopefully the rest is good.