dear back

Dear Back,
Please stop hurting. This 30 minutes of biking then back pain thing is getting old and it's only been a week.

NSAIDS - I love you. kisses.

future plans

It's very hard to plan your future when your spouse keeps applying for jobs in different cities. Maybe I'm destined to locum. I hope I can find a family/OB locum if I need to locum because it would be a shame to lose my skills.

The OB quotient of my fellowship hasn't picked up at all over the last few weeks. My only 2 deliveries were actually with the OB on call because I stayed in the hospital on Friday instead of going to the office. The family medicine part has been good, but I feel a bit like been there done that and having someone still supervise me although I'm fully licensed is a bit annoying. We have a few people due over the next couple of weeks so hopefully things will pick up!

Some people have anxiety when they're over worked, but honestly I'm made anxious by under-working. I've tried to use my time wisely but often end up sleeping too much and learning too little. I'm planning a few conferences over the next month to try and up the learning factor.

over training or under stretching

I am suffering from either biceps femoris tendonitis or IT band syndrome. I have odd bruising and pain at my fibular head and aching on the lateral knee precipitated it seems by road riding more than mtbing but lately all riding brings it on. I realized today with my foam roller that my IT band is very tender along its length but my hammies are also tight. Looks like I need to do some major stretching and foam rollering. Good thing I have a supply of topical NSAIDs and ice packs.

Jack Layton

Dear Jack,
I was so sad to hear of your passing today. You were a fighter both personally and politically and have inspired a whole new generation to embrace the socialist agenda. Your accomplishments are many, most notably turning the Canadian conservative political scene on its head during the last election. I sincerely hope that you death does not derail the plans you have for Canada, as I think your vision is of a better country for us all.

I hope you did not suffer and that you went gently into the night. I offer my condolences to your family and hope that they had time to tell you how much they loved you. Canada is far worse off without you.

anxiety

I was a very socially awkward child and if there's something that makes you have, it's social anxiety has an adult. Not so much being anxious about social situations in general, but being anxious about people liking you. It makes you work probably harder than you should to make and maintain friendships and it makes you worry that people don't like you. It makes you lie awake in bed at night analyzing social situations from the day before and wondering if you did/said something wrong. I wonder if this ever goes away.

breast feeding

Today I convinced a woman to give breast feeding another try when she didn't get adequate support in hospital. I am so glad I took that breast feeding elective!

podium!

Well, I guess all that extra mountain biking paid off because I came third in my race this weekend! First ever podium since being in the beginner category!

zzzzzzzzzzzz

My new preceptor just told me to view my next two month rotation as a summer vacation... not exactly what I'm looking for. This is my "family medicine OB" experience. Unfortunately, he only has 4 people due this month. He does 10 deliveries per month on average but it seems this month is slow. We'll see how this goes. I guess I have lots of time to read and mountain bike!

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?