Quick Soup

The last month, as you will have noticed from the marked decrease in blog entries, has been busy. I’ve been back on an inpatient service, meaning that I’m back to only have one day off in seven, averaged over the length of the month. Since we get the switch weekends off (the weekends between services), that means we get 3 days off during the month; this brings the grand total to 5 days. As I have undoubtedly whined here before, and I’m too tired to take the time to look that up right now and reference it for you, 5 days/month is not enough. More specifically, one day at a time is not enough to both accomplish some relaxing and some grocery shopping/laundry/checkbook balancing/cooking/sleeping/studying. Arguably there is not enough time in the world for that second list, but one day each week is not even enough to gets started. This has resulted in an unfortunate dependence on eating random meals at the hospital (thank goodness for the magic of money on my hospital ID graciously put there by the medical school to ensure that I eat), things from my freezer that my mom has brilliantly prepared and stashed away for me, and the crazy stuff I can cook up in the stolen moments between arriving home from the hospital and studying and sleep.

This brings us to the soup. The soup was inspired by two things.

1) The new presence of the Pacific Rim noodle bar in the hospital cafeteria. It’s delicious, vegan (at least if you want it to be), and available at the hospital.

2) This ancient packet of miso soup mix that has been languishing in my pantry for years. I moved that packet of miso soup mix almost two years ago, and I’m pretty sure it had sat in my old apartment for a while prior to the move. I am not one to throw away food that has not really gone bad, and that packet of soup was tormenting me. I could remember that the last packet I ate was not as delicious as I’d hoped, but couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. So I made it better. I added some random stuff from my pantry (dried mushrooms, dried seaweed, noodles), and it was pretty good. This reminded me that I had a tub of miso paste in the refrigerator that had also spent more than it’s fair share of time in the fridge and would probably actually make better soup.

Miso Soup
3 cups water or vegetable broth
2-3 Tablespoons of miso paste (I used mild yellow miso, you could also use an ancient packet of miso soup here)
dried shitake mushrooms
2-3 baby carrots, thinly sliced
1 stick seaweed kombu, broken into small pieces
1 serving udon noodles (you be the judge here)

Heat the water or broth, add the shitake mushrooms (as many as you’d like) and the seaweed, and bring to a low boil. Add the noodles. I broke them up so that they would be easier to eat. When they are nearly soft, stir in a little bit of the miso paste at a time until you like the flavor of the broth. Add the carrots to the soup, and heat for another 10-15 minutes. The noodles, mushrooms and seaweed should be soft. Enjoy!

Not a product placement

I recently realized that my white coats were, how shall we say, not white. They were not as gross as you might now be imagining, because the average day in the hospital does not include getting others’ bodily fluids on my coat, but the collars and the cuffs showed that grey tinge that comes from a revolting combination of pen ink from note-taking, water from hand-washing, and sweat from question-answering. I usually use an “earth conscious” detergent, one that is slightly cheaper than the wholly organic versions, but still leaves out most of the chemicals I dislike. Much as I love the lavender aroma and non-toxic fumes of this particular detergent, however, it lacks the vigorous stain-removing properties of a more earth-killing soap. At the recommendation of a classmate, I invested in some Oxy-Clean and pre-treated my white coats, and then soaked them for several hours, and then washed them in hot water. They are now mostly white, and I feel reassured that they do not contain any kind of terrifying bacteria because the combination of detergent that probably hastens the end-of-days with it’s whitening power and hot water is apparently a winning one. I feel a little guilty, actually admitting that the soap that kills is the soap that actually works better, but sometimes, maybe, I guess, a little man-made miracle is necessary. But I’ll probably keep hiding it deep within the closet and only bring it out for the white coats that themselves harbor germs that could bring on the apocalypse.

Winning the game

Cross posted on Dose of Reality

I’m now two weeks into my internal medicine rotation, and I’m learning a lot. It’s been, how shall we say, a steep learning curve, and I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it; it’s humbling to realize that even in the 10th month of my M3 year I still don’t really know what I’m doing. In spite of bumbling around more than a little, I realized that yesterday (and carrying over to today) I won the game, or rather, my residents won the game for me. Inside the hospital, patients who are admitted go to different teams on different days depending on who is on call. My team admits new patients every other day. This means that the other every other days (except for some minor technicalities) we don’t admit new patients, and instead just care for those that we already have on our service. This also means that if one manages to discharge all of one’s patients on a call day, that the next day there isn’t anything to do! This is called winning the game. That’s what happened yesterday – while I was away at lecture, my patients were discharged and I showed up this morning with very little to do. The reality of being a medical student (and arguably this is the only situation in which the interns have a better deal), however, means that I just picked a new patient from one of the many already on our list, and started reading about her for Monday.

Somewhere between celebrating that I might get to head out a little early on a Saturday, and lamenting that a med student’s work is never done, I wondered a bit at the phrase “winning the game.” It’s obvious that being in the hospital isn’t a game for most people; I’ve heard some general lecturing about how inappropriate it is to joke about patients, and do my best to be respectful of every person I encounter. That said, if you can’t laugh about your life (and my life is pretty much the hospital at this point), what can you do? Of all of the different coping mechanisms we all use to keep working when our patients leave for home, hospice, or the hereafter, I’m not sure that humor isn’t one of the least destructive options, so I guess I’ll just keep on laughing until I can’t…

Wonder Dog

The NYTimes posted a really beautiful piece about service animals for children with emotional and other mental health issues that I read this morning. It described how sensitive dogs are to people’s emotional needs, and how perceptive they can be to subtle disturbances in mood and behavior. I thought the article was a nice follow-up to my last post about how helpful Walter was in coping with the emotional ups and downs of medical school. Read the article here, and if you care to, leave a comment about it below.

A prescription for sanity

Take 1 ridiculous moment as needed for anxiety

I’ve just finished my psychiatry rotation, and am more convinced than ever that all of the little things we do to keep it together during medical school are really, really important. Even with the amazing hours (and they call it “psych-ation” for a reason), psychiatry can be really emotionally taxing. There are generally a lot of small steps between mental illness and recovery, and at points it can feel like you aren’t going anywhere. My antidote to the sometimes overwhelming sensation that nothing I was doing was helping anyone was to spend a few hours to make something for someone else (and particularly for the little photogenic snuggly someone else you see pictured above and below).

Note to self: try not to forget this lesson for the 1,000,000th time…

For those of you who are wondering, the pattern for the coat is courtesy of my very own nemesis, Martha Stewart. I considered several other options, including this one, but was drawn in by Martha's dog fashion show (scroll to the sidebar)...

An afternoon of “the circus arts”

Ruti and I discovered the Detroit Fly House when we saw some photos from a friend and colleague of mine doing aerial yoga, that is, yoga poses on trapeze, aerial silks, and on that suspended round ring that is apparently called an aerial hoop or lyra. We were quite intrigued, and the inspired and wonderful Ruti arranged a class for us. While not all of the photos taken were the most flattering the world has ever seen, we had a wonderful time on the trapeze and the fabrics yesterday!

We started on the trapeze, and did some crunches there to get the blood flowing. Then we got to climb the fabrics, which took me back to my days of climbing the rope to the ceiling in gym class…

We then did some poses on the trapeze, which made me realize that I do have a slight fear of heights, but actually feels quite secure once you are twisted around it in some way and not just standing.

 

After that we did a few more poses on the fabrics, and another series on the trapeze, and called it a day. I was almost unable to use a fork due to extreme fatigue of my arm muscles, and today my hip flexors are approximately 1000 times shorter than they were yesterday, but it was totally worth it.  

Happy New Year y Bienvenida a Miami

Apologies for the brief blog hiatus; I’ve had a slower start to this new year than ever before, and am kind of enjoying it. Details below…

I rung in the new year in a decidedly more relaxed fashion this year than in previous years, by watching movies with the dog and going to bed early. It was great; there was no disappointing party, no crabbiness when I got tired, and no giant let-down at midnight when the magical ponies (or whatever I thought was supposed to make midnight on New Year’s Eve so amazing) failed to materialized. Walter and I looked approximately like this when midnight passed:

Early the next morning, I boarded a flight to visit Laura in Miami. We went to the beach, saw the sights around South Beach, and visited the Everglades. I also got to spend more time with her lovely fiancee and their endearing dog. It was a fantastic trip, and a wonderful way to get the new year started right.

 The view of the Bay of Biscayne outside their condo.

 

Trooper

 Laura and I (below) at the beach (above)

 Art Deco beauties in South Beach

 Everglades flora and fauna: ferns (above), pelicans and alligators (below), and vultures (bottom)

Since returning home, I’ve started a new block of my psychiatry rotation, scheduled one of the two parts of the board exam for later this year, and planned out a draft of my M4 schedule. 2012 looks awfully promising, and I’m not yet convinced that the low key new year wasn’t the key to this awesome set-up… Happy 2012 everyone!

2011 in knitted goods

Based on yardage alone, I knit a little less than half this year than I did in 2010. This is not particularly surprising, given the prodigious number of items that I produced during that year, and given the rather abrupt decrease in knitting time that occurred in May of this year. (I will also note that this total does not include things that have yet to be completed; there is a 3/4 finished sweater and some mitten cuffs that are not reflected here.) The tally for 2011 stands as follows:

4 cowls
2 pair socks
5 hats
2 baby sweater
4 pair baby legwarmers
1 pair adult legwarmers
1 BlackBerry cozy
1 pair mittens

For finished items, this totals 1.91 miles of yarn, or 121,017 inches. If each stitch is slightly less than an inch of yarn, which seems like a reasonable estimate and is one I’ve used before, that’s almost 1/8 of a million stitches. If each stitch takes an average of 5 seconds (with a mode closer to 1-2 seconds, but with some distant outliers with more complicated patterns), that’s 605,085 seconds of knitting, or 10,085 minutes, or 168 hours of knitting this year. That would seem to average out to about 0.46 hours of knitting each day. That seems high, but I guess days of vacation where I knit for 4-5 hours in an evening would bring that average up quite a bit, as would days of lecture where I knit for 2-3 hours in an afternoon, and would perhaps compensate for what seemed like many, many days in which I did not knit at all.

Here’s to a 2012 filled with knitted things!

A little holicrazy?

Cross-posted on Dose of Reality:

I think I’m not alone in occasionally feeling on the edge of hypomania around the holidays...


Clinical definition: Hypomania is an episode of at least four days of elevated or irritable mood different from the individual’s normal mood that does not cause marked impairment of function or hospital admission, and which includes at least three of the following

• gradiosity
• decreased sleep
• more talkative than usual
• racing throughts or flight of ideas
• distractability
• increased goal direct activity or psychomotor agitation
• excessive involvement in pleasurable activities even if they have a high potential for negative consequences.

Although oftentimes my family and friends' extracurricular expectations of me are low, I love finding, wrapping, and giving gifts, and have been known to go a little overboard sometimes. This year I think it was brought on by the realization that I hadn’t handmade any gifts for anyone. Usually I knit like crazy during the summer, fall, and early winter to make sweaters, socks, hats, and scarves for friends and family. I knew that wasn’t an option this year, with the clinical calendar as it is, but decided to make small gifts for my extended family members. This blossomed from a well-intentioned little craft project into a bit of a crazed mission involving large volumes of chocolate and Martha Stewart branded craft materials.

(Another note: This gifting is not the extent of the holicrazy. I also made squash soup from scratch, which included roasting the squash seeds as a snack, and was posted earlier this week… Also, I drafted all of these holiday posts in a single morning when I was feeling particularly productive…)

Since they were all mailed last Saturday, and should have arrived already, I think it won’t be spoiling anything for anyone to post some pictures and the recipe here…

Chocolate Bark
adapted slightly from Seriously Good Improvisational Chocolates by Sally Schneider
Chop up 1 lb (or more, or less, depending on how much you want) of really good chocolate into 1-inch or smaller pieces. I used Callebaut chocolate, which they carry at my bulk food store, and Ms. Schneider recommends Valhrona, which I’ve seen at Whole Foods, or Sharfenberger. You can use either dark semi-sweek chocolate or milk chocolate. Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Melt 1/2 of your the chocolate in a saucepan floating in another saucepan of water on the stove (or use a double boiler if you have that sort of fancy equipment). When half the chocolate is melted, remove it from heat and stir in the remaining chocolate until it’s all melted. Use a spatula and spread it into the parchment paper so that it’s about 1/8”-1/4” thick. Let it sit for 3-4 minutes to set a bit, and then sprinkle with the toppings of your choice. I’ve listed the festive holiday options I chose below. Let the chocolate sit for a few hours or until it’s firm. Break it into shards, and package it up! Per Ms. Schneider it will keep for several weeks in a sealed container at room temperature.

For Mexican hot chocolate: Vietnamese cinnamon or other very fragrant cinnamon, and cayenne pepper. Sprinkle the cinnamon liberally, and go easy with the pepper.

For candy cane: Crush candy canes in a plastic bag (I used a rolling pin) and spread the shards over the chocolate. This is pretty!

For fleur de sel: This may seem obvious, but it’s just fleur de sel. It can be as coarse or fine as you’d like to grind it.

For gingerbread: This was (I think) the best one. Smash up some gingersnaps or other gingercookies in a plastic bag until the largest pieces are about 1/2” across. Sprinkle these over the chocolate, preferably dark chocolate and spicy cookies, and enjoy.

Soup for the holidaze

I tried out a new recipe last week, and it has quickly skyrocketed to the top of my list. It would be delicious with canned squash or pumpkin, but working with a whole squash was fun (if a bit time consuming). I modified the recipe so that it was more healthful and also vegan, but you could obviously use heavy cream in place of the silken tofu, although the soup might be a little thinner (and with less protein!). It was equally delicious reheated the next day, so it’s also a convenient weekday lunch…

 

Squash Curry Soup
adapted from the Fall/Winter 2011 Good Health, which Blue Care Network sends to me on a quarterly basis, ostensibly to lower my health care costs for them

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus a little for roasting the squash
1 cup finely chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup diced celery
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/4 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
3 cups water
1 cup low-sodium vegetable broth
1-2 squashes (total weight 32-40 oz, or one 32 oz can)
1 package silken tofu

(Skip this part if you’re using canned squash/pumpkin.) Preheat the oven to 400F. Wash and peel the squash. Cut it into slices, and set the seeds aside if you want to bake them later. Arrange the slices of squash on a baking sheet with a small amount of olive oil, and bake at 400F until they are easily poked/smashed with a fork. Let the squash cool a little, and then transfer to a food processor. Process until you’ve got squash puree. Set aside while you work on the rest of the soup.

 
Heat the olive oil in a soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion, garlic, and celery and cook until tender. Stir in the curry powder, coriander, and crushed red pepper and cook for another minute.
Add the water and broth, and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook 10-15 minutes to allow the broth to take on the delicious onion, garlic and celery flavors.

 
Stir in the squash puree and the silken tofu, and cook until heated through. Use an immersion blender (or carefully transfer to a blender or food processor) to blend until creamy.

 Garnish with fresh thyme or other herbs and enjoy!

Future patron saint of the holicraze

Sister Mary Walter of the Blankets

Welcome to the Holicraze!

Cross-posted on Dose of Reality

Friday evening marked the start of my winter vacation, but it was by no means the start of my preparations for the holidays and other festive winter activities. Since starting my psychiatry rotation, with it’s generous schedule and emotionally intense patient interactions, I’ve been doing lots of things to celebrate 1) being 2/3 done with M3 year, and 2) the coming solstice and all the holidays nearby. There’s been so much going on that it will take a few separate posts (some of which will be cross-posted on Dose of Reality).

First was the tour of the Parade Company workshop and warehouse. The Parade Company puts on the Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade each year, and also supplies floats, balloons, and expertise to parades across the country and the world. Their facility is in an old car factory, which was apparently on the cutting edge of industrial design because there was so much natural light coming in through the overhead windows. (All of the photos should enlarge if you click them... If you're a Detroiter, see how many floats and big heads you can identify in the pictures!)

 
You could still see the old train tracks where they came into the factory.

It is impressive to see all of the floats and balloons together, and I was particularly taken with the storage of the big heads in a gallery on the wall.

The big heads are a Detroit tradition, after some artists in Venice taught the Detroiters how to make them out of papier mache. Some of them are as light as 5 lbs, while others way much, much more.

 

Overall the tour was pretty incredible, and I have to thank Gary, my dad’s neighbor, for discovering the tours and inviting me along!

More holidaze posts to come…

One of the best $15 I've ever spent

More delicious things to do with greens and squash

As we near the real winter, I know I’m not the only one constantly looking for more things to do with greens and squash. My CSA ended a while ago, and I still have some squashes to eat. Luckily the squash keeps for a while, so I focused on the greens to keep them from wilting into little bags of brown goo in the fridge! Here are some of my more recent endeavors:

 

Ravioli on a bed of wilted greens 

 

Fried egg sandwiches

 

Scrambled eggs with greens and potatoes 

Baked tofu sandwich 

I’ll leave you with the directions for crafting that last sandwich, which I would consider an excellent achievement for the following reasons: (1) it is delicious, (2) it would be vegan if you used vegan mayonnaise instead of the addictive substance filled with egg yolk that I love, (3) in uses greens, and (4) it also features chili garlic chutney, which used a bunch of the hot peppers I also had accumulating in my fridge from the CSA. A win all around!

Chili Garlic Chutney
Adapted from 1,000 Indian Recipes by Neelam Batra
1 tablespoon black peppercorns, ground
3-4 large cloves garlic, peeled
3-4 quarter-size slices of peeled fresh ginger
8-10 fresh hot chile peppers, in any combination of red and green, serrano, jalapeño, whatever, coarsely chopped
1-2 red or green bell peppers, chopped
1/8 cup of lime juice
1/2 tablespoon paprika
1/2 tablespoon ground ajwain seeds (available at some Indian groceries, or use dried thyme)
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon salt
Put the garlic, ginger, hot peppers, bell peppers, and lime juice in a food processor and process until they form a paste. Add the paprika, ajwain/thyme, pepper, and salt and process until smooth. Transfer to a serving bowl, or to a container for freezing or storing in the refrigerator. Per Ms. Batra this will keep in the fridge for about a month or in the freezer for 6 months.

Baked Tofu
1 package extra firm tofu
1/3 cup tamarind date sauce (available at Indian markets, or substitute barbeque sauce or something else a little sweet)
1 tablespoon chili garlic chutney
Preheat the oven to 350F. Mix the tamarind date sauce and the chutney in a large bowl or pie pan. Press the tofu between two paper towels to remove some of the excess water, and cut into 1/2” slices. Place the tofu slices in the sauce mixture and let them sit while you prepare the pan to bake them. Film a baking sheet or roasting pan with a small amount of oil, and lay the tofu slices in the pan. It doesn’t matter if they have had a ton of time to marinate, because they will pick up more flavor as they bake.
Once you’ve spread the slices in the pan, spread some of the extra sauce on each on in a thin layer. Bake until they are slightly chewy, usually when a fork will no longer easily poke through, flipping approximately every 5-10 minutes and applying additional sauce with each flip. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Awesome sandwich
1 square pita
Mayo to taste
Chili garlic chutney to taste
4-5 small spinach leaves, washed
2-3 slices baked tofu
Combine and enjoy!

Reflections on the seasons as an M3

From Dose of Reality:

In talking to a friend about the weather last week, I realized how much of the seasons I’ve missed this year. While I’ve been so consumed with learning about medicine this year, the world around me has often been observed only through a layer of glass…

During the summer I was immersed in the long hours and overnights of inpatient rotations, and I often arrived at the hospital before the sun came up, and headed home as it was setting. I managed to miss the hottest days of summer this way, seeing the sweltering heat radiating up from the roads and sidewalks from the privileged position of the windows outside the operating rooms. I caught the tail-end of summer on my family medicine rotation, watching the sunshine stream in through my car window as I drove out to my assigned clinic location. I did take advantage of some free weekend time to enjoy the warmth and light, but it was already September and I was looking forward to fall. As the leaves changed and temperatures cooled a bit, I again found myself appreciating the vista from the OR windows during my week on neurosurgery, wondering if it would be inappropriate to bring my camera back (I decided it was) to capture the fall color as I was seeing it for the first time from inside the hospital. The last six weeks of the OB-GYN rotation have been some of my favorite weeks of medical school, and yet I couldn’t help but notice how drawn I was to the post-partum rooms on the 7th floor of Mott, with the long hallway of windows between the elevator and the patient rooms. When we followed our team for a quick tour of the labor and delivery floor of the new Mott, we all stood and marveled at the beautiful views from the patient rooms, watching the river meander through the falling leaves from the windows on the 9th floor.

And now somehow it’s really winter. Dividing up the year into 4-8 week blocks makes it really fly by, and I’m not sure how it’s the beginning of December already. We’ve gotten the first good snow of the season, and I’m looking forward to avoiding being out in it too much, as I’m starting my community psychiatry rotation on Monday. I’ll be enjoying the next 6 weeks of winter weather from the car.

Greens and Squash

Ooops... I wrote this a while ago and forgot to hit post!

In the interest of bringing some of the color back into the word clouds from my blog, I thought I’d share another recipe. I’m onto the “extended” version of my CSA (an extra three or four weeks at the end of the season), and in a few weeks the frozen CSA will begin, and I’m still pretty overwhelmed with the volume of greens and squash I have at my house. It’s also been getting cooler here, which for me means that it is getting toward one of my favorite times of year: soup season! Soup (and stew, and chili…) season is convenient as well, because nothing freezes and thaws quite like a delicious soup, and nothing is forgiving like a stew recipe in terms of absorbing greens and other miscellaneous vegetables. I enjoy these dishes on their own, or over grains. Most recently I’ve cooked up some barley and farrow, and they are really delicious in or under hearty soups/stews! I tried a new one last night, and was thrilled with how it came out. The recipe didn’t call for greens, but that has never stopped me before. I think the chard was a delicious addition… Enjoy!

 
Peanut Squash Stew
Adapted from Real Simple
1 cup grain of your choice (farrow and brown rice are excellent options)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 large onion, yellow or white, finely chopped
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
1 small green chili, serrano or jalapeno, or whatever you have, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
4 cups vegetable broth or water
2 1/2 cups tomato puree or canned diced tomatoes (roughly one 28 oz can)
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 medium squash (acorn or other firm squash is best, I used what I think is a buttercup squash), cut into 1”-thick slices
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 16-oz cans black-eyed peas, or 3-4 cups cooked beans
2-3 cups baby chard (I think that’s what I had, I think most kinds of greens would be delicious), sliced into thin strips

Prepare your grain according to the directions. Heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until tender. Add the ginger, chili, garlic, salt, and cumin, and cook for another few minutes. Add the tomato puree, peanut butter, broth, and sugar, and stir until blended. Add the squash slices and cook over medium heat until the squash is tender, 20-30 minutes depending on the size of the squash. Add the black-eyed peas and greens and heat through. Spoon over the farrow or rice and enjoy. You can also sprinkle peanuts on top as a garnish…

The best weeks of med school

From Dose of Reality:

I have to apologize for the long gap since I last posted here. It seems like the days are passing without my really noticing, so I’ll give a brief recap of the past few weeks…

I am loving my OB/GYN rotation! I had been hedging over the past 6 months since I hadn’t gotten to try it yet, acknowledging that I’d really enjoyed being in the OR during my surgery rotation, and that I liked the continuity on my family medicine rotation. I felt like I really couldn’t just say that I wanted to do OB/GYN when I hadn’t really gotten a chance to do it. Now that I’m here, however, it’s clear that the things I liked most about other rotations were the things that make up the core of this rotation. I think that most students have an ah-ha moment when they realize that they are rotating through their future specialty. I know that some have many such moments throughout the year and a few reach the end without one, but usually some elective time solidifies things and these moments present themselves, if later than your average medical students’ anxiety level would prefer. Here are a few examples highlighting how I know that I’ve found my place, in no particular order:

• Delivering babies is pretty cool. I think most vaginal births are pretty awesome, and as much as I wouldn’t wish a C-section on anyway, they are pretty magical in their own way. One minute, you’re in the OR cutting through skin, fascia, and smooth muscle, and the next minute there is a baby coming out of the incision!
• The surgeries on this rotation are some of the coolest I’ve seen. Fixing (or at least improving) incontinence surgically makes a huge difference for patients, and the anatomy is fascinating. I love that we still don’t totally understand how it all works!
• There is a strong research ethic, and the research program includes many of the social and economic determinants that I have come to know and love. I think I’d be well-supported! As much as I love “blazing trails” and “defining my own path,” I worry that in some fields those might be synonymous with “being completely alone and isolated” and “not getting any respect or funding.”
• The people I’m working with are engaging and entertaining. I have had really good experiences all year with both residents and faculty, so this doesn’t seem like an entirely fair thing to say; most rotations have featured an entertaining cast of characters, and this one is no exception. I like strong personalities, and they are present in abundance!

Suffice it to say I’m really enjoying these weeks, and am wishing I could stay longer…

Words!

In June one of the blogs I enjoy posted a Wordle image based on her blog. I thought it was a really beautiful example of art meets technology, and decided to do one myself. In June, here’s the word cloud my blog generated:

I repeated this experiment a few weeks ago, and in addition to intuiting that the color has gone from my life, Wordle seemed to pick up on my shift toward the clinical:

Thoughts?