#370

So I'm sitting here, writing my personal statement, and I manage to write a first-half that feels honest and compelling in 15 minutes. That's what a little lemon soda and Pimm's will do for your creativity. I'm a little nervous that I've gotten so far so fast, but I think I'll stop for the night before pushing my luck further.

Sometimes in life, you learn a new word, and then you see it everywhere. I remember first hearing the word "asphodel" at 15, and then I saw it 4 more times that week. "Asphodel!" I've noticed a similar phenomenon with people. There are prototypes of people that I've found everywhere. Like the short, intellectual, wickedly and nastily sarcastic middle-aged man with cropped hair and glasses who represent my high school English teacher, my undergraduate thesis advisor, and several of my upper level residents this past year. Then there's the free-spirited, buxom redhead history teacher/family medicine resident/nutritionist. And today there was the return of my anatomy lab cadaver, L. I had a real affection for my cadaver (in fact, one of my first ever posts on this little blog was a poem about him). He reappeared in my lung cancer patient from internal medicine, and again today in interventional radiology as we put an inferior vena cava filter into an elderly gentleman who had gone bang in the middle of the night. It's maybe these connections that help us treat patients we'd rather not treat, make us see the human under the layers of urine and blood and smelly breath. Maybe I'm behind the times, but I finally understood why people with "altered mental status" repeat the same phrase over and over and over again, like "Owwwwowwwowwwwowwwwwowwwwwowwwwww" or "OhGodohGodohGodohGodohLordAlmighty." Sometimes the emotion is so big, repeating it is the only way to get it out.