Seeking Motivational Inspiration

As I became further frustrated with the occupations of my mind, I decided to try to make myself have a crush on that model friend of mine again. It did rid me of the preoccupancy of thoughts of that disliked one, at least for now, but I still struggle with what to fill my mind with at night. This provides me with an inclination to drink, but that is an unhealthy habit to maintain chronically, so I am obviously looking for alternatives.

Dreaming of travel was once a viable alternative thought process, but I am unfortunately unsure of whether I can reliably plan for travel within the next year. You can fall in love with places without worrying about consequences on either side, emotional or otherwise.

I foolishly scheduled what are likely to be my most difficult exams for the next two Sundays in a row. The train of thought was that it would be a relief to be finished with exams for awhile, especially since I am approaching my last two rotations. Unfortunately, I overestimated my motivation levels leading up to these test dates. My practice scores are notably below passing and I have not finished reviewing said practice tests quickly enough to feel like I am progressing at a realistic pace. So here I sit at Starbucks, realizing that the added busy sounds of the coffee shop do as little for my ability to focus as the thought echo-provoking silence that awaits me at my apartment.

The missionary leaders with whom I have worked in the past are doing a trip to Kenya next year. They would potentially want to use my "new skills" to incorporate a medical aspect to the trip. I will of course have to inform them that I am still very much a student, but could certainly assist a physician if one decided to join us. In any case, that sort of trip, similar to the one that first put faces and places to this calling of mine, would probably help me in stirring up inspiration within me. But money is very much an issue. If all goes as planned, I do not expect to have time to raise funds. In fact, I am unsure as to how I will manage to pay for school, and residency applications, and all of the other expenses that are headed my way within the next year. So maybe it just has to be up to God, which is probably what it actually is anyway.

Dislike

I do not like disliking people. It rarely happens because I tend to assume the best and also empathize. But the thoughts I have toward that girly are specifically of dislike. She changed her relationship status the other day, a few weeks after texting me "Miss you" and I replied with a pretty disingenuous response with similarly kind sentiments. I could probably think better of her except that her method was to blow me off and make it clear that she did not want further communication, that we needed a break. It was difficult for me to discern what there was to break from, especially since we were just friends and she was emphatic on preserving that friendship.

In any case, cutting off communication seemed in her mind to be the way to fix things. For me, communication is actually the preferred method of fixing things, and breaking off communication after one party has been hurtful to the other tends to lead the hurt party to resent the transgressor.

As I said, I do not like feeling this dislike. I decided today to stop sending her funny tweets (one of a group of people who receives them). Hopefully I can simply avoid seeing her, like ever. If I do see her, my forgiving nature will likely take over and I will be able to get over this. But the dislike is a feeling that has remained in my mind, and has been allowed to grow stagnant there.

I prefer to think the world of everyone else, so it really sucks to have someone lower themselves in your eyes. She resented me thinking so highly of her before, so even that aspect factors in to make me feel justified in mentally placing her with a more inferior group.

Ugh, I do not like thinking of people like this at all. It seems to bear no benefit for anyone.

What Matters

I finally worked a full week (well, not Tuesday) in the hospital. It was so good. This is the first time that I have genuinely thought that I could make this my life, my career. Unlike all of the specialty medicine I have previously worked in, this involves everything. This week, we worked on the orthopedics floor, which often meant that every patient was old or sick enough to have had a bad fall and break something. So the broken parts are managed surgically and with physical therapy, but you are also checking on their comorbidities. Some with internal bleeding, others with pneumonia, or leukemia, or something else. So there is always the challenge of bringing to mind everything you know about this wide variety of diseases, and it is just so fulfilling. You get to establish a short-term relationship with a given patient, knowing that you will likely only have a few days with them at most. And with this rotation, the best part is that when I take a patient's history, the doctor is not going to repeat my actions. What I do genuinely matters to an extent.

We also went to happy hour yesterday with some hospital staff and other medical people. I do not know who was covering the bill, but I left with the knowledge that it (and my meal) was free. I also learned through that that there are occasions for which I should most certainly wear my white coat outside of the hospital (up until now, it has mostly attracted beggars asking for money when I have worn it elsewhere).

On Monday, we had a patient die. We saw him for the first time in the late morning, breathing fast, not conscious, with his wife telling us about how wonderful of a person he was. Then, after lunch and more rounds, we went back to pronounce this patient as deceased. I have only seen a few dead bodies in my life. This is the first I have seen that was a patient. Granted, it was not my patient and I did not know them, but there was something there. The doctor told us about checking the pulse, listening to the heart for a full minute, then checking the pupils for nonreactivity (I rechecked the pupils after she did so). The wife claimed that he had been dead for something like 40 minutes, and the fingers on one of his hands was beginning to turn blue. She commented that the other hand must be maintaining its usual color because she had not stopped holding and kissing it for the past hour.

I hope that I remember to take the time to stop in the future, to preserve the memories of these things. My mind is not naturally designed for medicine, so perhaps my perspective could lend something to all of this.