I am truly a resident. I literally reside in this hospital. I am on the floor from 6.00am to 9.00pm, pretty much every single day. I have been on call for the past several weekends as well. That is when I am on the floor from 7.00am of one day until 5.00 pm of the next day.  How much sleep? OK, 0hrs!!! Brutal.

I just want to sleep. That is all. Just let me go to my bed and leave me alone. I do not think I have ever done something this tough and I do not think anything is going to get better any time soon.

I did learn a very interesting word. Squirrely. Everything is a bit squirrely right now.

Two weeks of service are behind me, a week of General Neurology Consult and a week on the Stroke/ICU Team. This has been a great time to get to know the hospital, brush-up on physical examination skills and prepare for harder rotations. I am particularly delighted with my clinic. It is usually on Friday afternoon and I really get to take care of people as their primary care physician. After years of cutting-edge science and computational biology, I did not really expect to have so much fun being “the doc”. But it is great. I can actually connect with these people. A lot of them are immigrants, equally perplexed with the life here, and most of them are really sick and extremely thankful for any help and care that they receive.  I actually walk out of the clinic feeling that I have made the difference.

We had a few more excitements in the past couple of days. Dealing with the building management and making sure that we can use the elevator when our stuff arrives from California was particularly interesting. But I have passed the test there as well. I did not strangle anyone or throw him/her over the balcony and we did manage to get our stuff delivered without a lot of fuss. Our apartment finally looks like a home and not like an empty warehouse. We found a home for the kitty as well. We have it just down the street in one of the company-sponsored garages, $80 pre-tax.

Finally, my very dear friend just died. After years of abuse and a few more months of hospice care, my Compaq Presario V2000 died suddenly and peacefully. Major organ failure. His hard drive now rests in peace, together with a few weeks of work and some family photos that I did not back-up.

More photos of Lux:

This is it. We had our White Coat Ceremony yesterday and we got all our communication devices earlier today, including the unavoidable pagers. For the next few years we are going to be permanently tethered to the Mother House. After two weeks of orientation we are still left to live with that sense of being completely inadequate for the job. But well, someone said that the orientation was actually scientifically designed to make us forget everything we hear by the time we start working on the wards.