Pilgrims at Oak Ridge

Thankfully. In honor of a visit from our good friend and missionary, Peter , coming to visit us in Greenwood, we planned a tasty dinner. (Incidentally, he does great work with college students in Mexico City, Mexico, and if you are interested in supporting a missionary, please visit his website.) It was so good, I thought I should share the recipes here. We had two sides: baked sweet potatoes (easy recipe- just place on baking sheet and bake at 375 or 400 until completely mushy), strawberry salad (a summer favorite), and our main course was grilled pork loin with peach barbecue sauce. Here are the recipes: Strawberry Salad . 1 bunch spinach, rinsed 10 large strawberries, sliced nuts (if desired) 1/2 cup white sugar 1 teaspoon salt ...

Ok, technically speaking I meet Aubrey at the hospital cafeteria two nights a week when she is on call. But since I have a mild case of hospital-phobia, I just pretend its not a hospital at all, and that I'm just meeting Aubrey at a restaurant for a dinner date. Of course, its a bit of an odd restaurant. First of all, the dress code is really, really, really casual. I appreciate that Aubrey treats it like a true date and shows up wearing her white-coat attire. Other people show up for their reservations wearing scrubs all the time. Heck, you might as well wear a gown that's open in the back, you won't feel out of place. The decor is nice, if a little eccentric. There are all these posters bragging about how great the doctors are. Frankly, if I owned a restaurant, and I served food such that I had to keep a staff of doctors on hand, I don't think I'd be bragging about it. The staff is friendly. They don't have valet parking, but I do sometimes get a golf ...

Tomorrow I start my first month of internal medicine wards. I'm starting to get a little nervous. The internal medicine service tends to be very busy, with complicated patients, and sleepless call nights. I'm excited about it, but know that it's going to be a tough few weeks. I'm actually going to have two months of medicine in a row now. Looking at the schedule, I realized that I'm going to work from Aug 2-Sept. 11, and have only 1 day off. Yeah. That's 1 month and 9 days of working, (including weekends), with 1 single, solitary Wednesday off. I guess I should do some laundry this weekend.

I just found this link to get a free CD by a band called Monk and Neagle by linking back to here . Check it out. The songs I've heard on the CD so far are these really great acoustic songs, better than most everything I hear on Christian radio these days. I got an email saying my free CD is in the mail, so I'll have to let you know how I feel once I hear the whole thing. In other news, my favorite husband and I just got back from a little surprise weekend getaway to Atlanta. Jeff planned the whole thing and I had NO idea where we were going or what we'd do. Not surprisingly, he did an excellent job: We saw a show at the Fox Theater (Dream Girls), we stayed at a nice hotel (it had a pool on the ROOF), and did some excellent shopping (Ikea). We also hit up the zoo and farmer's markets, and he humored me on the way back by stopping at a bookstore so I could get the new Harry Potter book. (I loved it.) I came back feeling refreshed and ready to start my internal medicine ...

1. When you've been up all night and have to see a patient at 5 am, eating a warm s'mores pop tart gives you the early-morning boost you need. 2. If a 6-year-old girl can fight off 4 nurses who are holding her down to get a lumbar puncture, she probably doesn't need it in the first place. 3. Similarly, it is futile to reason with said 6-year-old when you are holding a needle. 4. If you have to be up all night, you may as well be up delivering a baby. 5. Call room pillows just don't cut it. 6. The post-call pancakes with peanut butter and sugar-free syrup can make a post-call morning a much brighter place. 7. There is no need to bother with taking a nap on the couch when you get home. Head straight for your comfy bed and wonderfully lush pillows. 8. Having clean teeth can go a long way towards making you feel less disgusting, even though you haven't slept or showered in 24 hours.

Hello, my name is Lucy, I'm the new dog around here. I feel bad that I haven't introduced myself sooner, but Mom and Dad don't let me have much computer time. But now mom is "post-call" so she's snoozing the afternoon away (a favorite activity of mine, too! Like Mama, like dog), and Dad, he's looking for work again (as if entertaining me was not a full time job already). So I finally got the computer to myself for a bit. Besides, I'm just now figuring out what this "blog" is all about. For the longest time I thought they were saying "dog." Which would make sense, they were always talking about getting comments on the dog, naturally, people are always commenting on me. And talking about updating the dog, which was worrisome at first, until I learned it usually meant I was getting a bath, or getting brushed, or getting "updated" in some other way. It's true too, I'm like a new dog after a bath. Anyway, I just ...

Whenever anyone in the hospital quits breathing or their heart stops beating, a "Code Blue" gets called. For us residents, it basically just means that wherever we are, we immediately run to the room number that gets paged overhead and sent to our beepers. In medical school I occasionally was expected to respond to these, but by the time I got there there were always at least 5 residents, an attending, and 12 nurses in the room. So my skills were never really needed. Here at our hospital, though, we are the only residents, and we are often needed to help during these times. Usually codes happen on the floors with the sickest patients, like where the medicine patients are, or in the intensive care units. Today, though, I got called to a Code on Labor and Delivery. This almost never happens. As soon as I heard the call overhead, I starting running. And running is not the easiest thing when you are an intern, since your pockets are full of notes, stethoscope, papers, and other u...

July 17, 2004 "There's always a beautiful view...Next to you...." I love you. Thanks for giving me such a great three years.

Although there are many, many reasons I chose to go into the field of family medicine, (a field many look down upon), one was recently illustrated at work. My first day of clinic was Wednesday. As time goes on, I'll gradually accumulate my own patients who will come to see ME as their primary doctor. Since we just started, I have basically no patients, so the people I see in clinic are walk-ins, or people who need to be seen but their resident doctors had other responsibilities or were out of town. Except one. My very first patient who is assigned to me as her primary doctor happens to be a baby that I delivered. This tiny little precious girl whom I brought into this world (with help from her mother, I suppose) is now MY patient. I'll get to take care of her as long as I'm a resident. I'll watch as she learns to sit, and talk, and laugh, and eat, and run. If her mom gets pregnant again, I may be able to care for her, and then usher this little girl's sibling into t...

Thanks to a little house warming gift from Mom and Dad Tell, Aubrey and I recently became the proud new owners of a Weber Spirit E-210 Grilling Machine! Under the hood this baby packs over 26,000 British Thermal Units of cooking might, spread evenly over 500+ square inches of a luxurious cooking domain. The lifeblood of the Grilling Machine is its Liquid Propane, which begins it life in a white cannister thoughtfully suspended by a spring loaded mechanism which is constantly weighing the cannister to give automatic readouts on how full your cannister is. From there, the blood (propane) travels through various valve mechanisms into two seperate burners, where it is transformed into heat which will then flow past five "Flavorizer Bars" and magically transform raw meat into delicious food fit for a king. And yes, I will admit that I stood back for a few moments after assembling my grilling machine, just to admire it. To see how good looking it is. How suprisingly humble it ...

I've decided that whoever made the decision for doctors to wear white coats had never been inside a hospital. Or, at least, was one of those people who breezed through life never spilling anything on themselves. I am NOT one of those people. I've already mentioned the dangers of working in a hospital , especially when you are delivering babies , but ANYTHING you get on your white coat shows up. When I got to work yesterday, I noticed that I somehow had gotten a mysterious, unidentifiable orange substance on the INSIDE(!) back of my coat. My coat stayed in my car all night, and I didn't notice it the day before, so it seems to me that some evil stain fairy had entered my car during the night to play a trick on me. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised since only half an hour later I mananged to spill soy milk up my coat sleeve. Don't ask. Since I was already at work, there was nothing I could do about it, but I felt bad since I would be seeing patients with a stained co...

I'm discovering that yes, indeed, residency is lots of work. I was on call on Friday and Sunday this week, meaning that I was in the hospital from Friday morning until mid-morning Saturday, then I got to come back before 6 am on Sunday and stay until 1:30pm on Monday. Hopefully you can understand why I didn't get much posting done. Sadly, this is one of the easiest rotations, so I know it will only be worse next month when I'm on internal medicine wards. But I did realize some important things this weekend: 1. Circumcisions are almost idiot-proof to perform. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this seeing as they have been performed for thousands of years, but I was pleasantly surprised at how easy and fun they are to do. (Obviously I'm in the right profession.) I think the biggest reason they are so easy to do is because we use an instrument called a Mogan clamp, which really makes it almost impossible to screw up. If for some reason you'd like to do these at y...

come when the nurses page you telling you your patient is pushing, and you enter the room and realize that "pushing" this time really means "the whole freakin' baby is coming out," and you just talked to your attending who is all the way across the street, your upper level resident was on call last night and left for the day already, and you realize that you are COMPLETELY alone, but hey - you've done ONE whole delivery by yourself, and watched maybe 10, so you should be ok, right? You take a deep breath, gown up for the delivery, and try to remember to act calm as you prepare to catch the baby, while inside you are screaming, "WHERE IS THE DOCTOR??!!?" and perhaps "I NEED MY MOMMY!" before you remember that now YOU are the doctor and your mom is not close enough to help. The seconds space out even more as you realize the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby's neck, and you can't slip it over the chin. Thankfully, the wonderf...

Here it is.... in pictures. The two love birds on one tube. mirror + camera + straw hat = fun my handsome man... relaxing My nearly sister-in-law

I've learned a few valuable things here on my first day. 1. When delivering a baby, WEAR A MASK, or at least goggles. Trust me. You are in DIRECT firing line for LOTS of fluids. So be prepared. 2. Try and have your husband come and visit you on call and give you a backrub. Or at least bring you delicious fish tacos with peach mango salsa from home. They will make your first call night loads better. 3. Babies are quite slippery when they come out. It's considered poor form to drop them. (Thankfully I didn't learn this one the hard way.) It's been quite fun so far, though, with two deliveries under my belt. No real calls yet, so I've just been trying to read and remember all the things I forgot during my fourth year about obstetrics. And enjoy the nice LCD flat screen TV in the call room.