I’m Still Alive!

Yeah, I am still here. It has been over six months after the last entry on my blog; now I am back.

Short summary of what happened in the last six months. I worked. Okay, you are all caught up now. Here is a little more detail if you are interested.

My first term was in vascular surgery – arguably the busiest term in the whole hospital, so it wasn’t exactly a way to ease into this back-to-full-time-work-and-trying-to-be-a-doctor internship thing. Having been thrown into the deep end, I basically spent the whole ten weeks trying to keep my head above water. Fortunately for me, I was in a team of incredibly good registrars and resident. So despite the hectic days, I felt like I was very well supported. The hours were grueling – by non-North American standards – from sixty-five to seventy-five hours per week. I felt like I only came home to sleep. So I spent the time that I had off either cycling along the beach or up the mountain or going to the beach with a book.

During that time a half dozen or so blog entries gathered in my computer and I never got around to finishing them. The perfectionist in me just would not allow myself to put them online without editing. And so in my computer they languished – half done, clumsy, and not fit to see the light of day.

My second term was in emergency. I had a blast! The work was interesting; the team was good to work with, mostly; one of the consultants has the ability to make interns feel like the most inadequate person in the world. I always stuttered when I handed patients over to that consultant. The hours were awesome: each week consisted of four ten-hour shifts and three days off. Having come from vascular surgery, forty hours per week felt like a holiday. So I treated my days off like holidays: biking, going to the beach, reading non-medical books, going to the gym (and sauna), going to Sydney, etc. My blog continued to sit idle. It had already been a couple of months, my unfinished entries were still waiting to be edited, but they were getting lower and lower on my priority list. I figured: who reads it anyway?

I was in the States last month on my annual leave. A couple of friends I saw mentioned that they hadn’t seen anything new on my blog. I even got emailed from some random person asking about it. So apparently people do read it.

All right, now that I have left my blog static long enough to have lost all three of my readers, I am going to give it another go.