Beginning and Ending.....

Leslie is around 10 weeks. She continues to struggle with nausea and fatigue mostly during the evenings. Mornings have been good to her as long as she gets up and has something to eat right off. When she stays on top of eating, and snacking, she does much better. She seems to be looking at her belly in the mirror a lot, asking me if she looks bloated. Since it is more of a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ type question to answer, I try to agree with whatever she might be thinking, but i try to come from a much more subtle angle. She is a little bloated, but it is normal. She should stop worrying so much about her belly, it has much more growing to do. One of the best feelings in the world is to look down at her belly, place my hand over our growing baby and think about the love, affection, and attention that we will show so that 'jellybean' will prosper in this beautiful life. Unfortunately, there have been no midnight cravings for ice cream or morning desire for do-nuts, but I will keep praying. We went to our doctor in Houston one last time before we have to change doctors in Belton. We got to hear the most precious sound, our babies heartbeat. It took the nurse a few minutes to find the beat, but once she found it, there were instant smiles and tears. We were happy to hear that the heartbeat was strong and fast at 170 beats/min.

Last friday was move day. The movers came and packed up our apartment and loaded everything onto the truck for our move to Belton. This is a great way to do it, I tell ya. I recently sprained my ankle after falling wrong at jiu-jitsu class. I was hobbling around everywhere, and if I had to move and pack the apartment, it would be a slow and painful process.

Another chapter in our lives is coming to an end and a new one is beginning. We have lived in this apartment complex for the last 4 years and it is sad to leave, but we are very excited to begin our journey in Belton.

Good Quote

In the battle of life, it is not the critic who counts; nor the one who points out how the strong person stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better.

The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually strive to do deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends oneself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he or she fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

by Theodore Roosevelt

Ohh Baby!

It was 3 AM, when Leslie shook me. She needed my eyes, because she couldn’t believe. She took a pregnancy test, and we had finally conceived. That moment when I saw both lines, was a moment I will never forget. I hugged my wife with happiness and love. We stayed up for about an hour or two and talked about what this image of ‘two lines’ had meant for our future. We joyously gawked over the beauty and brains that our little one would have. We let Rusty out of his kennel and let him take in some of the excitement as well. We took pictures of us, the stick with the indication for selflessness displayed as two pink lines, and then we took one with all four of us together. I couldn’t sleep. I thought about names, looks, hair color, education, and how our parents would take it. After all, it would be a huge surprise for everyone. They all thought we would wait till we got to Killeen to have a baby. Leslie and I looked at each other in amazement, with no words to speak. This happened several times, and we cried, held hands, and told each other we were going to be the best parents we could.

Wrapping it up!!!!

April 30th was my last day of medical school. I still have graduation in front of me, but I have May off. Bitter-sweet is a perfect way to describe my feelings as I finished my presentation on my dissection of the portal system. In fact when I think about it, the very idea of my project has some relationship to the fact that I will be moving on. I chose to research a procedure that is very seldom done in the ED, but for extreme circumstances and/or environments. The procedure is balloon tamponade of esophageal varices. This is a last resort measure when someone comes in with upper gastrointestinal bleeding, whereby you put a tube down someone’s mouth, and there is a balloon attached, which can be blown up to apply pressure to a bleeding esophagus. So I opened with my rationale for picking this topic, and it was along the lines of me being in the Army and being in the middle of nowhere and I get a patient with varices, but no endoscopy suite or fancy vasoconstrictor that is found in any ED. To top off the slow transition into a different stage of my life, all the other presenters had pictures of their kids, dogs, etc at the end of their presentation, so since I went last, I felt compelled to spread the news of our pregnancy, and I told them I was sorry I didn’t have a picture, but even if I did, it would only be about 1/8 of an inch big, so they congratulated me, and I was on my way. I took the next hour to walk around the school and hospital taking pictures of things that were pleasant reminders of the last four years.

One thing that I took a picture of was a statue of a man carrying a really big box, that was obviously weighing him down and making him struggle. So it hit me that the statue was the perfect artistic representation of what being a medical student was like.At the moment, I could relate with the statue’s meaning for me in medical school. Medical school is an ever constant struggle to keep your head above water, while carrying a steel box at the same time. When I entered medical school I had taken at most 16 or 17 hours of college courses in one semester. Most semesters though were 12-14 hours because all the labs associated with a science major. The first semester of med school is close to 21 hours worth of classes. The amount of information is daunting and relentlessly coming at you faster and faster. The worst aspect, is that not only is it a ton of stuff, but I had to read it 2-3 times over again, in order to learn it. And none of it was rocket science, but it took many hours to master the amount of information. 2nd year was a total blur due to the caffeine high I took on. This was more of the same, but instead of being tested on 3-4 weeks of info for 6 classes, we had mid terms and finals, which meant you were responsible for 8-10 weeks of info for 6 classes. And at the end of the 2nd year you took finals over the whole year, not the semester, but the year! And when you were done with a 2 week marathon of finals, you entered an ultra marathon of about 6 weeks to study for Step 1, which was over the first 2 years of all of medical school. And if you survived that, you could look at this statue, and know, just exactly what is meant by the image of a man who can’t even see over the steel box that he is holding up, and much less, trying to move forward at the same time. Then I walked over and read the plaque, and it was a statue dedicated to one of the physicians at the school, and the name of the statue was “A Good Physician”. It didn’t take too long for me to instantly identify and relate to the message that was constructed with steel and concrete.

So for the next couple minutes I took a moment to think about what being a good physician means. Plainly, by the general nature of the statue, a good physician is someone who can carry a load. But what is he carrying? I would say compassion, determination and responsibility, to name a few. Responsibility comes in many ways, including multiple patients to care for at once, having multiple options for treatment and patient care to decipher through, or even the constant nature of learning and reading as technology and science advances to better patient outcomes. The second factor I mentioned was determination. This is an ever bearing factor when you work in the medical field. Depending on the specialty we choose, will make this factor weigh more or less. If you choose to work in the ICU or on the medicine ward, it is not uncommon for patients to be less healthy and vigorous than they were before coming to the hospital. So the ability to get up every day and be positive about the reality of taking someone whose heart was functioning at 85% before their heart attack, and after their stay they are discharged at 65%, can be difficult to deal with on a weekly, and sometimes daily basis. But nonetheless, it is what we do.