serendipti's Diaryland Diary

10:54 p.m. - Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005

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way too much about way too much

the lack of creativity or creative outlets in my life is so vast, it actually makes me nauseated.
I am having a 'moment' of sorts....a why-in-gods-names-am-i-in-this-not4me-field type of moment.
which is awesome, since it comes at a real good time. (please note mossy thick layer of sludgy irony with which this statement is intended to be mentally read)
i feel the overwhelming urge to create something....anything.....with some degree of finesse/dexterity/accomplishment. And getting knocked up and being a babymomma does not count, thank you very much. I am in that place you get after watching the olympics or going to a talent show where you are like, why am I not good at ANYTHING??? Because people half my age seem to be good at friggin everything. And please don't give me the 'you are good with people' line of self-esteem shoring. I spit on your pathetic attempt.

I have spent the last 4 weeks with the Doctor of Doctors. This man with whom I have worked exemplifies what it means to practice selfless, patient centered healthcare. And I love him for it, and his patients would grip me and take 5 minutes per visit, at least, each one, to tell me how much this man has meant to them....sometimes getting teary eyed and choked up. And I am not surprised at this, since Dr. Ezroj is my family doc and all, but it certainly has been overwhelming, that WITHOUT FAIL, every single one of his patients will use the loftiest, most loving superlatives that their imaginations can muster up to tell me about how lucky I am to be working with him. He will walk into a patient room and he will have treated the parents, the children, will have seen the 80 year old through the passing of her husband, will know the types of trees that grew in the patients old yard of a decade ago.....he will know about the depression after the last relationship went sour, will ask after a patients wife and tell me how this man's wife has had it hard since her mother moved across the street a few years back....Dipti, do you know what this man did for a living? He would drive those big fire department boats.....now this lady here has 2 grandkids in Temecula.....oh, let me get your husband from the waiting room, I'll take a look at it....how are your parents doing? Dipti, her parents just celebrated their 64 year anniversary....I went to the party and the tables had little trophies because the wife says, I should get a trophy for being married to this guy for so long.....Dr. Ezroj, I didn't trust those guys in the ER, so I waited to take this med until I had an appt with you....Dr. Ezroj, could you just do it here? That urologist spent all of 3 minutes in the room with me and hardly looked at me when he left.

Dr. Ezroj has quotes in his patient rooms, along with tchochke (sp?....tchochkala) from various trips in Latin America and gifts his patients bring him (this man gets more chocolate than the combined lifetime haul of most women on valentines day)....so one of the quotes is: it is better to know that patient with the disease than the disease which the patient has. He has lived this, every day, throughout his career, and now he has patients he has had for decades, and this relationship, between him and his patients who often hug him and say, i love you, at the end of the visit.....this is the most beautiful thing in the world to witness.
Which leads me to my horrible confession: I don't want to be him. I mean, he is eveything I would want to be wrt a family physician, but I really don't want to pay the price. Dr. Ezroj works in clinic from 9 to 6, sometimes 7, on average. His patients expect a 2 sometimes 3 hour wait, but also get him for half an hour to 40 minutes, sometimes. He then goes home in the evening, only to return a few hours later, after dinner and family time (how he squeezes that in, I know not.) He will then finish his notes, make call backs, and look up all the things he told his patients he would. Then he goes home, gets his 4 or 5 hours of sleep, and does it all over again. I will motion for him to wipe the smudge of cottage cheese or the bit of lentil from his soup from his chin, since he works through lunch and lunch thus consists of little bites he takes in his office while looking up labs in between patients.
One of Dr. Ezroj's patient told me about how he had called her on a Saturday evening when she was going through he breast cancer diagnosis, and she got all choked up telling me how touched her husband still is, that Dr. Ezroj was spending his sat evening like that.....and yes, of course a part of me was stoked for her, but the whole time I'm thinking....jeez, what about Ezroj's wife....does she absolutely hate him??? And is this what I am signing up for if I want to be a good family doc......
So that is my latest angst. I love the pace of family, I love clinic, I love the very human connection I get to make with the patients....but I can come home after a good and solid day at clinic and feel like the best of me, my biggest talents and gifts, were totally unused. There is no organizing en masse, no bringing peoplee together, no public speaking, no writing of speeches,no getting people fired up in a group ( a lot of this happens in a one on one basis.....but I know my strength lies in a different scale...)
and so I come home tired, but the parts of me that want to feel tired from use, are not tired. In fact, I feel restless.
So there you go. I am working with an angel of a Doctor, and know that I do not want to be like him.
what else? I am spilling close to a gram of protein a day in my urine, which means that the kidneys are throwing raucous parties again, without inviting me. Which is unfortunate, because I just decreased some of my meds, because my white count got super low....so that is something sucky that needs to have attention paid to it.
I went and visited my high school english teacher today, who is retiring this year, and all I could think was, should this be where I am???And the fact that I am in med school made my mental answers less than appealing.
I need to be happy about what I am doing for a couple of key, and pressing reasons:
1) it is what I am doing
2) I am about to skip going on what could be my father's last trip to India, in order to get my MD quicker. The whole fam is going but me.
3) I will soon be back in Chicago, with winter starting quicker than you can say myhairisfrozenandiwant2die.
4) I will soon be back in Chicago, in the winter, while my whole fam will be in India....i know this is a combo of 2&3, but this is my list, so there.
5)I am about to embark on a 3 month Internal Medicine rotation......everything I know about this rotation and everything I know about myself give me ample reason to believe that I will be hatin on life....like drinking a ton of hatorade every morning, with a side of hater tots.....that is what this rotation, day in and day out, will prolly feel like. Amy and Laurel were never more depressed than when they were on medicine.....all the more reason I dread this coming chunk of my life.
6)i don't know. this has been a long entry and I need to sleep.

So I am trying to write again consistently. Most of the times I stop writing when I am down or having a funk or am sort of bluesy. I am not writing because I am not in this place anymore, I am writing this in order to yank me out of this place. Because life has to be lived and decisions need to be made and I need to be able to process what I am doing, and this little journal helps me more than most things. Also, I am not feeling like talking to people these days. It is weird.....I kind of feel like taking a nice long phone break from the world....that might change when I go back to the chi, but it is what I am feeling now.
Rohun is saying ma-ma and ba-ba now. Dad and Mom have also taught him to grip to the carpet and drag himslef over to any coveted object we dangle forth seductively....a rattle, a pair of keys.....you name it, he will drag his entire body by gripping onto the longs strands of the carpet,meanwhile giving the side of his face rug burn....it is awesome. So fun. Sometimes I want to eat him, I love him so much. Amy says I am creepy when I make such statements. but it is true. (actually, to her, I might have mentioned eating him and feeling his bits in my stomach so I could be closer to him) My bhabhi's brother would say to his daughter (in gujarati it sounds better, albeit just a ridiculous)---oh my little girl...if only you were tobbaco so I could snort you.....no joke....chheeekni...they snort that in india....

we go to a myeloma meeting for dad this saturday.....he is still having a lot of pain in the ribs in his back, so we just got a CT done again....the meeting should be interesting, and educational, and likely sobering.
I have a half day tomorrow. Maybe Amy and I can go surfing in the evening. She has been in a miserable rotation and I can't wait for it to be done. I caught my first real wave last week, not a baby wave, like a good sized one. I have been riding the wave of that wave ever since. ha. But the last couple times the ocean has kicked my ass.....you know it is bad when you are paddling past a break, and as the wave is coming towards you, you are chanting 'fuck you' in your head to gear yourself up to the impending brutality.....no, this is a far cry from the mother ocean embrace that I once imagined surfing to be.....this shit HURTS. Amy kicks ass at it.....my only goal when I surf is to make it out to where she is, and normally where she is is out on the horizon, a tiny little speckle that is on average, 20 big wave whompings away from me. Really gotta work on the upper body, if I can even consider myself to have any.
I am still in stalkage of the celebrity man whom I will have babies with. Trust me, it'll happen....you just gotta believe.
OH! And before I go.....I have been meeting all my girlfriends and they all have men now, and it is BIZARRO....everyone is with someone, and next year is going to be another big year for weddings....and now I never see my friends alone....I always see them in pairs....and man, the times really ARE changing....I met one of my best friend's new man, and they are the kind of couple that make you think coupling is a good idea. I was floating for days after I saw them interact. Love can be a beautiful thing.....or, it can be, as I described to them, a large puss filled abscess that needs an incision and drainage.....or a trip to the ER with appendicitis where the wait is so long, your appendix bursts anyway.....yeah, that is love too.

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