Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone's been enjoying the holidays and is ready for 2013!

I've been blissfully lazing around during my winter break after wrapping up my ob-gyn clerkship. After seeing all these deliveries and scrubbing in on the C-sections, I have extreme respect for mothers. Mad respect.

As one of the many perks of being a lowly medical student, one of our duties is usually gathering the general history of the patient in triage. So when a woman in labor is busy breathing her way through a contraction and squeezing the threads out of the sheets, hey - you get a medical student hovering over you, asking about your chief complaint ("What do you think? I'm in freaking labor!"), past medical/surgical history, your previous deliveries ("Can't you pull up the information from my medical charts? I've been here before!"), current medications, allergies, STDs, abnormal pap smears ("No, no, no, NO."), etc. Believe me, we're very sorry, but we enjoy the process as much as you enjoy resisting the urge to throw something at our heads.

So ob-gyn was fun, in that mildly traumatizing way.

Anyway, a friend gave me this snow globe for Christmas and at first glance, I was like, "Aw, this is super adorable. It even plays music while I watch the snow fall. I'm going to treasure this forever!"

And then, the other day, I take a closer look:



Be happy, indeed. A bear gleefully prepared to trample a tiny turtle beneath its huge paw. Or caught right in that magical moment before he sends a flying kick at the turtle's head.

Am I to assume this is a subconscious manifestation of my friend's real feelings for me?

Am I a puny turtle, idiotically grinning away, while the shadow of a foot looms over my head?

No.

When the moment comes ...

I shall be the bear.