So now here I am, on this delightful Saturday morning and I couldn't think of a nicer way to spend it than sipping a cup of coffee and catching my friends up on my life. By the way, with my cup of coffee I am enjoying some yummy blueberry muffins I made.
I got the recipe from a paleo recipe website. The link is underneath the picture, just look up the Simple Blueberry Muffin :)
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| Simple Blueberry Muffin from www.paleomg.com |
That segways nicely to one new life update; I'm trying the paleo diet. I'm sure you all had immediate, visceral, responses to that statement. Some of you thought, "cool!" However, the vast majority of you thought, "oh brother." Now don't rush into judgement. I'm not trying to lose a ton of weight or anything but I'm trying to see if its easier to develop lean muscle without all those carbs in my diet. Its a hard diet though, I'm not going to lie. No sugar. . . no potatoes, . . . no grains, which means pasta and bread people, no legumes, and no dairy. I'm not being crazy religious about this. For example, I still have milk in my tea and soy milk in my coffee, but I'm doing my best to stay within the guidelines.
The idea to try the paleo diet grew out of a general desire to be more healthy and see more benefits from my workouts. A few months ago I decided that it was time to attack one of the items on my bucket list. With that, I looked up a schedule online and started training for a half marathon. Some of you may have noticed the facebook posts from mapmyrun. I'm currently up to 11 miles for my long runs and I have managed to maintain a 10min/mile pace, which is my goal. Tomorrow, I'm supposed to run 12 miles, the farthest I will run prior to the half marathon on March 17th. I get nervous before every long run, afraid that I will fail, run out of energy, or not have the mental toughness to finish it out. Poppy has been training alongside me the whole way, like a champ. She helps keep me going!
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| MARCH 17TH!!! |
Finally, an update about the internship, especially since that's what this blog is supposed to be about. I would be lying or at least withholding information if I didn't say that I'm struggling at the moment. Start with a complete lack of motivation. I think I'm just burned out at the moment. It is so difficult to get anything done! Many days I could fulfill all my duties by lunchtime and yet, there I am at 5pm still trying to get things accomplished. It can be very frustrating and demotivating. Add to that the fact that I get paid less than the technicians I work with (yes, literally and by 30%) and the fact that sometimes students really aren't nice and you've got a real winner of a career going.
As an intern, you are actually the least important person in the hospital. The students often think they know as much as you do, until it comes time to write their surgery reports or discharge instructions or do a procedure they've never done and then they look at you with that blank and innocent expression and say, "well I've never done this before." The kicker is when you get a student's evaluation and it goes something like this, "Dr. Riley had been up all night (actually, I had been up for over 48 hours) and while I understand she is tired, she's being a little cranky and she just needs to suck it up because that's her job." Excuse me while I punch you in the face child.
Speaking of students though, I don't want to leave you with the impression that they are all bad. I spent Thursday night at a dive hotel, . . . where there were . . beeeed buuuugsss. Yah, no joke. I was with a group of students (the awesome ones) and we took a trip to the foot of the mountains where we spent the whole day Friday castrating wild horses. An amazing woman from the National Park Service came with us and darted individual stallions in the herd. Once the stallion went down (usually 5-10 minutes later), we would anesthetize the horse and castrate it. This was an awesome adventure with the students and it felt great to be doing something to help the population of abandoned horses. Once they are castrated they can be adopted out and find forever homes. What was not great. . . was the bed bugs. I actually didn't see any in my room, but apparently they like to travel room-to-room. We got home late Friday night and after putting e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g into the wash, I hit the hay.
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| Some of the great students I work with, rocking a castration |
I only have 4 months left in my internship and I want to finish strong. I'm visiting home soon and I hope that it will revive and refresh me for the last push. As far as the next stage, I'm looking for a job! Ideally, I would move back to the west coast and do sports medicine and internal medicine. Keep your ears open friends!
