goodness gracious me

so the past few days have been interesting and have gone by in a big blur. from waking up at 0230 last friday morning to admit and assist on a ruptured ectopic pregnancy emergency surgery, followed immediately by a scheduled c-section who went into labor a week and a half early to driving home to downingtown that night than up to erie with a quick stop in state college to move and back sunday, and yesterday having my hard drive completely poop out on me, fail, and spend several hours in the KOP mall apple store trying to get it all worked out. i made out of of the mall with only purchasing 2 pairs of jeans from express for a total of 39$ - consider this a win. especially since i was there for almost 4 hours.

long story short-below is my old hard drive with the 2 metal things that look like staples which had detached themselves from somewhere and where floating around on the inside. the apple guy come out rattling it and later with a picture he'd taken since he'd never seen that happen before...awesome.

after several hours of failed attempts to restore my hard drive from my external i finally called apple again and the very nice man on the phone told me that the instructions i was given to restore were wrong from the very nice guy at the store. we'll see how long my patience holds out with all of this, i must say i'm handling this with much more composure than i'd have thought. i'll hopefully still think that they were both 'very nice men' after all is said and done. thank god keith got me an external for christmas and i've been pretty good about using it to back up. and it's a small miracle that this didn't happen on may 18, what would have been 11 days before my boards when it was doing the same thing it did before it died but magically decided to keep working.

more updates on everything soon. just a few more days til the 4th of july and next monday i start a new rotation, peds :)

Beautiful Reading, Pa??

When someone says Reading, beautiful is certainly not the first thing to come to mind. Outlets? yes. City that i always drive past the exit on the turnpike-sure why not? but beautiful...it used to be far from it. i stand corrected.
p.s. the above picture is a result of the thunderstorm we had the other night


Below are pictures of the park that i've been running in for the past week or so and let me tell you it's absolutely refreshing to be outside and near water (yup, i sure do miss the lake). I wandered along the trail for about an hour and a half before i was losing the light and went for a quick run, the park closes at 9 and it was about 830 at that point.

i was playing around with my shutter speed on this one to
make the water look like it was flowing-gotta remember my tripod next time

I can't wait to explore more of it and i wish that i'd been able to go sooner, but finding that balance between working long hours in the hospital, trying to keep up with my studying, and having that new found freedom of being less that 372 miles away from keith, friends and family has been somewhat of a challenge. I'm just glad that i've been able to see as much of it as i have so far.

unfortunately my time has been a bit limited and i've only run a few miles in either direction of the covered red bridge but i'm going to attempt to take some engagement pictures of some friends that i've made here who are kind enough to let me practice on them so i'm hoping to find some good spots for that.

i'm off to erie this weekend to move out. looking forward to finally riding the 'raveen flier' :)

i have a healthy respect for geese and initally was taking pictures with my telephoto-- i gave that up and was standing right next to them. friendliest geese ever.

i must have looked like a lunatic trying to get pictures of the bees and fireflies,
following them around in a crouched crabwalk.

catching up

this month has been absolutely flying by! i feel like i'm just starting to get caught up and the month is already half over. It's been a good one so far though
this is how close we were at the James Taylor & Carol King concert--absolutely ridiculousness.


Colin's graduation--last but not least at shanahan here's a few highlights. the rest of the album is here

cute dad

The rest of the week went by pretty quick as did the weekend. i went down to baltimore to visit keith on friday for a date night to go see toy story 3-which was surprisingly good for a 3rd movie :) back up to reading on saturday for call and than sunday was a visit with the fam at nan & pop pop's before heading home for a father's day dinner. dad, keith, sullie and i went on a 'quick' walk at the new trail by 322 which was really nice. we gotta get sullie a longer leash though so he can swim more. not too much going on this week, back to the regular hospital/clinic stuff and moving out of erie this weekend. can't wait to see linds and ryan and abbie :)

this is how sullie likes to swim

Circle of Life

I got to deliver my first baby today!! It was AWESOME, and ridiculously messy. seriously projectile amniotic fluid, blood and urine. everywhere.

here's the story--after what was an apparent drought for my time in the Ob/gyn today was a torrential downpour of babies, and pregnant women and ob/gyn consults. after morning report this morning we basically hit the ground running. The other med student Laura and I were running around like chicken's with our heads cut off. Amy the resident had the first baby early this morning, laura delivered the 2nd and i got the 3rd. My mom was on her 7th kid and was in labor for about 20 hours by the time i got to see her. once she finally got started it was quick. so fast that the attending was helping me tie my gown and barely had time to put on his own gloves before the baby basically walked out of this woman's vagina. not before spraying a gush (yes that is the technical term) of fluid all over the attending, of course not on the side of any of the people who were gowned and covered. the baby girl made her way out and i caught her :) you wouldn't believe how slippery those little suckers are.

the rest of the day went by incredibly quickly. the thing that really got me today though was a girl my age who came in in active labor. she was only 22 1/2 weeks along. she ended up delivering a baby girl who lived for about 5 hours. going in with the physician to call the time of death was almost an out of body experience. i've never seen a baby so tiny, she barely weighed 1 pound. all of her little parts perfectly formed but not ready to be exposed to the big bad scary world. it wasn't due to anything the mom did wrong either. it seems so unfair, especially when we've got other mom's who almost don't deserve to have their healthy babies when they come in testing positive for all sorts of drugs, and neglecting to get prenatal care. i'm not really sure how to convey how i feel about all of this. it still needs to digest a bit.

another day of surgery tomorrow and on call til wednesday.

Whirlwind week

1 week down 103 left to go. 722 days until graduation...yeahhhh that number is too depressing to start a countdown especially since people like Kelly only have 72 days until graduation. I'm not jealous or bitter or anything though--I'll work on being more convincing :)

A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to Colin for graduating from Shanahan yesterday morning- pictures will follow as I'm currently bored at the hospital on call. And also a 'Bessie-sized' congratulations to Ms. Deborah Marie Cassidy. I'm having some serious fomo about your graduation party since it is sure to be fantastic.

After my first call, 3 days in the hospital and 1 day in the clinic I finally saw my first baby this morning in a c-section-it was awesome :) There are definately a variety of pregnant women in reading I'll give it that much. The clinic on thursday was an experience. The first pelvic exam I had the pleasure of doing the patient ended up having trichi trichi (an STD...yuck).

Thursday night was ridiculous. James Taylor and Carol King concert literally 20 feet from the stage. Thank you mom and dad :)
Keith hopped his butt on the bike and rode up so we could hang out for a hot minute. So lucky to have someone willing to visit for such a short time and get up at 6am with me to leave <3

Cracked up in the Looney Bin

I'd always figured that at some point being in the medical field would drive me crazy i'd just never imagined that it would be so soon.

I've arrived in Reading Pa, just about 24 hours ago embarking upon the next 2 years of rotations. I moved into my free housing in downtown Reading and the only thing i knew about it before i got here was that it was dormitory style and that there was the possibility of having a roommate and no bathroom. Flashbacks of Freshman year in East Halls filled my head as i mentally tried to prepare myself for the pleasantries of communal housing. Fortunately after i'd gotten a bit settled and learned from some of the more seasoned med students that live here on the 4th floor along with me that not only did i not have a roommate (yay!) and that i had my own sink and bathroom (double yay) but that i was now holding residence in a former inpatient pysch unit complete with my very own metal mirror bolted with flathead screws to the wall. don't worry though, the running inpatient pysch unit is just a floor below me if i feel the urge to check myself in.

really though it's not bad all things considering, i have my own space and two hospital beds (one of which has completely defeated me since i cannot get more than 1 end to lower below chest height) and an air conditioner that keeps my room at a crisp 58 degrees. Thanks dad for teaching me early to layer and deal with the freezing conditions i endured on every vacation we've ever been on since there is no way to shut it off.

Other than that--today was a pretty normal first day from what i understand. I have orientation this morning and was at the hospital for the rest of the day. it was a bit overwhelming trying to pick up all the different things that i need to know but i suspect it'll get easier the longer i'm here. no babies to catch today since there were 6 deliveries over the weekend but i've got my first 'on call' shift tomorrow night where i will be there for about 30ish hours. can't wait :)

some pics from baltimore memorial day weekend

trying to see if by holding hands they can conduct the electricity from the bug zapper through the circle. brilliant.

had to set the timer, scale a wall and get yanked up onto the roof in order to get this one :)