Listen

Today in clinic a Dene Elder says to me while I am listening to his heart, "If it sounds a little different, it's 'cuz it has a Native beat".

I have never laughed so hard with a stethoscope in my ears.

One of those patients that I felt an instant connection with. I stared at those deep laugh lines etched in his tan skin while he told me about his cardiology appointment. He pulled out a palm sized moleskin notebook and recited ejection fractions and names of specialists and amiodarone adjustments (which he doesn't care for, after all the reading up he's done on it). He told me that when he had his heart attack he remembered being wheeled in through the hospital doors and that when they closed behind him, many other areas of his life closed behind him too. He woke up eight days later in a cardiac intensive care unit.

He golfs, he lifts weights, he walks everyday. His intensivist told him he was a "ticking time bomb" but he pointed out to me that he was still here. I told him I was glad of that.

I wanted to cancel the rest of my afternoon and just listen. Such a vivid cast of characters in this unfolding narrative which is my life.

Last Day

Today is my last day as an R1, which officially marks the halfway point in my rural family medicine residency training. I find it amusing that I have to have my orders and prescriptions reviewed and see patients in a parallel consulting style today, but once the weekend is over, I don't. It is a magical weekend I suppose wherein all the wisdom of my R1 training will culminate and crystallize to make me safe on Monday morning in a way that was different from today. Ha!

I laugh because this is almost as ridiculous as the fact that a year from now I could go to sleep on Sunday night as a resident and wake up Monday morning as an attending (well if it weren't for the extra training I'm planning in surgery).

These days seem, like all other milestones, eerily anticlimactic. It is exciting though in some ways to feel that sense of independence slowly developing, to find myself feeling slightly more confident with certain things that were so scary and daunting a year ago (my first order as a doctor was for a chest x-ray and I remember being completely freaked out when I wrote it! How pathetic is that?!)

Maybe today to mark the occasion ALL my patients will get chest x-rays! (I'm kidding, of course.)

Onward and upward, amigos!