Santa's big helpers!

I really should sleep now (since I'm on call) but I feel a little guilty. There are only two of us interns covering the entire pedi service tonight on Christmas eve/morn, one of us admits (not me) and the other one is available for questions/concerns/emergencies the other patients in the hospital might have. Right now I've gotten called on a few easy things (tylenol for fever!) a few confusing things (why IS this patient in the hospital, really?) and one sad thing (boooo yeast line infections in kids!) The admitting intern, Jaime, is hard at work seeing kids, saving lives... and then here I am blogging! well, I could be sleeping. I'm already caught up on my discharge summaries!!

So I've kind of been bad keeping up with these hospital stories... I had this whole "ode to pumkins" theme I was going to use for my little NICU babies. but alas, that was a month ago. My pumpkins are doing well from what I hear, I heard one little baby (who was really fat too! AWWW!) was recently extubated and feeding well! and my other one who started looking like a glow-worm when I met him might actually be gaining weight. He was cute. If I could describe my entire NICU experience by one patient, that would be little baby A. He'd just be rocking in his little chair like a bobble head... with his big eyes wide open, tounge sticking out of his mouth and a serious look on his face (sometimes he'd smile though!) Soooo cute.

Last month (december... gasp!) I was in a chronic care facilty for kids who needed rehab, long term med therapy or kids too sick to go home but not sick enough to be in the hospital. That was pretty fun, only one kid I got really attached to (as did everyone since she'd been in and out of hospitals for the past few years) decide she had enough of her war against Pompe's disease (and the experimental enzyme replacement therapy she was getting for it) and left for a better world. Poor kiddo. She will be missed... with her cute little smiles, head bobbing and arm waving... but I'm sure she won't miss the crazy amount of meds and breathing devices keeping her alive. The room was so quiet though, it was eerie. If I were a braver intern, I woulda held her while they withdrew care, but I think I'm not quite ready yet. I have so much admiration for hospice workers and people in general who are at peace with the idea of death, and being with people as they go. I, on the other hand, have a severe fight-or-flight response. So I flew... out the door. Meh.

Whew. Now this holiday schedule is so confusing. let me expain. there are four teams of interns at our hospital, we've combined two of the teams so that Team A is former Teams B and D, and Team B is former Teams A and C. There are three interns on each team, and two supers on one team, we admit tonight and tomorrow, and the other team admits the day after Christmas. I'm taking call tonight for Team B, but I'm really on Team A. Or something like that. Anyway we have the original Team A pager (since it says team A on it) but the real team A patients are on Team B... so you can see what kind of fun we've had today. :-) But the nurses are feeding me goodies tonight and digging my Santa hat, so I can't get annoyed. It's almost Christmas!

Speaking of which, I wish you all a merry one! I'm going to have a fantastic one tomorrow... in my bed all snug and warm... with my pager OFF! :-) Good night to all!

Awesome.

This woman is my hero!

That's all for now... I slept 13 hours straight after my NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) call the other day. And... I think I'm going to sleep some more now.

But first a story. I intubated today!! It sort of counted, the NICU fellow had to hold the blade in place to expose the chords after my own failed attempt. So all I really had to do was put the tube in between the chords, and wooooo! It was in! You remember how when we were kids we put blocks through holes and thought we were geniouses? It was sort of like that. Maybe next time, I can do the whole thing myself!

I should write more about my babies. They're all champs, they're so cute and are starting to fix themselves. Its amazing how many babies are born broken, and even more amazing how they can sometimes self-correct. I'll leave that to my next post. I already have a fun title in my mind. (wouldn't you like to know!) :-)

Mmmm I need a run. Tomorrow. OK I'm out!

October

Wow! October already! Here's a great sky scene I saw on the way back from Austin last week... or was it on the way to Austin? This was right before I saw a rainbow! This month has been pretty cool, give or take a few rough spots. I haven't cried yet on my new floor rotation, we have three of these that are supposed to be the roughest of our intern year. I am slowly suspecting something... we pedi residents are freakin lucky. I'm so glad I'm not a surgeon.

But I have gotten yelled at by more patients in the last week than I've been in my entire (short) clinical experience. Apparently the private patient population of Houston has less patience for new interns getting to know the system. Some yelling has been justified (I'll write those orders faster!) but some yelling... has just been strange! I had to explain to a mom today that just giving a kid (no fevers, not in pain, but recovering from pnemonia and dehydration) Tylenol didn't do anything for her tantrum-throwing... she was, in fact, displaying totally normal two-year old behavior. With a sneaky smile the whole time. This actually meant she was getting better, which the mom had a hard time grasping. She just kept saying "I don't care what you think, there's a gift store downstairs, I'll go buy Tyelenol myself!" To her credit, I think she calmed down in the end (the kid, not the mom.)

The craziest instance so far I've had getting yelled at was two months ago in LBJ. This event should go down in some kind of book. I'm going to call this chapter "Worst Luck in History" This little patient was a baby transferred over from Hermann because of insurance reasons, and he was getting IV penicillin for an infection through a PICC line (I forgot where the infection was, he was a patient I was cross-covering for... Di, if you're reading this you know this story!) and had a PICC line. Anyway, this mom didn't trust the cleanliness of the county hospital (understandable actually) to the point where she brought along her own cleaning supplies. Now, LBJ is a different world, a world where patients DO get better, but it's far from the hotel-like atmosphere of the private hospital where she was coming from. Anyway she also demanded that the nurses wear gloves (I thought they did!) and wanted her own room instead of sharing it with four other patients (probably a HIPPA violation, but c'mon! county hospital!)

The team who was caring for her daughter moved her to one of the isolation rooms. (normally used for patients admitted with contagious illnesses.) So the team checked out to me, and soon I get this page from a nurse... "um, Doctor? you better come quick..." I got back to the floor, and there were three nurses going into her room, and a rather official looking person walking towards us. I walked into her room, and she's shaking and in tears. She mentioned something about pubic hair on the toilet (ew!) and bugs in the shower, and kept crying, and then just couldnt talk anymore. So I look in the bathroom, and the toilet looks fine (she said she cleaned it off, I wondered if her cleaning supplies were cleaner than the hospitals. I shoulda borrowed it for the call rooms.) and then I looked in the shower. There were BUGS! like... LITTLE ROACHES! About twenty of em!! Or more! It was really gross, and ridiculously ironic. But mostly gross. :-)

Needless to say, it took a miracle talking her into staying the night, so at least her own doctors could find another solution for her kid's treatment. But then two things happened, one, the wipey board fell off the wall in her room (causing even more tears) and two, the baby's PICC line clogged up. This is where I'm not sure where the story led to, I signed off on this point after being on the phone with Interventional Radiology all night trying to figure out how to fix a clogged PICC line in a hospital which doesn't have tPA (the clotbuster!) or attendings in house at night trained how to reinsert them. So, I think I switched to Intramuscular Penicillin, so she wouldnt miss any doses, I think the mom yelled at me some more for making her baby take more shots, but she needed 5 more days of therapy and that was the best I could do! Of course if this were House, Pediatric interns could just put in new PICC lines... sigh. Maybe on my call tomorrow...

But man. Everytime I think I have a bad day I'll just have to remember that mom's day. I'd like to think there's very little in the world out there that can top that.

Guilt Trips

I received a birthday present in the mail today... which was awesome! I am now in possession of a green shirt that says "keepin it green" sent from my good friend Rakhi who now works for the EPA in DC. I like to think of myself as environmentally conscious (I like the environment and applaud people who work to make it better) but I still feel like wearing the shirt would make me a poser. Why?

Because I live in Houston!

I'm going try not to turn this into a diss on Texas's environmental policies. Because really, we can all make a difference even if it means collecting all your recyclables and driving that 30 minutes to one of the few recycling centers in town. Maybe I'm exaggerating. From where I am, it's 10 minutes to Rice U, where I've dropped off my cardboards, and maybe 20 or so minutes to where I can find a place to take my plastics and cans. The problem is that I don't have time, and making these trips involves a lot of planning and strategy since you can't really let empty milk bottles sit around too long.

Let's solve this problem. Hmm... here's a site that's helpful...

Clean Texas

It tells you exactly where you can go to recycle things... and I think it'll be totally useful once I figure out what "corrugated cardboard," "fiber drums," and "acrylonitrile butadiene styrene" are. But it's encouraging that you can recycle almost everything. For example, if I were to recycle cottin gin hulls, I could just drive to Austin! Awww Austin. :-)

I shall have to figure out how to live in Houston (otherwise surprisingly great) without feeling like I'm slowly killing the earth. Then, maybe I can wear the shirt... unless "keepin it green" means being jealous of people living in cities where recycling and public transportation are the norm.

Bunnies!

So this is the most belated post of all time (Sorry Scott!) A few weeks ago, a fellow friend from med school and I journeyed to the Houston Zoo... and here are some pics! I really should have taken more, but my camara was broken. Luckily my phone has super phone powers. You can click on the pics to make them bigger (I think). Since this zoo visit, I've figured out how to bike there from my apartment, and it only takes about 30 minutes! it's a really nice trail by the big bayou flood collection thingie by my apartment. Here are the pics!


First... BUNNY! And... tiger getting in the water... Hop bunny, hop away!




You can kind of see the bunny standing in front of the Giraffe. SO MANY BUNNIES!

This might be a better view of the bunny. It's the little spot under the pole that kind of runs into the Giraffe's neck... does that make sense? This bunny has no danger of tigers, since Giraffes have tiger eating abilities. Or fences around them. :-)

And finally: MONKEY!! I've decided that if one day I aquire superhuman abilities (superior to my phone's photo taking abilities of course) I shall free the monkeys. Hopefully the monkey poo won't take too much of a toll on the city's cleanliness, but I'm sure we'll all benifit from a little coinhabitation.

And speaking of camaras.. I FIXED mine! It turns out that if your camara's lens is jammed so that when you turn the phone on the lens doesn't come out (or it makes a funny noise and turns off as in my case) all you have to do is take it apart and jiggle it around! then when you put it back together, jam the lens all the way in. And voila! FIXED!

I can take real pictures now. Watch out, world!

Hmm... what else of note... things are fun at the hospital. Although, I find myself laughing at really horrible things now. My co-intern was presenting a 2 year old patient that he admitted for an asthma exacerbation overnight, and the story kept getting more ridiculous. Mom didn't believe in giving the kid corticosteroids, and he had eight ER visits in the last year. Mom was bipolar, Dad was a sex offender. Dad complained mom hit the baby. Baby presented with a black eye. Mom admitted to calling dad saying that she bit her baby. I kind of lost it there and thus began an embarrasingly unstoppable fit of giggles. To my credit at least, the attending joined in.

And what was the result of all this? CPS said "sure the kid can go home with the mom." WHAT?! Legally perhaps the kid was in no danger, but dude! the kid is only 2. TAKE HIM AWAY FROM THOSE CRAZIES!! He won't remember when he's older.

Whew. That's all. I've come to really appreciate good parents in light of all these people who have children. I've come to appreciate my own parents most of all I think.

Only two more weeks left at LBJ... think I might take Step 3 next month during my development and behavior (aka child psych) rotation. I probably should just enjoy slacking off for yet another month, but something tells me I should actually try to become smarter... :-)

Disc On!

I've discovered a group of people who play ultimate! One of them even played with us at uthscsa before going off to Baylor to do a Pedi residency three years ago. So it was a fun reunion of sorts! It seems that people have played at Hermann Park for the past 10 years, but for the past four weeks or so thunderstorms have stopped a lot of people from coming out. This time the sky was clear, with 2/3 of the muddy field resembling the wetlands. As it should be.


I saw a little surprise peeking out over the bushes looking at the players on my way back. I can't believe he didnt notice me sneaking up on him. Bunnies and Frisbee!! That's kind of like the royal flush of cuteness. or awesomeness. why didn't we have bunnies at uthscsa? :-)

Back on call tomorrow! On a fun (and slightly nerdy) note, the other day I diagnosed my first case of Viral Meningitis!! With a crystal clear LP on the first try! Oh sweet success! The little boy will be fine... this particular type of viral meningitis gets better on its own. But it felt really nice telling his mom the diagnosis and freeing her from other worries... this whole doctor thing is awesome!!

All Day I Dream

Today I had to fill in for the intern in the nursery… we call this position "the mole” because you sort of disappear from everyone on the floor. The mole's job is to do 20 or so newborn exams in 3 hours, try not to lose babies (it happens!) and then discharge them while the nurses are all yelling at you to go faster so they have space to admit more babies. But I have to make sure he has an anus first! (yes that happens too.)

Anyway so to take my mind off what was almost an embarrassingly disastrous day, I am going to think of what makes me happy. Another one for the list:

3. Go running in cool places, especially if I’ve never been there before, and especially near large bodies of water

I bought new running shoes not too long ago. My old Nikes were fun, and did well for my feet this past year. No major injuries. Some great runs around Town Lake in Austin, a few by Corpus Christi’s bay, Forest Park in St Louis, and my personal favorite, by the bay of Bengal in Pondicherry- during sunrise! They also helped me hike/run up the foothills of the Alps in Füssen, Germany so that I’d have enough time to see the Neuschwanstein Schloss (castle), absorb its beauty, and book it downhill to catch a train so I wouldn't miss my flight to Rome.

Even San Antonio had its surprises; once I came across a little beige stucco house in the Alamo Heights area with the same color scheme as its flower garden. Totally worth planning a run/bike around, I think it's on Cambridge street. Purple shutters to match the purple flowers! Oooooh.

Yes, those Nikes have given me quite the memorable year. They were there in times of frustration, doubt, and even when I was starting to feel like my heart had a “kick me” sign on it. Post-run ice cream coupled with good friends can work wonders as an emotional analgesic, and I’ve come to realize that this world is full of kind souls (no pun intended) after all. :-)

But as it is, I’m an Adidas girl at heart. Running in this new pair of shoes is like falling back in touch with an old friend. Blue, lightweight, soft, sweet. A whole new six months-to-a-year of memories. Muy Perfecto!

Thunderstorms

There’s something so soothing about thunderstorms and listening to the rain… of course having to drive home in it sort of sucks, but when you’re contained in something dry it’s very calming. Residency has been fun so far, I can’t believe I can feed babies whenever I want. I should make a list of all these theraputic discoveries I've stumbled upon...

If I start to go insane because of residency/life I should:
1. feed babies
2. listen to thunderstorms

I’ll add more eventually. On a sadder note, my beloved canine family member of 14.75 years, Hershey, passed away in his sleep on June 29. It kind of took me a week to process, and I’ve repressed enough emotion so that issues about this will probably resurface in 20 years. But that’s ok, I’ve got my list--it’ll be huge by then!

To anyone I’ve talked to (or refused to talk to) about Hershey… thank you for being here. He was a loved old man. :-)

Taco Supreme!

Thank goodness for cute young things in blankets.

I was going to write some things about call but then I realized something. I can't remember! I can't remember anything! Sleep deprivation subtracts things from my memory. This frightens me. The first thing I heard when I walked into our break room was "thou shalt not fear!" Apparently someone left the TV on from the night before and this tele-evangelist lady was on. I had to smile... you kind of do get that feeling that you're an actor in some really strange tv show sometimes around here.

I've discovered something though, I think you may need a little fear. I might need a little fear... just a tiny bit so that I STAY AWAKE. I was so high on adrenaline last night that not only did I not really sleep the entire 5 hours that there were no pages and nothing to do, but I wasn't sleepy at at in morning report or noon conference the next day. And seeing the three patients admitted at 3am? No problem. Only I was kinda in this weird hazy awake-yet-forgetful-spazzed out state. Some people look great when they spazz (like Di!) but me, I look like Einstein. With the hair, without the brains.

I hope I didn't scare my med student. Med students are awesome! They just started their clinical year, and keep wanting to do really nice things for us. I think they feel bad for us with our sometimes-overwhelming scutwork and not knowing where anything is all the time. I wanted to tell them "we're fine, you should wait till your surgery rotation, we peds residents are spoiled!!" I also have this urge to shower them with positive feedback and tell them everything i know all the time. I have PTSD issues from my first third year rotation (CT Surgery) where we were pimped (questioned about our medical knowledge) mercilessly, yelled at, and made to feel like we really WERE scum. And it was true that our time was constantly wasted. My evaluation/grade from that rotation was great, but was the psychological abuse necessary? I hope I never make a med student cry. Here, our pediatrics chief resident has chocolate and hugs in her office when things get tough! :-)

What's better than chocolate and hugs? I leaned how to feed a baby last night!! It was so theraputic. Next time I freak out, I'll just drop everything and go feed babies. YAY FOR CUTE YOUNG THINGS IN BLANKETS!

Mi Familia Nueva!

This was at the senior resident graduation/new intern welcome dinner last night... at Rice! I shouldn' t be saying this, but Rice was my first choice for undergrad, before they rejected my attempt at early decision-ing in. How ironic that now I live less than 10 minutes away from their campus (which is just as beautiful as i remembered it!) Well I wouldn't have changed a thing... bears eat owls for lunch. GO WASH U!

Our group is awesome... three cheers for happy nice fun people! Lookin forward to a fun, yet challenging year... and actually learning spanish for real. :-)

Ode to Hershey, Survivor Extraordinaire

Want to know a great way to kill conversation? Just ask me about Hershey… not only is the most wonderful dog in the universe but he’s at the end of his road. In an 'it’ll be a miracle if he survives a few more weeks’ kind of thing. So I’m proud of myself for not being a complete emotional wreck, but dealing with end-of-life issues for canines is new and confusing for me.

First, why do we put pets to sleep? We don’t put people to sleep! (I guess that’s debatable in some states.) Hershey’s 14yrs 8 months with hypertension, arthritis, hearing loss, status post two strokes (or expanding brain tumor) which left him completely blind, early stages of leukemia (the vet is guessing), tachypnea, (vet thinks he has a heart condition), and recent onset of bloody diarrhea. We’ve opted against an extensive and stressful medical work-up, and when I get into his medical history I usually get sympathetic looks and the "yeah when my dog got like that we put him to sleep... ever think about it?"

No! He can't walk around as easily, but he wags his tail and perks his ears up whenever he feels or smells us near. He knows, man. I don’t think he wants to go down quite yet either. I don't know how, but I feel like if Hershey became suicidal he'd somehow let us know.

For one, he still likes eating everything. My dad seems to like this because he can finally feed Hershey all kinds of people food (which we used to yell at him all the time for.) So, not only does Hershey gets chocolate-chip-less cookies, he gets eggs, all leftovers and anything else the parents feel like giving him. In fact, I think there’s some filet mignon with his name on it in the fridge.

And another thing, he still hates my brother's dog. To the point where if she comes near he'll move instantly and even bark if necessary. He's got some fight left in him yet! He's taking a lot of meds, mostly to make him comfortable till he decides to leave for that giant backyard in the sky.

I could never do veterinary medicine. It freaks me out, I still don't fully understand what's medically going on with Hershey. You'd think there'd be some overlap, but dogs are like little aliens to me. I used to laugh at all those people who’d submit their dogs to brain surgery or pacemaker implants but now I understand them. I’m one of the crazies! Hershey’s a part of my family—he’s been around for more than half my life, and almost all of the time I can remember. And he’s loved me for all of it. (I think it might have to do with belly rubs and frisbee tossing.) If he were younger I’d probably donate him a kidney! Although, his kidneys are one of the few organs that ARE working properly at the moment.

Whew. Back in Houston now and ready for more orientationing tomorrow. (check out Di's blog to see what we've been up to for the past few days! hehe I know, I'm SO cheating) :-)

I'm Here!

I’m in the process of moving into my new place in Houston… and it’s fantastic! It’s in an older apartment complex with trees actually taller than the three-story buildings around it (a rarity in TX). The complex also has its own convenience store, which I should check out. Seriously this place looks like I’m in the northeast… I will definitely miss my old roommates and our westward facing balcony (with spectacular sunsets nearly every day) but man. I have so much space here too! And I have a new fellow UTHSCSAn partner-in-crime Diane! YAY!

Prepare for some amazement. I bought this alarm clock at Target for $14.99. I’m totally still skeptical, but this thing has an auto-time setting system!! After it's plugged in, the time, date, and day of the week show up. I just had to set it to the central time zone. The clock has an internal computer that keeps track of everything—including daylight savings—even when the power is off! And if we lose power at night, the “mini buzzer” will go off instead of the normal alarm. I wonder what the macro-buzzer sounds like. It says it has a "crescendo alarm"... like mitral stenosis! But, hopefully much more kinder on my heart. :-)

And if that wasn’t cool enough… it has a PROJECTOR. I press a button and it’ll project the time on the ceiling, or at any wall I point it to. So this means I can wake up to check the time without moving!! And the projected image can be red, green, or blue. Did I miss something in the advancements of alarm clocks?

Pot-Sicles?

This was too funny not to post. When I was a little kid, I used to get so excited every time I heard the ice cream truck come by our neighborhood. Sadly, my dad would never us buy anything... he always said the ice cream truck guy might be selling drugs. "ey, you never know what they put in there!!" He was so convinced too.

So for years, I would just sit outside listening to the happy tunes thinking my dad was totally crazy. If I were a more clever one I coulda just snuck around to a different street and bought some, but that was before my rebellion days. (did they happen yet?) :-)

Today, my mom gave me this article to read. Apparently you do have to watch out for this sort of thing! Unfortunately my dad might take this to prevent future generations of my family from buying ice cream truck ice cream, but I had to laugh at his vindication at last.

Ich bin ein Arzt!

So that was the fastest graduation I’ve ever experienced. It was nice, if you leave out the fact that my car was towed earlier that morning (I didn’t see any no parking signs… I shoulda looked harder) with my graduation regalia in the trunk. Props to my heroic roomie and her fiancé with his GPS system, and the lady who opened up the impound a half an hour early so I could get my robes! My friend Robert, also our class president, had some trouble too, he got a speeding ticket on the way to graduation. The cop actually said (after writing the ticket) “well won’t this make a great graduation story!” Robert mentioned this in his speech to our class, and all I can say is that the officer is pretty lucky we all had to take the Hippocratic oath again. :-) Now, I’m trying not to freak out about the new responsibilities that come with those extra two letters after my name. But on to happier thoughts! I had such an amazing time traveling around Europe last week. Deutschland war wunderbar! I took German in high school, and it was so fun having an excuse to speak it all the time even though I probably sounded like a kid with my über-basic grammar. I traveled through Germany for a few days, then Rome, and finished the trip off in Paris, meeting up with friends along the way. Some things I learned: 1. If you're flying Northwest Airlines, make sure they check your bags under your name before you hand them over. 2. Don't lose hope when your luggage gets lost, you never know when (or where!) it might pop up! For me, this lucky place and time was 4 days later in Mannheim, Germany in a storage area 40 minutes out of town. 3. German beer is awesome! And I dont even like beer! 4. Water = H2O + carbonation throughout Europe 5. I can diagnose sleep apnea in people snoring loudly on an overnight train, and then actually sleep through it. 6. It IS possible to communicate effectively with someone who knows French, Portuguese and Italian when you only know English, a little Spanish, German, and maybe 3 phrases in Kannada. 7. Trains are totally cool ways to meet people, I want to revamp the entire American transportation system now. Do we really need all these big cars? Make more Chunnels, I say! 8. Tony Parker released a French Hip-Hop album in March of 2007 and is now on cereal boxes throughout Paris! In Spurs uniform, of course. 9. And finally, it turns out that we're not alone in our quest to promote equality. (As shown on a lampost near the University of Heidelberg in Germany) Save the Planet, Space Invaders! :-)

La Primera Historia

My old friendster blog (don’t judge) is at http://delicioso.blogs.friendster.com/... I would have just stuck with my last one from India and its fun picture inserting ability (http://www.adventurings.blogspot.com) but that one has been shared with faculty from my school. It was awesome actually, being able to share something like that with people here, especially the donors who made our scholarships possible. Unfortunately, I can’t really use it anymore for a personal blog of sorts… so here we go!

This will be fun though. Just in time for residency… I may not be as badass as Cameron on House, but I’ll definitely stick in some fun patient stories here. I’m totally going to try and alter my white coats (this may require sewing lessons from the mom) so that they have that cool movie-star tapered-at-the-waist look. The plan is to look so snazzy that my patients can’t see how internally freaked out I am. :-)

I read this article today. To summarize, an internationally renowned violin player tried to see what would happen if he started playing historically famous pieces in a busy crowd, kind of like those musicians who play on the street for money. Only he was the “real thing.” He was trying to see how many people would stop and listen, and if people would donate money. I was definitely surprised at what happened.

This was great. It really made me think, but not about whether I would have stopped or not. It kind of reminds me of this saxophonist I heard in a subway station on my way to an interview… I remember feeling grateful to him, to put a little beauty in a grey morning and lightening the dull background of the station walls. I always wondered if I made the right choice stepping into and struggling through the world of science, when my natural abilities lean towards the creative. My biggest fear, I think, is that I’d lose it somehow… that ten years from now when I start mixing oil paints I would stare at a blank canvas thinking “I used to do this…”

But this article changed my mind. I loved hearing about the people’s reactions to hearing something they knew was beautiful, especially the quote of one of the men who stopped to listen. He trained for many years on the violin, but chose not to pursue it as a career. They asked him if he regretted it, after hearing the man play.

"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."

It makes me feel like it's kind of a gift, to be an appreciator of things like that. Like if you've learned any type of art, even if you forget how to hold a pencil, or play the c scale on a guitar, you'd still share the same joy the artists had when you see or hear their creations... what a comfort indeed. Now I can finally become a full blown science nerd!

Maaaaan... blog number three has turned me into a cheeseball. :-)