What Residency Looks Like XC: Random thoughts

What residency looks like:
1st breakfast: scrambled egg with Old Bay, two warm pumpkin cookies, peppermint milk tea
2nd breakfast: two homemade chocolate chip cookies, yogurt with kiwi and craisins
Lunch: ham sandwich, pretzels
Snack: apple, white cheddar popcorn
Dinner: lentil soup

Yes, I had 4 cookies for breakfasts this morning: brain food! That's me ensconced in an enormous rocking easy chair in the Neurology lounge, where I frequently put my feet up while reviewing charts or writing notes.

Scenes from social distancing: The in-hospital eatery is closed down, and the tables and chairs have been replaced by a cooler with 1/2 gallons of milk and shelves with loaves of bread. Is this an invitation for panic purchasing as if a snowstorm were on its way?

All of the couches, chairs, and end tables have been pushed into a corner in the lobby to prevent visitors or patients from lingering. The entrance is now cordoned off, and security guards check badges in order to keep the number of visitors low.

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What Residency Looks Like LXXXX: Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We're ready for St. Patrick's Day at our outpatient clinic! These goofy dinosaur and zebra greet everyone who comes through the waiting room. Did you put on something green, eat your Lucky Charms, and follow the rainbow to its lucky destination this morning? Actually, not many people are out and about, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools and restaurants have been closed, and our schedules have been frozen, either to make room for patients who are acutely ill, or in case we get pulled for coverage at the hospital. I'll leave you with a couple Irish blessings for these...interest times:

May good luck be with you wherever you go,
and your blessings outnumber the shamrocks that grow.

May the Good Lord take a liking to you--but not too soon! 

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What Residency Looks Like LXXXIX: Packing my bags

With the heightened concern about transmissability of SARS-CoV-2, the Corona virus that causes COVID-19, many of us have stopped wearing white coats and are lobbying our programs to let us change into scrubs at the hospital so that we're not wearing clothes to and from that could carry infectious particles (of that or anything else). This is all well and good, except for the increase in laundry (time, detergent, electricity) if you can't access hospital scrubs, and the loss of all those glorious POCKETS, which is one of the main reasons I wear a white coat. Also, because I get cold. I have a slick residency program windbreaker with pockets, but I figure that falls into the category of wearable fomites, so I left that at home. Instead I decided to go back to carrying a "medical bag," an experiment I tried a few years ago and then gave up because I figured the bag itself was an infection risk. But I'm trying it again, leaving the bag at the hospital and laundering it weekly (which is as often as I wash my white coats, when I'm wearing them).

I packed my stethoscope (always cleaned before each use), reflex hammer because I'm on Neurology Consults (now cleaned after each use), a couple of pens, a penlight, my pager, some lip gloss, extra hand sanitizer, and alcohol wipes. The detachable wallet purse has my driver's license, debit card, meal tickets, and some cash. I can tuck my cell phone (wiped down a couple times a day now) into one of the outer pockets.

Maybe this is premature, but just in case we get to the place at which physician cannot or should not go home from the hospital to non-medical cohabitants, I have also packed an overnight bag with two sets of scrubs, two tshirts to wear underneath (hospitals get cold at night!), extra socks and underwear (not pictured), grubby sneakers, shampoo and toothpaste, a hair barrette, silicon ear plugs for sleeping at night, sanitary supplies, arch supports, key medical references, green tea, granola bars, M&Ms, and dried apricots. (Meal tickets are no go if the cafeteria is closed!) Hopefully I end up pulling this bag from my trunk once the pandemic blows over, but until then, I'll be prepared like the Girl Scout I am.

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Lentils: They're what's for dinner!

"I know you want takeout, but we have lentils at home"

Good friend JGD. shared this recipe on Facebook, and it sounded so good that I went out of my way to pick up coconut milk to have on hand to make it. There is little active cook time over the stove, but the chopping and measuring took almost as long as the simmering. Although I usually take recipe directions with a grain of salt--i.e. as suggestions rather than instructions--I was able to follow this recipe to the letter (except for the garam masala), because the author cooks more or less like I do!

This is 2 cups of lentils and 1/2 can of coconut milk, with 1 can of diced tomatoes and 1 package of frozen spinach. Too bad the soup used up some of the spices (ginger, cloves) and all of frozen spinach. Now I have to figure out what to do with the other 1/2 can of coconut milk--maybe freelance some more. After all, we've got all kinds of beans in the cupboard, and plenty of other spices.

Los Angeles: Hollyhock House & Griffith Observatory

After our visit to Hollyhock House*, the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Los Angeles, our host drove us to the Griffith Observatory and dropped us off to explore. The building was erected in 1934 and renovated in the early 2000s. We watched Leonard Nimoy narrate a short documentary about the process of lifting the whole thing off its foundation so they could dig two floors down to expand their display space-!

The original murals depicting the zodiac, planets, and figures from the history of science in the central rotunda were restored. (You can't really see it from here, but they're pretty trippy.) The long ramp down to the lower floors is now flanked by a delightful collage of star- and moon-themed jewelry artfully arranged below a timeline from the Big Bang, represented below, to the present day.

"If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world." ~Griffith J. Griffith (1850-1919) While looking up his life/death dates, I discovered that the Observatory omitted to tell us the other reason Griffith is (in)famous: shooting his wife in 1903! Miraculously, she survived, losing her right eye, and winning a divorce and custody of their teen-aged son while he served 2 years in San Quentin State Prison and received treatment for his "alcoholic insanity."

We had a lot of fun here. Above left is a piece of moon rock. We got a docent to explain to us why only one side of the moon faces the earth (it's due to gravitational pull). We played with a globe of Jupiter that recreated the "red spot." We weighed ourselves on scales titrated for the different planets. Above right is a display of elements. I'm pointing out the fact that "we are star dust and to the universe we will return" (Credit: Period Pastor).

Left, we got to explore the terraces while there was still sunlight; right, the Observatory from Hollyhock House. We purchased tickets for a planetarium show about Vikings and the aurora borealis called "Light of the Valkyries" set to the music of Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." It had a live narrator and graphics that only got kind of cheesy at the end. it was neat. 

Afterward we wandered around the exhibits waiting for the sun to set so we could look through the telescope. When we went up at dusk, however, the line was verrrrrrrrrrry long. We were hungry, but not for what the cafeteria was offering, so we took the bus down the hill to an ice cream shop before calling a Lyft home.

*Unfortunately, I waited too long to get tickets for the guided tour that would have allowed us to take photographs, as at the other Frank Lloyd Wright properties we have visited (Taliesin, Oak Park, Fallingwater, Polymath Park).


Editor's Note: Check out our other Los Angeles posts on the La Brea Tar Pits and the Santa Monica Pier.

Los Angeles: Santa Monica editon

Wednesday we stuck close to our home base in Santa Monica. After a lazy morning, during which I logged in remotely to watch a hospital update about COVID-19, we met a friend from residency for seafood at the Santa Monica Pier. Below is the view of the roller coaster from our table.



The Pier first opened in 1909 to disguise the sewage pipe that extended into the ocean under it (!). It was the first concrete pier on the West Coast. Somehow the fishing was still superb, and an amusement park was added during World War I. Which was all well and good until rust and a large crowd caused the end to collapse in 1919! They eventually replaced the whole thing with creosote-treated wood. Oh, and stopped pumping sewage underneath. The late 1920s and early 1930s were jumping, when a huge ballroom was opened; unfortunately, the Great Depression sank that venture. After World War II, the Pier was once again an entertainment site. According to the history on the Pier's website, a fisherman named Olaf C. Olsen was the inspiration for the comic character "Popeye"! Other famous people associated with the Pier are Charlie Chaplin, who sailed a yacht in the harbor, and Preston "Pete" Peterson, who invented the famous oblong lifeguard flotation device. Like so many public goods, by the 1960s, the Pier was in disrepair. Community activists saved it from politicians in the 1970s, only to watch it succumb to the forces of nature in a pair of winter storms in 1983. It was rebuilt as a concrete pier with a wooden deck and an amusement park, finally opening in the 1990s.

After lunch we walked the length of the pier, said good-bye to my friend, and then over-paid to ride the solar-powered Ferris wheel. The views were nice, and it wasn't too windy. No necking, though. We walked down to the beach and waded in the water, which was cold, but it wasn't as blustery as that time we tried to touch the Pacific Ocean while visiting San Francisco a few years ago.

A stroll along the receding tide line brought us back to the Perry's where we had eaten breakfast our first morning in town. We rented a tandem bicycle for an hour to pedal down to Venice Beach and back. A one-speeder with seats I thought were too low, it was a bit of a trick to balance and steer. Nevertheless, we can proudly proclaim that in ~15 years of marriage, we have now kayaked, canoed, biked, and assembled Ikea furniture together. 

By that point the sun was going down, and the temperature was cooling off, so we met our host at a local rooftop cocktail bar to watch the sun set over appetizers and drinks. Below you can see the beautiful crown palms lining the main drag and the Pier in the background. When it was dark, we drove home so I could cook us pasta and asparagus and watch Parasite.

Editor's Note: Did you miss Tuesday's post about the La Brea Tar Pits?

Los Angeles: La Brea Tar Pits

After two years of Spring Break trips to Florida for adventures with nature, Spring Training Baseball, and cultural sights, this year Dear Husband and I decided to visit my old dissertation adviser, who has retired to California. #1 on my Los Angeles bucket list was to visit the La Brea Tar Pits, ever since my aunt gave me a book about dinosaurs coming up out of the tar to visit modern-day LA. Besides the whole childhood dream thing, this is a really cool site that combines science with history--the gorgeous weather for the outdoor parts didn't hurt--and it is the kind of thing we couldn't do anywhere else we have ever visited. (Our usual go-to's are art museums and botanical gardens, ever since our honeymoon.)

Our adventure back in time started with hopping on a city bus for the hour-long ride from downtown Santa Monica to the heart of LA. Public transit was free for the Super Tuesday Election Day. We read books and gawked at the urban scenery. Second happy surprise was that the museum was free (first Tuesday of the month during the off season). We joined a 45-minute walking tour of the site, which originally belonged to the Hancock family. In the late 19th century, they extracted the "tar" (really asphalt) and threw away the bones they found (dumb sheep), until it became obvious that these weren't ordinary bones (and fangs!).

Since the early 1900s, a million fossils have been removed, cleaned, sorted, and identified. The first iteration of the museum opened in 1913 already! They're currently in the middle of a big project, combing through 23 bins of material removed when the county art museum is next door built a parking garage. Check out the saber-toothed cat skull on display in "the lab" (above). We had not realized that the pits are all man made, either to mine asphalt or to look for fossils, and none of the ones being actively excavated were open to the public the day we went. Instead, we took part in a research project on artificial reality and teaching visitors about ecosystems, climate change, and the scientific method. We also watched a 3-D film--"Titans of the Ice Age"--which really played up the whole "sheets of ice" theme, although the AR study had taught us that the average temperatures in the Los Angeles area during the Pleistocene Era were only 16 degrees cooler than now, so the environment looked much the same. In fact, I think our tour get said 95% of the species found fossilized in the pits still live there day!

Wall of ~400 dire wolf skulls, one quarter of their collection.

Animatronic saber-toothed predator attacking a large ground sloth. 

It's no wonder why the latter died out.

I'll leave you with this photo of me being silly in the gift shop:

Editor's Note: Stay tuned for more Santa Monica/LA sights and out-of-this-world experiences!