Oh, The Places I've Been!

“Things may happen and often do to people as brainy and footsy as you”― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

How many of us received Dr. Seuss's Oh, The Places You'll Go! as a graduation gift? I got mine after high school, I think. For graduation from residency, My Awesome Parents (MAP) gifted me a piece of personalized artwork with each state in which I got my education: Maryland (K-12), Missouri (BA), Illinois (MD PhD), and Pennsylvania (residency). Each state is made of words about the state written in a different primary color. So Maryland has crabs, Missouri has the Ozarks, Illinois has deep dish pizza, and Pennsylvania has the Liberty Bell. When I opened, I knew exactly what I wanted to do to personalize it further. I hopped on RedBubble and found transparent stickers with objects associated with each state. I actually ordered more than would fit so that I would have options; the leftovers will probably end up on travel mugs (then maybe I won't lose them as easily!). Below you can see the work in progress. For Maryland, a black-eyed Susan with the Maryland flag at the center and a crab with the state glad didn't make the cut; I chose the Old Bay spice box from McCormick's and a fancy, mosaic blue crab. I thought about fried ravioli or the Washington University in St. Louis seal but settled on the facade of Brookings Building (looks like a castle) and the silhouettes of two lindyhoppers. For Illinois, I left off the Block I for the University of Illinois in favor of the Alma Mater statue; and I put a painting of Louis Armstrong up in Lake Michigan for Chicago and the blues. And for Pennsylvania, I put a golden Cathedral of Learning for the University of Pittsburgh at the center and made the difficult decision to leave off the Mr. Rogers trolley in favor of the Duquesne incline, for reasons of space. Oh! And I ordered a "Made in Texas" QPC code, for obvious reasons. I was momentarily stymied when I discovered it was *exactly* the same size as the frame I picked up at Michael's, but a few trims with scissors cut it down to fit nicely. I'll hang the finished product either in our bedroom or, when I get one, my office.

What Residency Looks Like XCIX: All Gone!

At the conclusion of residency, I went to the children's hospital to run some errands:

• Filled out yet another check-out form (3 programs = 4x the forms!)

• Dropped off my "pickle phone" and charger for one of the in-coming MedPeds interns (it's the ciiiiircle of technology!); happy to be keeping my pager with its winning number (#5050)

• Took my final portrait (below)

• Purchased $42.50-worth of food with the last of my meal tickets: sushi and a boxed salad for lunches, 2 pints of ice cream (chocolate for me, chocolate chip cookie dough for him), 1/2 dozen bagels, and 1 dozen fizzy drinks

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What Residency Looks Like CXV: Accomplishments

Monday: 

Graduated from Internal Medicine Residency (no more shifts!). I dressed up for the live-stream, although no one could see me except in the selfie I posted on Facebook. Even Dear Husband was on a different Zoom meeting.

Earned a Certificate in Medical Education. Was "voted" most likely to give a history of medicine lesson on rounds. Sore that the foodie award went to someone who isn't even a Yelp Elite.

Friday: 

Took a knee against white supremacy, racism, and police brutality. Medical professionals around the city gathered at noon to reflect and kneel for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, but I was not on campus due to graduation. So I had my own one-woman protest on the busy street corner in scrubs, a white coat, a refurbished version of the "White Coats 4 Black Lives" poster that has lived in my rear car window since medical school. I didn't do it for likes on social media, so I didn't have Dear Husband come take pictures or video or anything. I did it for the white man who started crossing the street, turned around, and came back to ask what I was doing. I did it for the black city bus driver who honked and waved. I did it for the black woman who asked to take my picture. I learned that 8 minutes and 46 seconds is a long time to support my weight on one thigh, and that the pavement is very hard when the soft neck of a Black person isn't underneath.

Graduated from Pediatrics Residency (1 Emergency Department shift, 12 more hours of jeopardy, and 3 weeks of out-patient elective to go!). DH, my parents, and I gathered at my colleague's house for a graduation party. Since Allegheny County had moved to Green that very day and there were still fewer than 10 of us, we figured it was safe. I confess that sitting on a friend's couch to watch a pre-recorded ceremony with an adult beverage in your hand is absolutely a superior way to experience a graduation. Big surprise: I was awarded the American Academy of Pediatrics Med-Peds Resident Recognition Award for my advocacy work, and the program director read my poem, "In the Trenches."

Provided by-stander aid to an older gentleman who fell off his motorcycle due to a near-miss with a car. Good thing there was a house full of doctors on the corner, and good thing he didn't really need us!

The ambulance driver who came to pick up the biker was definitely
laughing at us as she drove down the street after the accident...

Saturday:

Repaired a closet shelf that had collapsed when we moved in and I tried to store too many boxes of books on it. (Credit: Father Man)

Acquired a blister from a lovely walk in Frick Park in inappropriate footwear.

BBQ shish-kabobs (Credit: Father Man, who wore his new "My Favorite Doctor Calls Me DAD" tshirt)

Games after dinner included the tallest-ever Tier auf Tier tower (Credit: DH). We also made up rules for Gluecksferkel, because the instructions were missing from the box (I acquired 3 German children's games for free back in grad school).

Sunday:

Adult Forum finished talking about Barbara Brown Taylor's Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others; Zoom church went off more or less without a hitch; and DH had very thoughtfully picked up Klondike bars with which to mark the start of "summer church" (we're still meeting at the same time, however, since we don't have to move to the cooler worship area at an earlier time due to the lack of AC).

Re-upholstering my rocking chair. It was 10 years old when we got it with the dining room table and chairs from another history graduate student; at that time I replaced the stained blue-and-white coverings with green-and-brown stripes. 10 years and 2 cats later, however, it was time to replace the fabric. Mother brought a beautiful dark blue cotton with light blue flowers that remind me of blueberries and Maine for the front and ottoman, which we paired with a sturdy light blue polyester for the back.

45-minute hike in North Park (Mother and I are wearing matching face masks that she sewed)

Successfully ordered burgers to go (it only took two tries in three days, as the first time we accidentally landed on the site for a burger joint 30 minutes out of town!); watched Top Gun; chilled

Monday:

Had second breakfast together and said our good-byes until...mid-August for family vacation?

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Learning, Labor, and Love

For graduation, I asked my parents for customizable diploma frames from 3art. I chose the blue mat for my PhD diploma and green for the MD. In the green one I also put a photo of Dear Husband hooding me at graduation (it was the only professional up-and-down photo we got), as well as my tassel. In the blue one are my MD medals (Alpha Omega Alpha and Honors), as well as my BA tassel, since I lost my PhD tassel when I accidently returned it with my mortar board. These now hang in our living room, over the couch as mementos of 12 (16!) years of learning, labor, and love.

Maybe if I'm ever home again when the sun is up, I'll take better photographs.

I've Got Something in My Pocket...

The first time stitches popped on my backpack, I was hauling it onto my shoulder in an airplane, having just landed in Germany for 10.5 months of dissertation research. It was stuffed full of laptop, camera, cords, snacks, and goodness-knows-what-else, and a few of the stitches on one shoulder strap snapped. Wow, that was fast, I thought to myself. This brand had been recommended to me because of its sturdy design.

Since then I have reinforced the straps numerous times, and for at least a year only one zipper on the main compartment still caught the teeth of the zip. My parents had offered to buy me a professional bag for my PhD graduation, but I told them I wouldn't need to haul my laptop or books around with me while on the wards as a third- and fourth-year student. Then the other zipper lost its catch last week, and I realized it was time to bid "adieu" after almost six years of companionship.

These are some of the things I found while cleaning out its many pockets: the dish towel I used as a shock absorber in the bottom of the laptop compartment. 0.7-mm pencil lead for the clicky pencils I almost never use any more. My trusty little USB key named "Handymann," with the remains of a green flower sticker I begged off my landlady's 6-year-old daughter in Dresden, to mark which way was up. The clasp back of a stick pin.

The card reads "Paradigm Pioneer ~ Shift Happens" from friend and former pastor Howard O. Nash. I think he would be pleased by some of the shifts in social attitudes that have happened the last couple of years, but he would have had a regular conniption fit at current presidential election cycle. The pink pin "I [triangle] equality" is from Lambda Legal, the country's largest and oldest legal organization working for the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, and people with HIV/AIDS.

A friend in Germany bought me the hand mirror with a peacock on the back at Schloss Moritzburg in Saxony. The collapsible hairbrush is also from Germany (no special associations there). Finally, the beautiful business-card holder with a Gustav Klimt design in mother-of-pearl is was my parents ended up getting me for my PhD graduation. I always get compliments on it when I pull it out at conferences or an interview.

That's it for this week. Nothing deep. I just wanted to share these little bits of my history that I've been literally carrying around with me. Some of them have been transferred into my new (old) backpack that I am using again, others have been tucked into my desk. I'm sure that there will be some different objects the next time I need a new bag.

I Matched!

After months of applications, interviews, and waiting, I am pleased to announce that I have matched in Internal Medicine/Pediatrics at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). This is a combined residency program that smashes six years of training in adult and child medicine into four years. Med/Peds is still the shortest program I could find to let me get out into practice to do what I love after twelve years of graduate and medical school. Doctors who complete this pathway can either become specialists or work in primary care. I intend to do both by entering a niche called "complex care" that includes both diagnosing and treating rare diseases in the hospital and taking care of individuals with multiple life-long health-care needs in the clinic. I imagine my target population as kids with developmental disabilities and related conditions (such as cerebral palsy or Autism Spectrum Disorder)--and their families. Once they age out of their pediatrician, they can still see me, since I will be double boarded in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.

If you are following along on my Medical Grand Tour, UPMC was one of the last places I interviewed. By January I finally had an idea of what kind of career I want, and what kind of training I need to get there. Med/Peds at UPMC offers all that in an academic medical center--and the #8-ranked children's hospital in the nation--and infrastructure already in place to support the medical humanities--in a mid-sized Midwestern city on the water (three rivers, to be exact). An up-and-coming place, Pittsburgh is five hours from Dear Husband's family and four hours from mine, so the location couldn't be better. Really, it was a no-brainer. So for the last two months, I've been waiting to confirm what I already suspected: that I had found my match, and I didn't even have to kiss a frog. (The mosaic below is from the Pittsburgh Children's Hospital.)

The official photographer didn't get any photos of me making the announcement (how rude!), but you can watch me do so on YouTube by clicking here.

If you're curious how this whole Match thing works, Dear Husband wrote a blog post you can find on the Pianonoise blog.

Click here to see where my classmates matched!

“Stop reading and start writing!”

“Stop reading and start writing!” said my senior dissertation adviser on, I think, two occasions. So I did. He was trying to snap me out of the graduate-student dilemma of being a few years (or sometimes decades) behind in knowledge of the literature in one’s academic field. Why won’t other scholars stop publishing, at least until we catch up? One of the hardest lessons of graduate school is that you cannot read everything—even everything that you “should” read. When it comes to writing the dissertation, it is better to stop procrastinating by reading “just one more” book or article that contains someone else’s position on the subject and articulate your own position. The only time I relapsed into reading secondary sources was when I needed to know something factual (e.g. how working-class European families organized meals) or when I wanted to remind myself about a particular historian’s position, so that I could argue against it (e.g. that communal kitchens were unpopular and unsuccessful). Three years later, I had completed, defended, and deposited more than 300 pages of prose on the merging of science and politics in the rationing systems of World War I-era Germany. And I had stopped reading.

The weekend before graduation, I attended the annual conference of my professional organization, the American Association of the History of Medicine. During one of the keynote talks, which involved “shout-outs” to numerous well-known historians of medicine, I realized that I had managed to get through a decade of graduate education without having read some key texts in medical history. Granted, many of these cover American topics and so are not directly relevant to my own work, but being a medical humanist in the US, it is easier to talk to one’s clinical colleagues about our shared national medical history. So I promised myself that I would read one book in the history of medicine every month until I graduate from medical school. So far that has meant a few pages here and there at night before falling asleep, and many pages in airports and on planes while traveling one weekend. Although, now that Dear Husband and I have started preparing for the 32-week-long Disciple I Bible study together at bedtime, I may have to block off another time when I am not in clinic or studying for exams to recover this crucial bit of my identity and intellectual life.

In June I read Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, by Asti Hustvedt. Written for the general reading public, Medical Muses describes in detail the lives and medical cases of three women made famous at Jean-Martin Charcot’s psychiatric hospital in Paris: Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève. In the 1870s and 1880s, Charcot developed a theory of hysteria involving epileptic “fits,” catatonic poses, hypnotism, promiscuity, confabulation, and insensitivity to pain. Hustvedt attempts to recover these women’s lives before and after their incarcerations at the Salpêtrière and to show how they still had some autonomy over their symptoms and representations, despite the fact that Charcot literally displayed his favorite patients like circus animals, opening the lecture hall on Tuesday afternoons for demonstrations of their symptoms. Hysteria was a leading medical theory until Charcot’s death in 1892, when it was quickly swept under the rug of medical misadventures. He is still remembered for Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease and other neurological and medical phenomena. For someone who is not trained as a medical historian, Husvedt does an admirable job explaining the social and medical contexts as well as the various images of the three beautiful, afflicted women.

Up next: Susan Reverby’sExamining Tuskegee.

Initiation into Doktorhood

To see the rest of the photographs from graduation, click here.

The last day I had my graduation regalia, Dear Husband and I went to campus to take some informal photographs. One of those became my "graduation portrait." Here are two more.

1) The line stretched around the corner in front of the Alma Mater, but on a tip we went to the art and design school, whose students had created a paper-mache replica. DH took the photo as if I had climbed onto her pedestal and he were standing below. I don't know whose head you can see under her arm.

2) I have always liked the statue in front of the Krannert Art Museum, because it reminds me of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus (1920), which Walter Benjamin described as the angel of history in "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).

Image credit: Wikicommons

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."


So it's not supposed to be an Alma-Mater pose I'm doing but rather angel arms (or wings). The statue's name is really "Initiation," which is also appropriate for marking my initiation into the storied realm of doktorhood. That's Frau Doktor to you!