Christmas 2020

Christmas 2020 was unlike any other. It wasn't like the year we were married, when we went on a great American road trip over the winter break. It wasn't like the year we left town on Christmas Day to visit Baltimore, and I had to take a bus back to Pittsburgh 48 hours later in order to work the New Year's shifts. It wasn't like the last two years, when I worked nights over Christmas at the children's hospital (ask me sometime why that was so great!). So what was it like?

Christmas this year was reading The Light of the World: A Beginner's Guide to Advent by Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine with Rosamunda on a quiet Sunday morning. It was our Adult Sunday School book in December. We could debate what "beginners" means, since everyone from the pastors on down learned something new every week, but I'm not complaining. She writes the kind of thoughtful, text- and history-based theological books that you can read and re-read.

I came home from working my first Christmas Eve as an attending to discover that Dear Husband had cooked Montgomery Inn* ribs and Brussels sprouts for dinner, set the table with our good Christmas table linens, AND put on a suit. (*This Cincinnati staple came with Graeter's ice cream from his parents.) The church service on Zoom was very nice and included videos of DH playing the organ for the carols.

Christmas Eve I brought in fresh bagels; and on Christmas Day one of the fellows shared homemade cinnamon rolls. The residency program provided a catered lunch, which I finally enjoyed in "my office," mostly warm, at 2pm, until one of the residents needed me to chaperone a gynecological exam.

Nevertheless, I was able to sneak off in the afternoon to take a walk through the snow in Frick Park with DH while there was still some daylight. It was Pittsburgh's snowiest Christmas on record!

When my 9 straight days of COVID jeopardy and Christmas coverage were over, we finally time to do the baking that was delayed by DH's isolation for not(?)-COVID earlier in the month. We used J.S.'s famous sugar cookie recipe to make reindeer, snowflakes, Christmas trees, candy canes, eighth notes, und unicorns. Most of the 69(!) cookies were packaged up as gifts for the church staff.

Finally, Christmas this year was visiting the 80-foot Duquesne Light Company Christmas tree at the Point. Dear Husband had heard that the state park department had decided to end the 30-year tradition due to concerns about preserving the area and it not fitting into their historical mission, so we figured we had better check it out. Then 9,200 people signed a petition asking them to reconsider, and the last that I heard is they will do something smaller going forward. I can understand why, as everyone who visits has to trek across the muddy grass to get to where the strands of lights and garland are staked into the ground. But it is quite a sight to see from various vantage points along the rivers. After taking some photos, we used a gift card to pick up tacos from täkō to eat for dinner while watching Saturday Night Live sketches.

2020 is practically in the rearview mirror, which means it must be time to write my annual rememberlutions post. Stay tuned...

I rehabbed my stethoscope!

It was time. My trusty hunter green Littman II stethoscope had seen me through 4 years of medical school and 4 years of residency. (Also 4 years of graduate school, mostly on a shelf.) I bought it from the scrub shop in Champaign with some money from a dear family friend. The sound wasn't as good as the Littman III, but it was pretty good. I had originally planned to treat myself to a pediatric stethoscope when I got to residency, but then I decided the one I had would do well enough. 

In its last year, one of the ear pieces split, so I wrapped it with tape, because you have no idea how painful cracked rubber is when the weight of a metal chest piece is hanging from your ear canals. A friend gave me a replacement ear piece, but that quickly split too. (I don't know whether that was from being thrown in my bookbag or chewed on by a toddler. Oops.)

When I realized the tubing was cracked (below), I decided it was time to replace it. My in-laws gave me the money for Christmas to replace the ear pieces and tubing. Alas, hunter green was no longer available, so I'm sporting a dark blue stethoscope these days. But only after using a utility knife to hack the old tubing off the chest piece--terror, thy name is taking a sharp implement to one's functional if aging stethoscope. Also, I cut myself twice trying to recover the bell. Thankfully, it all fit together at the end. The last two pictures are me trying to auscultate Rosamunda to check the sound. She was suspicious.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

The house is finally decorated for Christmas! We tend to wait until around St. Nicholas' Day (December 6), because Dear Husband likes to keep the tree up until at least Epiphany (January 6).

Again this year we picked out a pre-cut tree from the Trees for Veterans stand in Homewood, where the sales guy makes friendly banter. This time he talked me into accepting a garbage bag full of clippings, some florist's wire, and a large red bow. After we got the tree into its stand upstairs, I made a mess on the kitchen floor fashioning a homemade wreath, to which I added some swag from prior years.

I would show you the handmade vintage Christmas tree skirt to which I treated myself from eBay, but it's stuck somewhere around Columbus. It's red and white with cardinals on it.

Also not pictured: the lights we put up on our porch and that of the abandoned house next door, to make the neighborhood more festive.

Spotted on the mantel next to the grand piano: the pinecone chorister I made in Brownie Girl Scouts.

On the shelf above the shoe caddy: a felt nativity from Palestine, our wedding invitation in stained glass, and steel map cut-outs of Pittsburgh and Baltimore.

On the entertainment center in the dining room: the poinsettia from Third Presbyterian Church, the straw nativity from the Czech Republic, and wedding photos.

In one of the cubbies: the glass nativity S.H. gave me in 8th grade, D. and B.'s wedding photo at the Inner Harbor, and the Kitty Godzilla birthday car DH gave me 2 birthdays ago. When you press the button, it "roars" and rocks back and forth like it's terrorizing the city.

There was a lonely middle section of Advent/Christmas, when DH and I spent 10 days living and sleeping apart after he woke up with COVID symptoms one day. (This was my view from the air mattress in the front room.) We aren't sure whether he got it from Best Buy on Black Friday replacing his laptop or if I brought it home from the clinic, but he tested "negative" and I didn't develop clear symptoms (everyone's a hypochondriac by now, right?).

Turkey Day, Take 2

The day after Thanksgiving, things were still mostly running as if in holiday mode. Dear Husband picked up individually packed lunches for my team and our sister team, and I smuggled him into the hospital (hey--he's MY support person!) to deliver it. After dropping off the food for the residents, who promptly scattered to different nooks and crannies so they could safely unmask, we went back to my "office" to eat together as a household.

Critic's take: the turkey was thick and moist, there was plenty of good gravy, the mashed potatoes and corn were passable, the sweet potato casserole was SWEET, the creamed spinach was salty, and the gratis cornbread was cold (ick). You can see my homemade orange-flavored cranberry sauce in the corner. It turns out the only reason we've been married for 15 years is that I keep forgetting DH doesn't like cranberry sauce, while it's my favorite part of the meal. Ah well, more for me!

 

Thanksgiving 2020

 

Since there aren't any meetings or classes today, I'm back in my "office" for the holiday shift. The residency bought Thanksgiving lunch for everyone who had to work today: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing (flavored to perfection), green beans that were surprisingly not boiled to within an inch of their lives, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. I skipped the dinner roll but was glad of the cranberry sauce--so afraid was I that there wouldn't be any that I made my batch early and brought it with me to the hospital! (There's a long story about how I assumed there wouldn't be a potluck this year because of the pandemic, planned to buy my team a hot lunch, and both Boston Markets within driving distance were booked for Thanksgiving. It turned out there would be food on Thursday but not Friday, so we pushed our plans back by a day; Dear Husband will deliver the food to the hospital so we can celebrate together but away from every else. Whew.) 

Today I am grateful for my life and health, for my loving family and amazing friends, for a comfortable place to live, plenty of food to eat, more books than I could ever read, an excellent education, and my dream job right out of training. If we haven't seen each other in a while, please reach out. I want to make time for a Zoom chat, Google Duo, walk in Frick Park, or a plain old-fashioned phone call.

Step into my office

Welcome to my office! My division currently does not have enough space to house all its faculty, so I have been sharing an office with several of the fellows and two other attendings. However, four of us are now trying to work in there at the same time. Given rising COVID cases and the fact that our employer says the most common source of at-work infections is break rooms and people eating together, as opposed to patient interactions, we do not feel that this setup is particularly safe. (One of the four of us was out earlier in the week for COVID testing, so it's not idle speculation.) Therefore, I have taken up residence in the empty conference room--at least for the weekend, while there are no meetings or teaching going on there. It's a wet morning in Pittsburgh, but this is still one of my favorite views of the city. You can also see the "congratulations on being halfway done with your first week as a hospital attending" card that Dear Husband got me. He's so supportive about the fact that we rarely get to see each other for two weeks. Yesterday was my half-day off, and we spent part of it eating dinner and watching half of Enola Holmes, until an early bedtime for me, except then I did two hours of charting and emailing until I actually fell asleep.

What Attending Looks Like

I know I said back when I finished residency and shared my last bloopers post this summer that I wouldn't start a new series about attendinghood. However, every once in a while I would like to give you a window into my world.

Despite how incredibly over-busy I was this week, I made time to look up the tracking number for a parcel that the email that showed up in my work in-box claimed was from the American Board of Internal Medicine. I didn't end up reporting it as phishing, but it sure seemed fishy to get an unsolicited shipping announcement with a link. (Instead of clicking on it, I copied the purported tracking number and entered it into the USPS web tracker. It appeared legit.) Lo and behold, on Friday a big flat package arrived in the mail with my certificate in Internal Medicine. (Photo altered from my real name + MD to "Frau Doktor Doctor, MD PhD.")

The other package that arrived at the same time contained three Lyrica "surgical caps" from Etsy. I started my first two weeks as a ward attending in the hospital today, and I wanted to take extra precautions not to bring COVID home with me. In addition to wearing scrubs (which I don't do when I see patients in the clinic), I bought the caps to cover my hair. They say "one size fits most," but I am unfortunately in the minority: if I pull them all the way forward, the front edge reaches my eyebrows! (My child-sized head is the reason I failed all N95 mask fittings until Thursday, when a special set-up showed that there is exactly one model that fits my petite jaw. The nurse running the test told me I should have eaten more ice cream, because the masks fit better with a double chin.) Dear Husband even demonstrated his remarkable attachment to me by walking 4 miles round trip through Homewood Cemetery on an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon to a locally owned shoe store so I could try on Dansko clogs to wear instead of my usual sneakers. The risk of me bringing COVID home on my shoes is honestly pretty low, but the risk of me bringing home a drug-resistant bacterium is actually pretty high. They didn't have the fancy punched-out leather ones from their website, so I went with a matte black, waterproof pair that were very comfortable for the 12 hours I wore them on my first shift.

I don't work directly with COVID patients, but I might take care of some while their tests are pending. And there are plenty of others with chest pain, back pain, cancer, asthma exacerbations, bloodstream infections, unexplained kidney failure, delirium after a prolonged hospitalization, and everything else I'll see between now and Thanksgiving. Low person on the totem pole again as junior faculty, I am working on Thanksgiving, just like intern year. I suppose it's just as well, because 2020 is not the year to travel across state lines to eat with other people, not matter how much we love and miss them. (I'm also working Christmas.) Please stay safe out there, wear your masks, and distance as much as you can. Yesterday we got a briefing from the Chair of Medicine about new bed spaces being opened up and asking for volunteers to staff them. We're seeing the aftermath of indiscretions on Halloween weekend, but also coworkers, church members, and households not taking as much as care as maybe they could have. Maybe scrubs, caps, and clogs are "hygiene theater" like having your temperature taken when you walk into the hospital building--today I was so cold after my hike from the far parking garage that the automated robot reader couldn't pick up my temperature at all--but maybe the fact that I'm willing to dress like the virus is serious will help someone else take it seriously too.