Remembering the Good in 2016

Well, it's that time of year: time to unload my Rememberlutions Jar. Not only is having a place to store positive memories from the year a good habit to make, but the jar itself is a reminder of the years I spent studying and making friends in Grad Study at the Wesley Foundation in graduate and medical school. In 2015, I stored memories related to the last two years of medical school such as good grades and comments from preceptors, as well as experiences I had at the theater (fun, beautiful) or traveling (memorable, meaningful). 2016 included many more arts & culture moments, as well as big life changes. Here they are, in the order I pulled them out of the jar. Click the links for blog posts or websites.

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The first slip I drew out was the note Dear Husband left me one night when he had gone off to choir practice before I had gotten home from the hospital.

Next was my PACE Palette score card from Pediatric Intern Retreat. Our class had gathered at Cheat Lake, WV, to learn more about ourselves and each other, such as the fact that I am the most analytical, curious person in the class but not as methodical or organized as I like to think I am. Later I posted what DH and I learned about our marriage that weekend.

Ticket to see "Mark Twain Tonight! Starring Hal Holbrook" at the end of April. I had bought us seats to surprise DH, but he spent the night in the hospital getting chemotherapy, so I took a mutual friend. Getting to see Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain is one of the many things cancer stole from him/us in 2016.

Invitation to K.T. and A.S.'s wedding in Knoxville, TN, also in April. My in-laws stayed with DH that weekend so I could get away and enjoy myself. Best of all, I got to stay with friends R. & M.K. on the way down and meet up with J.R. for the shindig.

Ticket to hear U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor with J.S. We were lucky enough to score extra press seats way up front. [March]

"My senior resident's delight the day I finished my progress notes before noon." He actually jumped up and hugged me. Unfortunately, the day ended on a sour note, as I got a late admission and ended up staying way after sign out.

"Matching to UPMC in Med Peds." [March]

"DH's 10th doctor-versary and my 2nd. 3/17/16." As luck would have it, we both defended our dissertations on March 17, eight years apart.

Ticket to watch The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Virginia Theater. That was late May, still in chemo season, and a friend came to stay with DH so I could leave the house without worrying about him.

"Snuggling in bed reading together (after laughing uproariously!)" [???]

Ticket to see the San Francisco Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in June.

"O in Medicine and Society." I'm particularly pleased with the presentation I made on "Medicine on T.V."

Ticket to see the Miami Marlins beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in August.

Stickers that read "Delilah" and "Butch Cassidy" from a pre-show ice-breaker at a Wordplay performance at the Bricolage Theater. I found my "Samson," but DH never found his "Sundance Kid."

"The sky from the workroom on 12N. The first time the patient in 1260 smiled her toothless smile at me." She was a cantankerous, manipulative cirrhosis patient, and I had just combed her hair, about which she was very vain.

"Driving to my continuity clinic in Turtle Creek along the river and through the green."

Cover of the program for "Flight: Songs of Migration," a beautiful, moving performance by Amasong, the Lesbian/Feminist Chorus. DH was in the hospital the first time, so I went with A.S. to hear friend R. sing a solo.

"Bath time with DH." While undergoing chemo, he sometimes had a good hour in the evening, when I sat him in the tub (by candlelight when his eyes were sensitive) to bathe him.

Good, old-fashioned
collective action.

Ticket stub from Loving. [December]

Receipt from attending the Winter Flower Show and Light Garden at the Phipps Conservatory, a rare work-night date with DH after starting internship.

"O in Pulmonology."

"Found a woman's wedding ring outside the gym after the snow melted." I believe the staff were able to help me reunite it with her.

"Having D.W. for dinner and playing baseball Scrabble." He and I also took a daytrip to Covington to go antiquing one Saturday.

A sticker name tag from a residency applicant dinner. DH and I are suckers for free food and like the company, too.

Ticket to see Rogue One with my brother-in-law's family over Christmas 2016.

"Paid off the Turquoise Torpedo."

The cap off a bottle of Jones Soda that reads inside: "Your efforts will be well rewarded. Be patient."

"[The Pediatric Clerkship Director/My boss] complimented me on my TA leadership."

"Selling our house! 3/23/16"

"Fixed the toilet." Surely there's a line for that on a C.V.

Ticket to watch the Moscow Festival Ballet perform Don Quixote. That was back in January, and I honestly cannot remember a thing about it. I'd like to think I enjoyed it at the time.

Sweet mini-card from J.R. when she sent my Halloween earrings.

Ticket to Finding Dory, which we saw for my birthday this year. [July]

"Getting DH's scans back--times two!" This must be his negative CT and PET scans in August.

Another interview dinner name tag.

"Today I drove a metal spike into an old lady's spine with a hammer." ~The most audacious thing I did in medical school was perform a (supervised) kyphoplasty during my Pain Medicine rotation.

"Exchanging pickle phones with [the acting intern] to talk about our patients at just the right moment." We were fielding questions on each other's patients.

"Celebrating our Steel Anniversary in the Steel City." [August]

"O in Pain Management (Surgery II)."

Another note left by DH with dinner.

"Took apart and fixed the refrigerator/freezer."

"Walking in Frick Park."

"The trees and bushes heavy with snow as we drove to see Allegiance in the theater." [December]

Ticket to see Sinfonia da Camera perform The Mikado. [March]

Ticket to see "Opening Night," DH's last performance at the Virginia Theater with The Chorale. [New Year's Eve 2015]

Ticket stub from Sherlock, the holiday special that aired in theaters in January 2016.

And finally, tucked under the jar, my program for Back to the Future with Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra playing the soundtrack. [July]

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Not mentioned: Walking with CureSearch to raise money for pediatric cancer research (top left photo).

The love and support we got through DH's CaringBridge site while he was undergoing cancer treatment.

Oh yeah, and I graduated from medical school in 2016, too, but somehow between the family visiting, house packing, chemo, and celebrating, I forgot to put it on a slip of paper in my Rememberlutions Jar. (Instead, I've got a fancy piece of paper framed and hanging on our living room wall.)

So Long, Farewell,...

Dear Husband and I received a care package from A.S. today! It contained cards and belated going-away presents: for Dear Husband, a bobble-head statue ("As you bounce Bach, know your friends will always have your Bach."); for me, a Pittsburgh coloring book ("With the hospital monopolizing your time, here's a way to see your new hometown."); and for the both of us, a copy of Chris Ballard's non-fictional account of the 1971 Macon Ironmen, a high-school baseball team that went to the state championship. These are beautiful, thoughtful gifts that blend old and new. We are almost finished with Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear and can read One Shot at Forever to each other next.

Home Sweet Home

Pittsburgh is the city of three rivers: the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the one nobody can remember (the Ohio). We came up from the south, crossed the Monongahela, and then drove along it for a beautiful vista of our new home. On account of the triangular downtown and numerous hills, few streets here make a grid, some are marked "private," and some are actually public staircases. One of my colleagues says the city must have been designed by an angry civil engineer, because it makes so little sense. Case in point: a ridiculous number of 5-way intersections. Driving here is often improvised and not for the faint of heart. The city still feels like an experiment and not like "home" yet.

Dear Husband says the housing stock reminds him of Baltimore in the way that one block can be quite nice and the next block a row of trashy lots and boarded up houses. Only in The Burgh the third block could look positively semi-rural, with trees, brush, and an insurmountable hillside behind it. For instance, the friend of a friend's house where we stayed when we first arrived is perched on a hill with bee hives in the side "yard." (How cool is that?)

Rowhouses: not just in Baltimore.

DH and I are renting a townhouse in an eastern neighborhood called Point Breeze. (Pittsburghers take their neighborhoods so seriously that they are listed on every major street sign, and there are multiple, detailed Wikipedia articles about them.) There are three schools within two blocks, as well as the Reformed Presbyterian Seminary (estb. 1810) and The Frick Art & Historical Center nearby. We are within walking distance of one edge of the 644-acre Frick Park.

Speaking of trashy neighbors, while outdoor maintenance is our responsibility for the duration of our lease, it was apparently not the responsibility of the landlord before we moved in. The cantankerous old man who lives next door actually accosted DH the day we moved in about cutting the knee-high grass in the front yard, as if that were our fault. As it is, DH's father, uncle, and cousin clipped the yard. Later my mother and I weeded the front garden bed and bought a couple hosta plants to fill in. The back bed, as you will see, is hopeless for the little time I have (here).

This is Dear Husband's view from the piano bench out the picture window to

the front porch. The fireplace is to the left, the front door and couch to the right.

This two-story townhouse with semi-finished basement and storage space in the attic is technically a little bigger than our single-level slab in Champaign, but the layout is different, with only two bedrooms instead of three. Two sets of steps lead up the front to a porch, where we've secured our patio furniture. The front door opens into DH's music salon, complete with couch for house concerts (we're already planning a holiday carol-sing) and Nancy McAleer's watercolor painting of Baltimore's Mount Vernon over the decorative fireplace.

 

View up the stairs with the skylight waaaay above. It's noisy when it rains.

The staircase with its narrow clearance bisects the downstairs. The built-in shelves narrow the passage so between the two rooms that the appliance delivery guys had to hoist the refrigerator OVER the newel post and banister to get the thing into the kitchen. Behind the stairs are the dining room and kitchen. With some rearranging, we've been able to get most of our downstairs furniture into the two rooms, as well as most of our knickknacks. (The rest will stay in boxes for the next move, hopefully in a year.) DH is pleased we got a half bath downstairs, for when the upstairs one is occupied.

Big, beautiful new refrigerator. :-)

Electric stove. :-(

The kitchen is large, with more cabinet space than I know what to do with. Literally. The house in Champaign had exactly one drawer (we used it for the oven mitts next to the stove). Now I've had to leave some drawers empty, because I don't have anything to put in them! And then there's the unfolding pantry. Seems like a neat idea, until you realize the cubbyholes are all different sizes, and that you have to pull out both hinged doors to get to the big shelves for flour, sugar, and the like. So I've left half the glassware packed and used some of the cupboard space for boxed dry goods for easier access.

What the what??

Downstairs is a "wet basement" that is storing what used to be in our garage. Up the stairs (that wouldn't admit the full-sized box spring [not queen-sized, full!]), the front bedroom has become combination living room and study. We left DH's big old rocking recliner on the curb in Champaign because it was broken, and it's not certain that we could get a new up the stairs, so he's using my rocker. I am unlikely to watch much television this anyway. My desk is in the basement, so I am using his. The back bedroom has a really funky shape, with closets along one wall, a recess for the bureaus on the other, and a sleeping nook in the back. The friend of a friend who viewed the place for us told me she was jealous of all the closet space, which is rare in old Pittsburgh houses.

Finally, the back porch is for storing our bicycles, the charcoal grill, and items for freecyclers to pick up. Our view isn't that great, but two doors down the neighbors have a small garden, a big dog, and a little girl, so we like to go down there to unwind in the evening.

We inherited the wind chime and hanging pot from the previous owners.

The pot is soon to have a transplanted spider plant in it.

Mermaid, butterfly, and bird (I promised it's there).

You Lift Us Up

Cross-posted from Caring Bridge.

Tuesday is Moving Day. I keep saying, "We're almost packed!" and yet find myself still putting things into boxes. This time, I mean it. (Anybody want a peanut?)

Yesterday I gathered up all the cards we have received over the last two months: the get-well cards from entertainment center, the graduation cards from the china hutch, a long row of get-well cards from the shelf above the picture window in the living room. They're all coming with us to Pittsburgh, in some box or other. I have already shared about Dear Husband's last concert with The Chorale. The next day was his last Sunday playing at church.


After we got home from the going-away party, we sat out in the sun on our back deck to open the stack of cards we had accumulated. Some were addressed to DH and some to both of us, so we decided to take turns: he would open the cards with his name, and I would open the joint ones. We each selected a card from the bag, and I went first. "Good Bye," it read, with a red balloon. How sweet. DHl opened his: "Good Bye," it read, with a red balloon. What were the chances that the very first two cards we opened would be copies of the same one??

By the end of the session, we had also opened two copies of "You're leaving? This sucks." and no fewer than five--yes, five--adorable Dr. Seuss cards. We liked the poem so much that we read it through to the end every time. I got the first two and DH the last three, which he read in his normal voice, like a chipmunk (Alvin!!), and like Vincent Price. Needless to say, we laughed, we cried...and we were very touched.

The "Get WEll" balloon that DH''s parents brought with them from Cincinnati at the end of April is miraculously still floating in the dining room. I don't know what sort of "special gas" they put in it, but I suppose I will have to euthanize it before we hop in our respective cars and head east on Tuesday. Or maybe we'll bring it with us, like all of your good wishes, that buoy us up during this difficult time of worry and change. Thank you.

Why yes, that IS a candelabra on the piano behind us.

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!

What is the Opposite of Nostalgia?

As graduation and moving approach, I am trying to divest myself of old paper journals, unloved knickknacks, and the detritus of sixteen years of college, graduate, and medical school. Next to my desk I found a thick stack of lined index cards, a handwritten bibliography of figures from German medical history that I compiled from microfiche (microfiche!) about a decade ago, before my first laptop, before the Deutsche Biografie went online, and before the Sächsische Biografie was compiled. Reliant as I am on my computer's search function, I have no nostalgia for the way I would have written my dissertation in the pre-internet age.

We Get By With A Little Help From Our Friends

When Dear Husband and I purchased our house eight years ago, we knew we would have to replace the carpet before we sold it again. It came with a dated, bluish-gray diamond pattern in the front room and hallway, thin brown shag in the two corner bedrooms, and a thin, dirty blue carpet in the middle bedroom that had been the dog's room. We pulled up the blue carpet ourselves and installed a locking hardwood floor for my study and left the rest. This was just as well, because our dearly departed cat Erasmus had a bad habit of retching his orange-colored food (always on the carpet, never on the hard floor). Well, now that we're preparing to sell and move, we went ahead and got the carpet replaced in the front room, hallway, and master bedroom. The carpet place doesn't want to take the responsibility of moving a grand piano, so we had to leave the music room as is.

Very kind friends P.S., B.B., and R.W. helped us pack up and move all the "belongings" from the furniture: the china in the cabinet; the DVDs, VHS tapes, and records; the TV and lamps; the drawers out of the bureaus; and no fewer than 25 books from our bedroom (natch).

Although our realtor had recommended a variegated shag named "Snow Peak" that we thought looked like "wild rice mix" and my mother proclaimed "dirty snow," we opted for a soft, solid shag called "Tassel." It's the middle of three tans that the carpet shop owner dubbed "renting" (darkest), "selling," and "owning" (lightest). We love it--and the new pad underneath--and wish we could have done this sooner.

It hasn't been without its aggravations, however, as it took Dear Husband half an hour to fix the furniture after the subcontracted carpet layers had finished; they forgot to cut the vent in the bedroom (left); and we are still in negotiations with them about putting down the loose threshold from the hallway into the study.