I finished my spring semester at Columbia a week ago which means that I am officially one year into grad school! I can't believe I am already a year in but, at the same time, I can't believe that it was only a year ago that I was living out in California - so much has happened (aside from my becoming
significantly less tan). Tomorrow is my first day of clinical rotations at a hospital - a
real hospital, with
real patients who
really bleed. It is kinda freaky when you think about it... so I have tried to avoid thinking about it too much. To assist me in this endeavor, Chuck and I
took a trip to Martha's Vineyard last week! The weather was not cooperating so we had the island to ourselves and we filled our days with sleeping in, lots of eating, bike rides, museum visits, looking at historic houses, walks, daily naps and watching quite a few Boston Red Sox games. We missed the sun but we had a lot of fun.
After our stay in MV, Chuck headed to Boston for his sister's college graduation and I flew back to NYC for a weekend with mom! Officially, she was in town to see me over my break and to help Katherine and Sheldon finish their wedding invitations. Secretly, she was also in town for a bridal shower that Julie had organized. I don't have any pictures from that (they are currently on a flight back to Tampa, Florida) so those will come in a separate post.
We did manage to finish the wedding invitations but they were quite a bit of work. Katherine and Sheldon have constructed a letter press so we would roll ink onto the template (see above) and then put the template over a sheet of thick paper and then crank the press down so that the text was imprinted into the invitation:
If it sounds complicated, that is because it was complicated. Very complicated. But, in the end, well worth the effort because they came out looking pretty amazing! This was also the inaugural visit for mom to Katherine and Sheldon's new apartment on the lower east side. The apartment has a much larger living room which is great for entertaining (and for letting your sister sleep over when she is too tired to make it home), but this came at the expense of kitchen space:
What a week!
Today was my first day of clinical rotations! My first hospital is Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the upper east side. I had no idea what to expect this morning but it turned out to be a day of orientation (getting lockers, ID badges, getting access to the Pyxis, meeting the staff CRNAs, etc). The chief CRNA is a great guy, he did his best to allay some of our anxiety about not having seen patients in a year and I am excited for my first day in the OR tomorrow! I would like to point out that by the time we got our scrub cards this afternoon (the scrubs are dispensed out of a machine that will only give you one pair at a time to keep people from stealing them) they were out of all the normal sizes so I am wearing a size XL in that picture - sorry for the cleavage.
