porch stitches

I've never been a fan of giving answers. You want to know why.....? Too bad.

-Stephen Colbert

I’m on the ferry now. Watching Mt Baker fade into the haze as we head to Nanaimo, then to Duncan and our next elective of fourth year.

I just flew in from Ontario yesterday afternoon, where I was doing a 2-week family practice elective with my cousin Jeffy. I had initially requested to spend the whole month of September in Halifax, but Dalhousie was only able to find me 2 weeks of elective time, so I had to come up with a back-up plan pretty quick. Luckily, Jeffy bailed me out and agreed to have me come stay and work with him in Kingston. In the end, it was the most relaxed and fun time I’ve ever had working as a medical student. I also got to work on my medical skillz a fair bit, especially in the most important area in primary care medicine. Jeffy is very skilled at communicating what is going on to the patient, and also manages to listen to them at the same time. Sounds pretty simple, but it almost never happens in real life. It was nice to work with someone where you felt satisfied when you left the examining room.

The other benefit was that I got the spend time with Sheesh and the kids. They just get cuter and more fun as they get older (that includes you Sheesh). I also got to visit with my Aunt Marg and Katelyn as well as some old friends in Toronto. All this while getting in some episodes of Daily Show & Colbert and upgrading to a level 6 mage in PuzzleQuest.

regional amnesia

Nazis. I hate these guys.

- Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade

Unfortunately, there is usually an inverse correlation with how much interesting stuff I'm doing and the frequency of my blogging. By which, you have inferred, I've been doing some cool stuff.

Brief recap.

I finished my anaesthesia elective in Halifax. I endured a fair bit of frustration to organize this, but once I showed up, everything was awesome. Things were well laid out and the people in Halifax (including the OR staff) lived up to the stereotype of being extremely friendly. I ended up mostly working with relatively new Haligonians (Myron, Konstatin, Axel, Armin) who were maybe even nicer than the natives. I got a chance to improve my technical skills, which was the main objective of my rotation and my main preceptor agreed to write a reference letter for CaRMS. Halifax is a pretty cool little city and reminded me a fair bit of Kingston. But on the ocean. Haligonians tend to be a little more relaxed, good at wearing helmets and more prone to sexual innuendo. At the end of my time in Halifax, Coco and I pretended we were 55 years old and overweight on a weekend getaway in Cape Breton. The gravy covered sandwiches and scenic walks were lovely. All kidding aside, it was a great success.

I caught a flight to Toronto on monday night and took a bus straight from the airport to Queen's campus. I was reminded about how many trucks can be on the 401 and how pretty the moon can be in Ontario. Katelyn and I went to the QP with her housemates and I relived a few memories. We made plans to see Apostle of Hustle tonight, despite her housemate's wishes to throw me a bachelor party (with all the trimmings).

I'm staying with my cousins now on a lake. I get to hang out with them when I'm not at work and the preceptor for my elective is one of my cousins- Jeffy. Needless to say this has been a pretty sweet elective so far.

The photo on the last post was the ocean on the left side of us. This a picture of the one on the right. Maybe after this winter I may have another of the one up above.

need for speed house invite

Where is home?

I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was 9 years old.
-Kurt Vonnegut, The World According to Kurt, Globe and Mail 2005

And so on.

What do you do at this point? It's been too long. I can't possibly write about all the stuff I did.

Well, I could, but again, that would be too long.

And I'm tired of being at my computer.

What I will say is that I had a great vacation. I had some good adventures, some good relaxation and felt like myself again.

Also, we decided that we are gonna get married on May 23rd, 2009. Whoop.

I'm in Halifax now, doing an anaesthesia elective at Dalhousie. Last night I went to a pub, drank a beer on tap called "Peculiar" and watched a group of bluegrass musicians jam in the corner. It was fun.

Now here is a photo. I think Heather took this one.