hard to believe tomorrow will be the two month anniversary of arriving in our new home city, not to mention we all just passed the two month anniversary (i guess those are more accurately 1/6 anniversaries) of the best wedding ever, what's up. i remember on my high school graduation my uncle asif told me that after that day, my life would fly by faster and faster as i aged. truer words may never have been spoken.
it seems like just a few days ago that we were still reeling from the wedding high while simultaneously attempting to pack our two bedroom ann arbor homestead into a sleeker, more streamlined version of itself for our smaller diggs in the big city. things were only moderately overwhelming until one fateful late-night packing spree when i sat full speed onto a large electrical plug and broke my tailbone. i got a little testy with the whole foreign travel-wedding-interstate move all in two weeks undertaking after that.
after a final all-nighter and with the help of some samina-magic, we somehow managed to get our belongings, our cats, and ourselves packed into one car (i bid a tearful farewell to the honda) and a u-haul, and began our adventure to our new home (as well as the longest drive i've ever completed by myself to top off my driving career for the next several years-- i have since vowed never to get behind the wheel so long as we live in this city). many miles of cat whining later, we arrived on the most gorgeous day of the year thus far at our new apartment building.
view from a window in our living room on day one
the night sky from our balcony, featuring the tower formerly known as sears (now willis)
first dinner in our new apartment, mexican carryout picnic on the bedroom floor. thanks to my parents, we now have bedroom furniture...
ben beginning the several-day process of recovering from our move. he refused to leave his carrying case, so we had to disassemble it and remove the top to make sure he was alive.
david holding a paint roller against a wall that i painted.
the next ten days were a literal whirlwind of unpacking/furniture shopping/painting/staining/hanging/hammering/opening and closing bank accounts/returning and buying housewares/cleaning/organizing/another healthy dose of samina-magic all in a wild frenzy to get as settled as possible before both starting our respective programs. while those may always be ten of my least favorite days ever, the slave work served us well since the last few items to be properly addressed remain in boxes in the corner and probably will stay there until one of us has more than a day of vacation in a row (september...can't come soon enough).
and while we still haven't really spent quality time getting to know our 'hood, the convenience of our location can't be beat, especially for recently moving here and the tasks that entails. we live on top of a grocery store, across from three metro lines, and easy walking distance to our gym, our bank, and several other highlights of consumer america like starbucks, potbelly, home depot, bed bath and beyond, etc etc.
our place at this point is far more than functional, and actually really feels like home. it's finally become a place we both look forward to walking into and collapsing after a long day/night/both, one we enjoy spending most of our free time in, and it's in good enough shape that we've been able to host one overnight guest and a few potlucks without having to apologize too frequently for the appearance of the place.
it's definitely a new experience living in a high-rise, but we're pretty fired up on the wood floors and huge windows. most importantly though (and this was of course my top real estate search criteria), we've been blessed with a phenomenal kitchen with luxuries like stainless steel appliances and a gas stove top...the stuff that culinary dreams are made of. indeed, i'd say a bulk of my personal free time has been spent in those few blissful square feet concocting edible proof for david of exactly why we needed all the appliances he dutifully scanned at my command when we were just kids registering for a distant wedding. slowly but surely, i'm convincing him--apparently the way to a man's heart *and* mind is through his stomach.
yes, we and the cats seem to have settled into chicago fairly well, but our lives have changed in many obvious ways aside from granite countertops (ben is expressing his distaste for these changes by howling--not meowing--at the top of his lungs every morning at 4:30). i have been adjusting to life as a full-time student once again, and while i'm usually pretty adaptable to heavy courseloads, this program is on a quarter system, so i pretty much get murdered every other week (at least) with exams, papers, and various other projects. my classes range from boring to really captivating, but my overall consensus is that i'm thrilled to be in nursing school and find myself more than ever before very, very eager to do all i can to get my hands dirty. in addition to studying in sometimes sickening amounts and my weekly clinical rotation at a nursing home in evanston, it has been pretty wonderful living as vicariously through david as i can to glean off some of his experiences as well.
david just finished up his first month as an official practicing m.d. at lutheran general hospital, located out in the northwest suburbs of chicago. he was working trauma-surgery, so in addition to his time in the ER, he also took call a few times a week and had the daunting and thrilling task of caring for every surgical patient in the hospital. i saw him leap from an understandably anxious medical student to a confident and competent doctor in literally a matter of days--truly remarkable. every morning he left for work at 5:30 am, returned at 8:30pm (or 12 pm the following day), and had only great things to say about his rotation, his peers, and his patients.
every night we would discuss his patients at length, and it quickly became obvious that his passion and experience will serve me very well in my own studies, as i saw myself understanding our classwork on more profound levels than many of my peers. not to mention it's pretty handy to have a doctor around when studying for pathophysiology that it seems like he could have handled in kindergarten... should we ever happen to have a few free hours overlapping, we eat, sleep, go to our *awesome* gym, and read read read read. david is extraordinarily patient since these "study dates" are actually just me interrupting his studying every four seconds over several hours to ask him to explain something to me.
david had so much autonomy in his last rotation that on a couple of call nights, i had the pleasure and privilege of donning a white coat and student id and following him around all night on his various doctoring adventures. with so many students around, i was relatively anonymous and thrown into the mix of traumas and patient visits. it really was amazing to see david at work--not surprisingly, his patients adore him and his students and superiors respect him. it was just so cool seeing him take on so much responsibility, and to move almost effortlessly between prescribing medications, ordering tests, taking histories, conducting exams, paying visits, talking to families, or handling traumas. and of course, knowing what i'd been studying that particular week, he made sure to point out how what i was learning was relevant to any given situation. what a rock star.
i've been grateful for those extra clinical experiences and ravenous for more--clinicals for my program right now are totally focused on developing a therapeutic relationship with a client (it too has been very interesting comparing nursing education with doctoring education), so we are stationed in various extended care facilities. i though my therapeutic relationship was going great, and then my patient unfortunately passed away last week, which put a damper on it. it's one of the draw backs to nursing homes, i suppose. as much as i enjoy the chatting, i've been really excited to get an inside look about the different roles of nurses in different areas of the hospital, as well as try and get some exposure therapy for my newly developed blood phobia. sounds like a contraindication for nursing, but i keep telling myself i'll grow out of it.
my first night on call with david i had a near-disaster when observing the placement of a central line, which involves inserting a 3 foot needle under a person's collar bone and then stabbing them with a box cutter for a purpose i'm not actually sure of. i was really intent on observing this procedure, but noticed after a few minutes that i myself was about to become a trauma, and woozily skulked into a corner where i thrashed out of my layers of personal protective equipment as discreetly as possible (not very).
later that night, i practiced my zen breathing while i watched my husband wield a scalpel, cut open a living, breathing chest, and shove a plastic tube in between two ribs and into somebody's lung to let out all the air and blood that was making breathing very difficult for that individual who had recently jumped off a 30 ft highway overpass. i had the foresight to remain seated for that one, and made it through without going into a severe state of shock. all the hard work seemed to come undone, however, when a few days ago my finger grazed a newly sharpened knife ever so slightly, and though i didn't even *see* the blood, i had to sit with my head between my knees in my own lovely kitchen for several minutes until i could blindly fumble a bandaid around it and try to move on with the day. sigh, much more work to be done, it seems.
david has since begun his second rotation, this time in the ER of his home institution, U of C. it's been a challenge for him to switch from a well-to-do state of the art hospital to a more understaffed, underresourced, and underserved locale for his work, but such is the nature of his training and he continues to grow exponentially as a physician. challenges in medicine, of course, are not limited to different patient presentations, but very much include the environment in which you must treat those patients. i've passed the halfway point in my first quarter, and am looking forward both to my two weeks off in september (one of which will miraculously overlap with david) and to my next set of classes and clinical assignments. we seem to have a system more or less down--the study schedule, the sleeping schedule, the eating schedule (though david's changes frequently), and the obviously pervasive theme for all is medicine, medicine, medicine. we eat, sleep and breathe it, and it seems neither of us can get enough.
i'll end with an anecdote that i think does well to illustrate our life in chicago: we had one common saturday night off this entire month, and after an outing to the gym, we found ourselves back at home, showered, on the couch, each with a glass of wine, riveted by an episode of "trauma, life in the er." and we couldn't have been more content.
we hope everyone is doing well, apologize for being woefully out of touch and for the fact that that may not change for the next few years, and hope that you'll come visit us in the windy city (or way may not otherwise see you...).
take care- ash & david
