First entry, December 26, 2005: The day after Christmas in the ICU

I decided to start a blog the day after Christmas to keep from falling into the abyss of insanity around which I've been orbiting since day one of my residency.

I just returned to the surgical intensive care unit after 48 hours off (in and of itself an anomaly for residents) to find that two patients had died ("Could you please check the 'expired' button on their computer registry?" asked the nurse when I came in); another patient had bilateral pneumothoraces (his lungs literally blew up, he'll probably die within another 48 hours of writing this), and another one who was recovering quite well from major heart surgery had a massive stroke and is neurologically devestated. His wife is now left to care for their mentally-challenged child alone.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Let me just pull you all up to speed.

The background: I'm 31 years old (yipes) and a second-year resident in Emergency Medicine at New York University Hospitals, deep in the heart of the epicenter of the Western Hemisphere. I never planned this, believe it or not. In fact, from about age six, when I talked and argued incessantly with my parents (I still do, I'm staunchly left-leaning, the rest of my family are card-carrying members of the NRA in rural Georgia -- a subject I'll return to many times over; and yes, I'm gay, let's just get that out of the way), it was decided that I should just go to law school and make a living out of smart-assing.

Turns out, helping one large corporation screw another one out of millions of dollars via jurisprudence nuances wasn't my thing. Neither was sitting in an office with no human contact for 18 hours a day except to fight with opposing counsel over the phone.

During my adolesence, after a number of failed hunting trips with my dad (I sat in the deer booth reading US Weekly, scaring away the deer on purpose because I saw Bambi one too many times), I decided that when it came time to apply to college, I would only look North of the Mason-Dixon line. Forget Athens or Atlanta -- despite everyone's protestations that they're liberal bastions ("really, it's like a northern city with so many expatriates,") I've been to both places enough to know that that's what Democrats tell themselves to make themselves feel better about living just outside the Zone of Mullets. (Though one of my brothers has a mullet -- and I actually convinced him it was originally pronounced "Mull-ay," as the style had obviously descended from 18th-century French aristocracy. When he clipped it down to the "rat tail," I gave up.)

So my dream undergrad school was The Lavender Ivy, despite it being in New Haven. I had the test scores, the grades, the essays. The only thing I didn't have was the courage to put a stamp on the application package for fear of rejection. So when fall of 1992 came, I packed my bags and headed to Northwestern just outside of Chicago. Loved it. Fucking phenomenal four years (from the parts I remember; that's another topic.)

So here's the thing -- I studied humanities and social sciences, I was the nerd who always went to discussion section (PREPARED for it, no less) and talked the most. I *liked* researching for my papers, and I always wrote them ahead of time and way over the page limit (can you tell?). I was on the debate team and travelled twice a month across the country for policy debate on a range of topics. And, like over 95% of college policy debate geeks, I thought I was going to go to law school.

I took a quick detour first and ended up in a PhD program in political sociology at -- you guessed it -- The Lavendar Ivy. My grand plan was to be the ultimate nerd -- PhD/JD, read, write, research, teach, end up as a federal judge somewhere.

I hated it.

And I hated New Haven. I was reading the same books I read in undergrad, only this time with more response papers and public flogging in smaller groups. In retrospect, I think I simply burned out. So four weeks into grad school, I had a conversation with my advisor that went something like this:

Me: "I need to take a break. I can't do this right now."

Him: "Would you like to take a leave of absence?"

Me: "Yes please."

Him: "Would you like to show up next fall?"

Me: "Yes please."

And that was the last time I have ever been to Connecticut.

I moved back to Chicago and went to work for a litigation firm doing a bunch of legal research. I was working and researching like a first-year lawyer (I was 2nd place for billable Lexis/Nexis hours in the entire firm) but with 5% of their pay.

And then one night, x number of martinis with the associates later, one of them said, "Fletch, don't go to law school for this. I would not let my children do this." (Children? I slept with him weeks ago. I didn't even know he was married.) When 100% of the other associates agreed with the aforementioned wisdom (only 25% of whom I also slept with), I thought, "I have to sleep with the rest of them now." Just kidding. I thought, "there has to be something better than this."

That something will be post #2. I just got paged; apparently, patient Z just pulled out his own breathing tube.