Here's a roommate picture that Linda took for us while we flopped. 

Rachel, Ellis & April at the lake 

Nicky and baby James 

My throat's feeling really scratchy today too...

<---This is from when my new roommates took me out for my birthday. Olive Garden is really cold, that's why I'm wearing that dorky shrunken sweater.

Okay so on Monday I woke up with a mildly scratchy throat that turned into a runny nose and sneezing and a thousand-pound head, so I left work early and came home to sleep.
On my way out the door, I said to my preceptor, "If I wake up feeling worse than this I'll give you a call in the morning."

She said, "well, that's ok when you're a student, but when you're a real midwife, you come to work no matter how you feel."

I was like, "Oh. Well maybe I'll feel better in the morning."

Anyways, I didn't feel better yesterday when I woke up, so I left her a message and slept the rest of the day. Okay I didn't sleep the whole day: I woke up to eat a little and drink a lot and take Sudafed.
It was a pretty good day, in that I felt like I had made the right decision to not go to work. Linda came over and brought me tea, a Z-pack, arnica gel, Airborne, a plant, a get-well-soon card and some quesadillas. I was supposed to go to yoga with Christian, but she was feeling sick too, so she invited me over to watch movies and be sick on the couch together.

She gave me some chewable Immunorockyourworld tablets or something, and after I put it in my mouth she goes, "they're basically just colostrum and echinacea, so they're really good for you."
What the? Colostrum? I almost spit it out, but then she said it was cow's colostrum. I didn't know they made that, but since I drink cow's milk, I felt like it would have been hypocritical of me not to accept their colostrum. Well whatever. It didn't taste gross.

Today is my day off, and I'm planning on being better, because I want to go watch Wooster & Jeeves movies with Nicky and I certainly don't want to make her 3 month-old roommate sick. So I should probably go back to sleep now.

Slug thoughts

Today I feel like trash so I'm flopping around watching Cool Hand Luke and eating puppy chow. Paul Newman is in that movie, did you ever know that? He's my favorite, even though I have to try really hard not to think about salad dressing when I watch him.

On a less embarrassing note, I was noticing this week that I still get a little nervous every time I get ready to go in a patient's room. I mean, I always look in the chart to see why the woman's there and get an idea in my head of what I'm going to do before I go in, but I guess I'm afraid that they'll ask me something I don't know.

Sometimes I'm even scared of the prenatal visits, which are the easiest of all and take like 20 minutes. Those pregnant ladies, especially the first-time moms, have a LOT of questions. Occasionally the husband will come too, with his own list of questions.

<---that's me. I usually like it when I walk in the room and she's sitting on the table with a 12 page "tentative birth plan" and list of things to ask, because I can usually tell them what they want to hear and have it actually be the truth. That's something I really like about midwifery. They'll ask, "how many of your patients do you cut episiotomies on?" And I get to say, "we only cut if the baby's really in trouble and has to be out right away, which is pretty unusual." But other times they'll ask me stuff like, "I heard I'm not supposed to be eating fish because of mercury levels--how much is safe?" or "Where's my scar going to be after I have a tubal ligation?" and I have to go ask someone. Both of those fall into the category of things-I-should-have-memorized-by-now. But I love those patients, the ones who are curious and freaked out at the same time, but still want to try having an unmedicated labor. It's really brave of them, I think. Sometimes if I have really bad cramps, I yell in my head, "I am SO getting an epidural when I have a baby!! It's going to be so much worse than this!" and then I feel guilty like I'm not a true midwife or some crap like that. :) That's why I don't mind if my patients decide to get them. Especially if they're the kind who ask me if it's going to get worse after every contraction, because then I have to say, "Yes definitely. But you can do it." Of course, I like it better when they don't--because it's more of a challenge for me (epidural patients usually sleep a lot, which means I get to sit around bored until the baby comes down) and because they are so proud of themselves afterwards.

This week I really enjoyed myself in the clinic, even though I had to look up a lot of stuff and felt like an idiot approximately 50% of the time. I'm excited about the births I'm going to get this semester--last semester, I didn't get to see the patients for their prenatal visits, so I didn't know them as well. This time I'm going to have an idea of where they are in life, what their family dynamics are, how they deal with pain, and what they want from the birth. I mean, I tried to get an idea of all those things with my patients this summer but it's hard, especially if it's one of those stop & drop moms who've had like 6 kids. :)

Anyways, enough of that. I saw a cute little lemon tree for sale at Home Depot the other day, but then Christian pointed out that we'd never seen a lemon tree growing around here before, so maybe it would just die. Does anybody know? Also, if I were to get it, would it take like 50 years before it would actually bear fruit? Because it's only 3 feet high, and obviously I don't want to help it grow to like 12 feet and then have to leave it here when I move again.

P.S. on Cool Hand Luke: maybe not as good as I originally thought. Right now there's some skank doing a Paris Hilton Hardee's commercial imitation, and its totally gross. If she turns out to be a romantic lead, I'm switching back to Jeopardy.

Good reasons to eat Top Ramen...

<----That's Tico, in case you can't tell. Isn't he cute?
This weekend Linda and I drove to NC to switch my van out and see the fam.

Mom, Christie, and Tico are going to Israel for a couple of weeks with Grandaddy. And when they return, Tico will have aged enough to be allowed to trade in his learning permit for a real live unrestricted driver's license. Since the only extra car in the driveway at home is my Dad's shiny new Prius, and I'll probably be trading my van in for something that doesn't break every 500 miles in a couple of months anyway, my parents asked me if I'd switch with them so Tico could use the van for his teenage hijinks. Mom said it was good for a 15 year old boy's ego to drive around in a weird-smelling 1993 minivan.

So anyways, it is a brilliant car. It's a hybrid so it gets like 60 miles to the gallon and you get to feel like a hippie. When I walk up to it (with the key in my pocket) the door automatically unlocks, and then I push a button to start it. It has a GPS and you can type in where you're going and this girl will say, "turn right here" and you can rebel and it will reroute you. AND, the CD player is in the front, unlike my van, where the CD player was under my legs.
I've already made a decision not to fall in love with it because a) I would just be on the rebound, and more importantly, b) I don't think I can afford the monthly payments. Unless I make the decision to subsist only on ramen noodles and canned peas. If I did that, all my hair would probably fall out, and I'm too vain to embrace baldness at 24.

I gotta go get ready for church. I'll blog about my first week at work later.

Now I'm 24

On Thursday night we had our honoring of hands ceremony at my school, and one of the midwives who I worked with this summer gave this photo to me and said, "hey, one of the patients you delivered brought this picture of you and her baby to her 6 week postpartum visit." On the back of the photo is this awesome thank-you note from the patient, talking about how happy she was with her birth and how much she appreciated my help and encouragement during her labor!!! Umm, yeah. So I was pretty much thrilled and showing everybody and jumping around. I'm still pretty excited about it.

This morning I woke up and discovered that I was sleeping with several pine needles, dust bunnies, and black specks, so I decided to wash my sheets. My Mom tells me that normal people usually wash their sheets weekly, and I think I'm going to give it a go, as part of my preparation-for-being-out-of-school-and-being-a-real-person plan. That's actually all I've thought of for that plan so far.

Anyways who cares, because do you know what? We have cable! and wireless internet!! And my patients really like me! And it's fabulous, I'm never going to leave my house again. One time I met this guy who told me he was really lonely when he first moved to Nashville, so he decided to get satellite TV and TiVo. He said after that things got a lot better, because he had something to do after work.

This morning I was flipping through the channels during breakfast, when I came across Dean Cain, my old friend from 8th grade. When I was 13, my best friend Jennie & I used to watch Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman every Sunday night. I made a collage of him for my room and we both wrote him letters, to which he replied with a postcard that said something like "Super wishes!" --Dean. I saw every episode up until he and Lois finally got married, when the whole show totally went downhill.
Since that was ten years ago I was psyched to find him back on tv. Unfortunately, he was playing in some geeky movie on the SciFi channel where a giant dragon was flying around eating people, but he still looked exactly the same, and by that I mean he looked awesome.

So, I am fully moved into my new house and I LOVE it. I forgot how it was to live with people who are your friends: it's really great. When we get home from work we talk about our days and sometimes we eat dinner together and watch movies.

Last night for my birthday, Christian & Glenn & Linda took me out for dinner and then we went back to their place for a movie. We watched Memento, and then Glenn tried to explain what he wants to do his doctoral dissertation on, and by then I was so tired that my brain could only handle one complicated concept at a time. But it was all really fun. I got a big box from my family to open, and Christian gave me a candle, and Linda gave me an Amelie poster in Chinese, and Em sent a card and earrings that she made. I also bought myself a jacket, but that's a story I'll write about later.

Okay, so awhile ago I found this necklace I really liked on the internet for $120. Last week while I was bored in Nashville I decided to try and copy it. Since I hadn't looked at the picture for a few weeks, I sort of forgot what it looked like, so it's not exactly the same, but still close, huh? I was really proud of myself. It cost like $8 to make.