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Wahhhhhh Rosemarie has left the country. :( :(

It was very nice having her stay with us for the last 2.5 weeks (although she wasn’t here for lots of that time). I liked having her living in the corner of our living room. We played a lot of games and watched a lot of Seinfeld! Plus she did the dishes and took out the garbage, hehe.

Last night her and I went to see the movie Collaborator. I had won tickets to see it from the newspaper. I thought it was so-so and at the end of the movie we all got trapped into this semi-awkward Q & A session with the star of the movie. Although he was fine in the movie and I recognized him from the show Weeds (Peter Scottson), I just wanted to go home.

Some tasty sushi the other night from the Sushi Garden near our house. We were planning on eating at the restaurant but there were TWELVE groups ahead of us! So we got take out instead. The sashimi was awesome and the rolls were all quite good, although very large in diameter which makes for tricky eating.

I’ve been very busy at work this week. Learning a new camera, a new scanning protocol, learning bone density, doctors reading sessions, plus lots of difficult patients. I am learning heaps and sometimes struggling with all the jobs, but I think I am still doing pretty well overall. By the end of all our clinical placements I have no doubt that I will be totally ready to work as a nuclear medicine technologist.

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We have been mega busy in the last four days. I’m pooped.

While Scott looks happy in this picture, Canada Day in downtown Vancouver was a disappointment. It was crowded and there was nothing good going on. There were some food carts but they were too expensive and there were trucks giving out samples of chocolate milk and stuff but the lines were too long. And the lumberjack show was too slow paced and boring. So we went home.

On the Monday of the long weekend Scott and I went mattress shopping. Our old mattress has just gotten too soft unfortunately, even though it’s only two years old. I have been waking up with a sore back for a while, from sleeping in a canyon, and Scott snores more now!!! >:( So we got a way more firm mattress on mega sale and it gets delivered on Sunday. I CAN’T WAIT. We checked out all the stores nearby to get the best deal.

We also played many many games of Agricola over the weekend. THE BEST GAME!! Check out this game where Scott sucked so bad he lost 38 to 10. Even if you don’t know the game you can see how badly Scott did. He doesn’t even know what went so so wrong, hahaha.

My board.

Scott’s board. HAHAHA.

Tuesday was MY BIRTHDAY! We had a really good dinner at Phnom Penh. We had tons of food including their famous chicken wings and butter beef. My favourite dish of the night was the deep fried squid though… man oh man it was SO TENDER. That was the softest, non-chewy squid I have ever had. I don’t know how they do it! Unfortunately a lot of the dishes (including the squid) were extremely salty though so while I’m glad we finally tried it, I don’t know if I will go back again.

Rosemarie got me a nanaimo square cake and Scott made cookies. I got awesome presents this year including Ticket To Ride from my Aussie family, and a Kindle from Scott!!! I am spoiled!!!

Us playing Ticket To Ride on my birthday. Rosemarie won.

Then yesterday was Rosemarie’s goodbye party. I had parmesan and herb wings and a cocktail called a Rocket Pop. It was good but I think I ate too fast and felt really nauseous so that’s all I had. Rosemarie had a lot of friends show up. I think it was a good goodbye party for her.

I’ve still been having to wake up at 5:45 AM for work this week too, but tomorrow is the last day of that for a while. I don’t think anyone should ever have to wake up at anything before 6:00 AM. Cardiac stress lab has been my hardest rotation so far. There is lots of stuff happening and the same time and you don’t really get to stop moving until the afternoon. I’ve done 5 injections so far but that’s it. Not the right rotations to do a lot of injections unfortunately. And next week won’t have many either. Boo.

ANYWAY that’s me all caught up I think! I’m looking forward to this evening bumming around with Scott and playing some more Ticket To Ride once Rosemarie gets back from her errands.

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I am sorry for not writing anything personal in so long. For the past few weeks I’ve been going through some kind of career and life crisis and maniacally wondering if I am really doing the right thing or maybe I should quit BCIT and go to med school instead, and I wasn’t really ready to talk about it. End result: I’m just going to keep doing my nuclear medicine/MRI thing for now. There are approximately 8 billion different factors involved in this decision and I still don’t feel 100% confident that it is the right decision, but at this point I think it makes the most sense.

I may write the MCAT at some point in the next year or so though anyway… just to see.

Things that have been on my mind: student life, stress levels, insomnia, mental health, $300K salaries, personal life, debt, moving, Canada, Australia, babies, traveling, 8 years, careers, boredom, prestige, homework, rotations, pre-requisites………… and on and on and on.

In other news Rob was back in town for a few days so we had him and Rose over for a little pizza and games night. We ate homemade chicken basil pizza and played 4 player Carcassonne (with 2 expansions) and MAGNETS. It was delightfully nerdy.

AND>> today we had venipuncture training at work and I am now allowed to inject patients starting tomorrow. SO SCARED. I hope my patients have gigantic veins. I will keep you posted. So far I DO have a 100% success rate, hehe. All four pokes.

Well that’s pretty much me all updated. What’snewwit’you?

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You may have seen it on Facebook or Twitter already, but my clinical placement coordinator guy approved my plan to be able to visit Rosemarie in Fiji for longer! Basically I was already planning on visiting her there during my March Break, but then I did a little brainstorming and realized that maybe I could sacrifice my two weeks off at the end of this this summer in order to get two extra weeks off around March Break. It’s so cheap in Fiji (so I’ve been told) I figure I might as well just stay longer, hehe.

So I emailed him a week or so ago, and I just found out on Thursday that he sees no flaws with my plan! I AM SO EXCITED. IKSIDID. So I will work at the Children’s Hospital for the last two weeks of the summer. Bye bye summer, HELLO THREE WEEKS IN FIJI! I think it will be worth it.

Scott will probably just go for a week. He has to work, plus he is also going back to Melbourne in December again for his sister’s wedding (I can’t go to that because it is directly in the middle of my exams). A lot of big travel in the next 10 months!! Definitely blowing the travel budget for the next looooong time after that.

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Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Boston Pizza perogie pizza. That’s kind of like getting paid, right? :/

First week of work went well: we got free food twice in five days. That’s pretty good statistics.

The non-food part went pretty well too. I’m on a camera (this week and next week) that sees a lot of variety which is good and bad. Good because it’s not boring, bad because it’s hard for me to help out when everything is new. But we also do quite a lot of bone scans and I am getting ok at preparing and running those.

Today was sweaty. Lead aprons are not exactly breezy.

My goals for the week were to drink more water and to talk louder. I semi-succeeded at both. Goal for next week: get less flustered. I have to say that trying to remember things when they are actually happening is A LOT harder than remembering things when you are sitting quietly writing an exam.