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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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Today is the first day of summer, which seems like a very appropriate time to make a list of SUMMER GOALS.

  1. Finally paint the cheapo wooden drawers we got from IKEA.
  2. Make delicious popsicles in my new popsicle mold.
  3. Go swimming in the ocean for the first time in Vancouver.
  4. Ride the rides at the PNE.
  5. Watch fireworks.
  6. Finish my Settlers paintings.
  7. Sell a pair of shoes or a shirt or a painting.
  8. Go to one of the night markets in Richmond. already done!
  9. Regularly visit the farmers market on Saturday mornings.
  10. Read some books while I actually have the time.
  11. Make a nicer looking menu planning board.
  12. Find a new person to play board games with.
  13. Try a new fruit.
  14. Do a successful venipuncture on a real patient.
  15. Make a new blog header.
  16. Take more pictures.

Summer lasts until September 22, so I’ve got until then to complete my list. We’ll see how I go!

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For the next four weeks I start work at 7:00 AM, so I spent today prepping a bunch of breakfast foods so that I hopefully don’t have to wake up much before 6 AM. I made 12 oatmeal chocolate chip muffins this morning, and just finished making 10 breakfast burritos this afternoon. All that combined with bagels being on sale for $1 a bag at No Frills means that our freezer is totally ridiculous right now!!

Is it weird that I took a picture of my freezer? Probably.

Last week at work was enjoyable. Things are becoming more familiar and I’m getting better at dealing with patients. There really are a lot of details I need to eventually know!!! I’ll be on a new camera for the next two weeks, similar to what I was on before but with only one camera head instead of two. This camera also gets a whole lot of different scans scheduled on it so it will be another two weeks of randomness.

In other news, Scott is home! He worked something like 140 hours over the last two weeks in Edmonton so we’ve been taking it very easy this weekend. We’ve been watching a lot of Australian Masterchef.

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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.

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TO BLOG:

  • class party
  • luxury bbq
  • outdoor rock climbing
  • camping
  • first day of work

I had an epic weekend!! So much fun. I can’t wait to blog about it all but I took over 200 hundred pictures and that is going to take another day to sort out, and I’m gonna have to split it up into a couple posts.

For now I can tell you that my first day of work was good! We got a big tour of the department, met lots of people, saw a bunch of patients, and got introduced to the fifty million programs they use on the computers. We spend two weeks on each on a different camera, shadowing whoever is scheduled to work on that camera. We had a bit of extra time today so I got to have a bone scan (no injection obviously). That might seem a bit silly but it was interesting to see how the patients might feel when they come in and hear all the strange noises and get a big block camera put 1 cm away from the tip of their nose by a total stranger.

Okeedoke. All for now, I want to go to bed early tonight. More tomorrow!!