Well: I'm was plagued by insomnia (bad start to the day), so I got up and called my post-bac's premed office one last time before driving up in person, in the hope I could get an answer and not the voice mail for once. I was pleasantly shocked and surprised when that's what happened. I was even more pleasantly surprised when they confirmed that I could, indeed, still get a committee letter. That puts a /lot/ of recent stress I've been having to rest. A /LOT/.
I also found out they still didn't get my physics teacher's letter of recommendation after he submitted it twice (really?) and it looks like one or two other things might have gotten misplaced over the last year. One or two other things yet need updating (like my resume). But all that bad news pales in the knowledge that I can actually get my committee letter as planned.
I also talked about the MCAT date I signed up for (June 21st; oops, forgot to post about signing up for it again, but that's when I'm up). It sounds like it's not too late to use. And I can get the old "meaningless" fluff letter of rec from my personal physician replaced by a much more professional one from the doctors I'm working with now (if their letter is received... grumble... I'd better get ontop of that post-haste, actually, since the dead line is April 15th and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they told me it hadn't been received).
And lastly, I definitely need to get in touch with my faculty mentor (something I should have done months ago, but was just too stressed out over thinking I no longer had a mentor or committee....). I'll try getting in touch with her by e-mail asap, and if that doesn't work I have two days off work this week I can use to drive up to DC and try to say hi.
So there's a lot of stuff that needs to get done. But overall, I feel great right now.
In slightly unrelated realms work has been going great as well. I keep getting to see all sorts of interesting cases, people, and procedures. I get to pick up a few basic things, and find out all sorts of tidbits (three or four consecutive ribs in an area can get broken and left to heal with just pain medicine - body casting was used for that decades ago, but it found that hurt much more than it helped because disease was induced as contraction of the rib cage was prevented. More recently, another study was cut short in which we were trying to treat slightly irregular EKG's of the type produced by having a bit of hypertension and excessive caffeine, where you have occasional skipped beats. It turned out that most of the medicines resulted in premature death, and there was very little adverse affect to having your EKG be slightly off baseline in this manner in the first place.)
Some people are really fun to deal with. Some interesting. Some you just have to. And very occasionally someone comes along who you wish hadn't. Someone who'll harass the nurses, or hit them because they're drunk or in an altered mental state or for whatever other reason. When you're working with people for 12 hour shifts most days of the week, you can end up seeing them more than your own family, so when someone comes in and does anything like that it's incredibly upsetting.
Of course, that's just a randomly chosen example that by no means necessarily occurred. But the ED staff works hard, and occasionally has to put up with various stuff they shouldn't. It's tough work, and people there can really empathize with one another. That's one of the nicest parts of the job too though, I think - you really do get to spend a lot of time under stress with the people you work with, so they do become like family. In a way.
As for me.... I guess I'm going to go have lunch and try to fall asleep again. I have to do this whole work thing tomorrow, plus get back to studying for my MCAT on double pace now that my biggest concerns have been cleared up.
