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seanscheng
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Name: Sean
Location: New York City
Birthday: 3/31/1980
Gender: Male
Interests: books, music, movies, writing, martial arts, whiskey
Expertise: profile picture: Bethesda Fountain, Central Park - "Angel of the Waters"
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
7/28/2002
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| Not much else happened, really. Somehow, very mysteriously, we ended up at a reputable "gentlemen's" club, where my stripper for the evening was a leggy blonde from one of those landlocked countries in central Europe (Hungary? The Czech Republic? www.alllooksame.com?). She did a damned good job pretending like she enjoyed rubbing up against me, even going so far as to telling me her "real" name (Petra), her home phone number (somewhere in my cellie), her fetish for Korean men ("I'm a full quarter, you dirty minx." "What is minx?" "A minx is, uh, like a soft, silky animal, like a cat." "Ah, yah, then I'm dirty, dirty minx"), and her penchant for anal sex (she, um, loves anal sex). By the end of my third straight free lapdance, I was pretty convinced that she liked me, she really liked me. Which felt nice, because if you forgot about the whole "stripclub" setting, here was this statuesque beauty telling me how fabulous and sexually attractive I was, the perfect elixir for a childhood marked by low self-esteem and obesity.
I told her I'd call her and that maybe we could meet up a little later for breakfast for something (we left the club at 5am), but I never got around to it. Dunno why. Maybe cuz it'd have been weird showing up with my two buddies in tow ("Hello again Petra, this is Mike and Todd. Now where were we? Vaseline versus Astroglide? Ahh yes.") Or maybe it's because I like a girl with a certain naughtiness and an edge about her, and Petra was a bit too tame and straightlaced for my taste. Perhaps if her name was Candy or something, I dunno.
That was February. This is August. A lot's happened since then. I've settled into my digs here in Flushing, Queens. I finished my intern year of residency and began my anesthesia training at Columbia. I met this girl that I'm pretty into. I've been to Baltimore on a crab-eating trip; to Connecticut multiple times for sushi (friend of a friend's a sushi chef at this place in Danbury); to southern California, a.k.a. my former home, for a brief respite prior to starting my second year of residency; and I just got back from a 5 day sojourn to the Dominican Republic where I got all-inclusively darker, fatter, and dumber.
Queens is a fantastic borough. I mean, it has to be to have cultivated the likes of LL Cool J, Nas, Ja Rule, and Jerry Springer. We've got rhythm, we've got music, we've got immigrants who could ask for anything more? I live a stone's throw away from Shea Stadium, a hop skip and jump from the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park, and within a gentle breeze of the savory pungency of downtown Flushing (think mobs of people on the street, karaoke blaring, $15 buses to the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, grannies shoving flyers in Chinese in your face, the smell of smoky cumin and lamb wafting from the Xinjiang skewer carts situated on every other street corner).
Got a lot more to write about: work, travel, the digs, the lady... just not enough time. Tell you more about it later, gotta go meet up for some Taiwanese shaved ice. Whatdya think: red bean or green bean, mango or lychee?
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| Swathed in The Venetian's luxurious terry cloth bathrobe, I had just
about the best hour of sleep I could imagine this morning. The sofa
cushion that doubled as my pillow was a bit too thick for my neck to
handle, but luckily my cervical spine requires more than an hour of
vertebral misalignment to get fucked up entirely. The events
sandwiching this blessed hour of sleep included a lovely Czech girl
suffocating me with her tits (circa 6am) and my making a mad dash to
the Vegas airport to catch a morning flight to Los Angeles (boarding
time: 8:15am), where I'd planned to engage in horseplay and general
tomfoolery at Six Flags Magic Mountain with my two partners-in-crime.
Instead, I find myself perched back on this familiar balcony
overlooking the Pacific, my two comrades assed out, me the insomniac
writing some more in this journal that, I'm sure, will keep me from
getting elected to any decent office someday.
Not that I care. I'd make such a lousy/terrific politician. Mainly
because I wouldn't give a fuck about all the personal BS you see making the news all the time. Did I know she
was 15? Yeah, Wolf, but she looked at least 17. Did I ever inhale?
Approximately forty seven times, Anderson, give or take a sesh. How do
I explain that dead hooker in my hotel room? Cocaine's a helluva drug,
Larry.
I'm kidding, of course, about the cocaine. My memories of D.A.R.E. are crystal clear.
Anyways, I was feeling generally sorry for myself this past week (see
last entry) and two of my boys, thus alerted, decided that what I really needed was
some R&R. And so, keeping in line with the guiding principles of
male camaraderie, they decided to fly me to Vegas for some gamblin,
drinkin, clubbin, and strippercrotchgrindin. I sped through my work at the
hospital Friday morning like a man possessed and managed to tuck away
my gomers and rocks (i.e., my patients) well in advance of the
afternoon flight to Vegas.
Land in Vegas. Reunite with the homies. Handshaking, backslapping,
whiskey-swigging in full effect. Drop off the kids, shower, p(r)imp
thyself. We're hungry as hell. Dine at Delmonico's, one of Emeril's
joints. Veal chop, filet, and ribeye around the table; blood on the
plates and on our mouths. Stomachs full, wallets fat, lapels wide and
our hair just-so, we're ready for action.
Action comes in the form of Tao, Venetian's nightclub and beacon of...
Well, they're awake. We're going to eat now. More later.
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| Hello, xanga. How do I even begin? So much has happened since I last updated (October 2007). Seasons changed. Holidays came and went. Patients who got better, patients who got worse. Patients who died. Me, inured to it all: the agonal breaths, the cracked ribs under my hands, the blood shit vomit piss, the icy coldness of blue skin, the death rattle and the eternal hollow blank stare. The tears and lamentation of the family. Me, inured to it all, inured... until the widow starts to tell me about how they'd been married for sixty years and that he was the love of her life, and "What do I do now? What will I do???!?!?" It's at this point that I have to excuse myself, usually. Usually, as I walk away is when I hear the wail. I've learned a lot these past several months. I've learned that you can't make everybody happy, no matter how hard you try. That no matter how hard you try, you alone can't fix a system that is broken. And that high productivity in residency is rewarded not by money or respect but by more work, more patients to follow, more pages to return, more orders to write. I've lost many things in the muddiness of these past months and gained... little. I've lost a certain drive to excel and replaced it with a fear of failure. I've lost a sense of belonging and gained a tremendous desire to get the fuck out of here. I've lost the surfeit of potential I once had to exercise and live healthfully, and I've gained weight, bitterness, meanness. I've lost a relationship that took years to build, and gained... like I said, very little. They told me this would happen. Still... Last week, my car got broken into. They smashed my side window in. Took some spare change, the fucking bums. It rained that day, hard. I had to leave in the middle of rounds to put up some plastic. When I got off work that night, I drove all around Queens looking for a car glass shop still open. I ended up paying some Mexicans $60 to put up glass that did not, in desperation, match the tint of the rest of my car windows. I don't give a fuck anymore. Out of the blue, couple of weeks ago, I started shitting blood. Bright red blood coming out of my anus. Blood in the bowl, blood on the tissue. As a man, I was not accustomed to seeing blood coming out from below my waist, even as a doctor. The bleeding resolved on its own within a couple of days, but not before I saw a gastroenterologist who gave me my first rectal exam. As it were, this gastroenterologist happened to be my teaching attending for the month. Suffice it to say that from that moment forward, morning rounds were awkward. Just slightly. I.e., I couldn't look him in the eyes, and neither could he mine. Turns out I have high blood pressure. No big deal, I thought. I'd known about this little problem of mine for a decade or so, ever since my first physical back in high school for sports. Since I finally have decent insurance now that I'm working, I decided to go ahead with the workup for secondary causes of hypertension. During this workup, I discovered that I had renal artery stenosis, a condition in which one of the arteries supplying your kidneys is narrow. When this happens, the kidney fed by the narrowed artery tricks your body into thinking your blood pressure isn't high enough, and causes your BP to be abnormally high. Not the worst thing in the world to have, really, but finding time to make appointments with your doctor, get blood tests done, and have imaging performed on you during an 80-hr workweek was stressful. Especially when you just got your car window smashed in, you're shitting blood, you're getting shat on at work, you're struggling with the end of a six year relationship, and you're looking -- abruptly -- for a new place to live. Cuz crashing with that sympathetic buddy from your college days and living out of a suitcase gets old mad quick. For the record, I am doing okay. Just listening to a lot of Alice in Chains and reading a lot of Hemingway, minding my own business, you know, the usual. | | |
| In Memoriam
I was going to post an entry about how I had worked 46 out of the past 52 hours, but when I realized what day it was I couldn't bring myself to complain. I remember that day like it were yesterday. | | |
| At night, the lights get turned down low in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, lending the place a submarine, otherworldly feel. A skeleton crew of nurses is here with me as I'm on call: a Jamaican, a Filipina, and a male Estonian. Every so often, they come by my station, hand me a piece of paper with a bed number and some lab values scrawled on it, and stand there, expectantly, waiting for me to respond. The Korean lady in bed 3 is sick and needs dialysis and a transfusion; the Jehovah's Witness in bed 7 is sicker and needs a miracle. We brought him back from pulseless V-Tach earlier in the day; whether he dies from his heart, his lungs, or his kidneys is anyone's guess.
The nighttime resident tells me to get sleep while I can; before I can thank him for his graciousness, he cuts me off and tells me not to page him unless I feel it's absolutely necessary. Deciding whether to page your senior is always a battle between fear and pride -- as a new intern, fear usually wins out, but I've become surprisingly proud in a short amount of time; my resident knows this, knows he'll not get paged unless shit really hits the fan. My pride in my work is either going to make me intern of the year or land me in the hotseat of M&M conference.
It's been quiet for a few minutes and I steal away for the call room. The call room is nice enough. It's no Ritz, but clean sheets are all
I'm asking for. It's my lucky night -- one of the four beds in the
small space has clean sheets. The three others look... used. I hang my white coat, step out of my
clogs, and lie supine on the creaky bed. A rattling air conditioning unit keeps the room luke-cool and lends some welcome white noise to the room. I try, but it's difficult for me to fall asleep. A million thoughts hurdle through my brain. I lie there in the darkness running through all the worst-case scenarios that could happen during the night; I'm partway through an imaginary code when I suddenly remember to call down to X-ray to make sure bed 3 gets her chest film done. Her lungs are wet and the Lasix we're giving isn't touching her. I get paged by the Estonian who tells me that someone's blood sugar is too high and could we give her some coverage. Like me, he's new; he plays a bit too close by the book though and doesn't know yet not to page the doctor for a cheap sugar elevation of 160. It's hard to keep a smile on your face when it's 3am, you've been working since 6am the day prior, and you have to write an insulin order that should've been done by the primary daytime team.
The telemetry monitor goes beep and the ventilators go whoosh through the night, and so it goes -- ushering in the sick, delivering no harm, striving to keep one's sanity -- until the daytime team trickles in through the automatic double-doors of the CICU. I'm happy to sign out to them, but my work won't be done until I present the new patients to the Critical Care attendings on rounds, where pimping awaits me. Somewhere outside, the sun has risen. I'll need some coffee for the drive home.
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