Saving grace

Talking about... by Lionoche

Sometimes, call is nice. Sometimes, call is tough. Sometimes, call is just motherfucking awful. And I've had my fair share of nice calls, but in my 3rd year now, my calls have been absolutely miserable.

I have not been dealing well with the stress. It's tough work, and it's a lot of weight to carry. And the only thing that keeps me going is coffee. I need coffee to survive these calls, because after 24 hours of living hell, I can't make it another 6 hours without some help, and the cafeteria doesn't carry amphetamines.

And then, I had my worst call ever. I was covering the ICU, and capped out with really sick patients. I had in one call: 2 family meetings, 3 patients terminally weaned off the ventilator, 4 or 5 central lines, a couple codes... It was that nightmare call you pray never happens to you. It was the Moby Dick of calls. I had one code while I was intubating another patient. The only worse thing I can imagine is simultaneous codes (I've had that happen to me too, but not this time).

And when the worst of it was over, all I wanted was a cup of nice, decent coffee. So I went to the cafeteria at 5AM and poured myself some coffee. It was burnt, nasty, and tasted miserable. It threw me over the edge. I was yelling at staff, critical of my interns, and my signout to the on-call senior was: "You take care of them. I'm fucking done with this."

Everyone knows me, though, and knew that I had gone through hell that night. But we cut each other a lot of slack post-call, because we all know that calls can suck, and sometimes suck very hard. And sometimes without that little saving grace, it's easy to be crushed.

I apologized to one nurse the next day, as I had yelled at her, and implied that she had no idea what she was doing. Her reply: "Oh, don't worry about that. If I had the night you did, I'd be running around shooting people!"

What your coffee says about you

Whenever I want to get coffee, it's always a tough thing to coordinate with other people. Seems like getting a cup of coffee shouldn't be so hard, but in college I learned just how hard it could be to get a simple stupid cup of coffee.

Of course, Starbucks. You can't go to Starbucks. The pretentiousness isn't the problem. It's the corporate conglomerate nature of Bux, overpowering and outcompeting local small business, and taking money out of communities and draining the small towns. It is nothing short of evil.

Then, there's low brow coffee: Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kreme, Tim Hortons. You can't drink these. It's simple, unpretentious, without sophistication or class.

There are a slew of smaller national chains: the deer one, the beanery, blah blah blah. You can't drink them, because supporting them would be complicit to the strategy of Starbucks, and the national chain philosophy of the destruction of small town America.

So then, you must find yourself at local small businesses who serve what can be accurately termed as terrible coffee. There are many of these kinds of places, but they tend to go out of business on a fairly routine basis because (1) their coffee is terrible, (2) they try to be pretentious but the hipsters who promote their types of establishments don't spend money, (3) they sell coffee at fair prices instead of coffee drinks at fairly unreasonable prices.

So, whenever I call someone to go grab a cup of coffee, we have to navigate this immense, geopolitical, socio-economic landscape to figure out just what the other person thinks about coffee, before we can even decide where. It's more complicated than trying to figure out who someone will vote for.

So, I called a friend of mine, and we went to get coffee, and we had this kind of a pitiful conversation:

her: So... where do you want to get coffee?
me: Well, anywhere is fine. Someplace close.
her: Well, Starbucks is close, but so is Place A and Place B.
me: Starbucks is fine. Let's do Bux.
her: Okay, Bux it is.
me: I could give a rats ass about where we get coffee, as long as it's warm and has a bathroom.
her: Oh thank God. There's nothing worse than trying to figure out where we can get coffee, and worrying about what your coffee says about you.

And for the record, I don't like Starbucks, not because of the corporate greed or whatever else, but because they burn their beans, and their roasts go far beyond 'bold' and are more like charcoal. If you drink the latte's, then I'm sure you could care less, but if you're a lover of coffee like me, then it becomes a problem. I prefer milder roasts, unflavored. People make the argument that the bolder roasts are more flavorful, but I'm sure these are also the people who order in Starbucks lingo, and think that my cup of Tim Hortons is swill. Well, it's tasty swill.

WTF is wrong with me

So, I left the hospital at 6 PM, and I realized as I stepped out the door that I had no plans, nothing to do, nowhere to go. I stopped in the coffee shop near my house and did a little writing, but otherwise, went home. I didn't even eat dinner.

I didn't eat dinner because I've been feeling guilty about my weight and decided that I need to cut out about 700 calories from my diet. Sounds like a lot, but I take like 2600 kcal a day. So 700 is a drop in the bucket.

Anyway, I came home after 3 cups of coffee, watched some TV, goofed around on the comp, and now I'm going to bed. It's Friday though! C'mon! Shouldn't I be going out and doing something? Shouldn't I be living life to the fullest?

I need a life. I really, really, really need a life. I actually spent tonight listening to medical podcasts. MEDICAL PODCASTS! WTF.

Coffee for two

In an effort to commune with the world and counteract my hermit tendencies, I have taken to camping out in coffee houses. This is, for the most part, entirely without point or purpose. I haven't yet met or talked to a single person who I didn't already know.

So, I'm not sure that this strategy is really an effective one, but I'm trying nonetheless, and I think the next step may be to join a gym or something like that. That may work, or it may just be another thing to waste my time.

But in the course of wasting my life in coffee shops, I've been privy to some interesting goings on. I've seen a lot of people studying, and most of them are studying medical things: students, pre-meds, residents, and even an attending or two. There seems to be a surprising amount of medicine going on in coffee shops.

Even funnier though is a conversation that I overheard between two girls about how to snag a doctor. It was absolutely ridiculous, and absurd in that they were surrounded by people in the medical field, in one way or another.

I've witnessed a few first dates (or half dates, depending on how you wish to view it). A lot of meetings from eHarmony or Match.com going off with several hitches and a few bricks. The world going by in coffee houses is a little bizarre in many ways, and the $2 cup of coffee is well worth the admission price to the show.

But it also points to the deficiencies in my life. Case in point, there is a pretty girl sitting not two tables away, typing away on her laptop, sipping her coffee, and here I am, doing the same thing, and I will pack up my computer and go home without another glance, and probably there was nothing there anyway, but still, how typical of me.