So after living in NYC for over a year now I am sure of one thing, I do not like cities. I like the idea of cities, with entertainment such as museums and great restaurants, but neither of those make me feel really happy and excited as the countryside does. So, instead of studying being productive I decided to run away upstate to Bear Mountain State Park, only a 1.5 hour, $26.50, bus ride away. It was a crisp fall day and it felt amazing to be outside, sweating walking up a trail covered in boulders and dirt.

Here is a picture of the lake at the bottom of the hill, so pretty!

 

(The other pictures didn’t come out as well because I was using the pathetic camera on my phone.)

Moral of this post, hiking adventures are a great way to escape reality (NYC)! I highly recommend Bear Mountain State Park!

 

So I haven’t written anything creative in a a few days, and I’m not feeling inspired now, so I will rant about the awkwardness of physical therapy massages for a bit as I sit icing for the 4th time today.

I used to think of a massage as a relaxing thing, one to take stress away after a hard day of labor, or one to tease out the post-workout knots. After tonight’s massage for my recent injury, I’m going to make a rude analogy. Heaven is to hell as an orgasm is to a physical therapy massage. If you knew me, you’d know that is nothing I’d ever say in person. But laying there  on the table yelping in pain as the therapist literally made little knots of muscle convulse in my leg and hip, I couldn’t but make that comparison in my mind. That said, I went to therapy with a tingling down my whole leg, and left with nothing but a cold spot from the ice pack left on a few minutes too long. I was beginning to doubt physical therapy, but after that I’m willing to keep giving it a try.

Next time I need to remember not to mention I am a medical student though. Everything they do is now a test for me… “so what muscle am I stretching now?” If we had learned anatomy through physical therapy I would have loved it much more!

Nothing else new really. I can’t wait to run normally again. I want to sprint around like a crazy little kid, haha.

Neuro exam one is done, yay! Only 5 weeks until the next one, so for the next week my real goal is to heal my own body so I can then focus more on learning to heal others. It is very hard to do both at the same time. I saw a patient tonight though who at age 72 runs 3 miles a day despite several health problems. There is hope (and I hope that doesn’t remotely violate HIPPA).

Here is my ‘cheesy’ poem about my latest aches and pains.

Piriformis Syndrome

That pain in my butt, or hip to be polite.

The pain that makes me search

For the mouse nibbling away at my nerve,

(My Sciatic is not string cheese)

Or the tiny gremlin hammering on bone,

(My Sacrum is not a broken roof)

Or the mole burrowing into muscle,

(My piriformis is not a sanctuary from the fox)

 

Well I just wasted two hours looking at possible schedules for next year. I meant to write a lot more because I was feeling creative, but apparently the creativity was drained when I had a mini-panic about my future. That said, I’m super excited for rotations to start. I’m a little sick of being a student.

So here is a little about one of the characters, Brita, who I’m going to model after someone with histrionic PD, meaning they are dramatic and attention seeking… Maybe I should actually consider psych as a career, nah!

Brita sang “Tale as old as time…” as she twirled around in pirouettes on the linoleum floor in front of the TV. She had finished watching Beauty and the Beast for precisely the 54^th time since school ended in late June, and it was only the middle of July. Still, with four working parents, the step Mom and Dad included, Brita hardly had anything else to do stuck at home all day with Cindy, who had not stopped texting her boyfriend since the minute she greedily snatched up her first pay check. Cindy sat on the far end of the couch closest to the air conditioner with her freshly painted toe-nails dangling over the edge towards the cool breeze. Brita spun faster, turning from her sun-kissed summer color to an off shade of green more resembling a washed out leprechaun. Her nasal voice got louder, to the point that the chandelier in the room over threatened to fragment and rain to the floor. And then she dropped to the ground, sparing the glass crystals above, but leaving an egg sized bump on her left elbow. Cindy barely noticed as the yelp became a choked cry and then a furious wail.

So I have a small section of my story dedicated to a scene specific to each person’s personality (disorder). Today’s is Margaret, a girls with borderline PD.

I also thought Borderline was a good title for my life today because I feel on the border of getting really upset. My hip/butt/leg have some weird pain/tingling that won’t go away with icing, Aspirin, etc and is worse when I sit. I self diagnosed it as Piriformis Syndrome causing sciatic nerve pain. The part that is making me scared is the treatments all call for 2+ weeks off of activity. That sounds like a nightmare! Doctors appointment in the AM…

Here is a little of the story… it makes me feel stable!

1. Margaret

Just after her 15^th birthday Margaret fell in love. He was not tall or attractive. He was not smart or funny. He was not even memorable to anyone else in her life after those three weeks. Joe was simply that, an average Joe.

On their first date, Margaret brought him a box of Godiva chocolates, wrapped in gold colored paper with a classic red ribbon. Joe had never seen such fancy wrapping, as his birthday presents were typically enfolded in the Sunday comics, with either Charlie Brown or Garfield prints staining the packaging inside. After eagerly opening the box for him, Margaret slowly slid a dark chocolate between Joe’s lips. The bitter taste of the hardened cocoa caused him to spit it out before he could tell a lie. Before the brown sludge hit the pavement of the driveway below, Margaret’s arm was in full swing, and approaching his jaw at high speeds. “Thwackk.” Joe’s lower jaw pounded against the braces still locked to his upper teeth. Blood spewed out from his gums and instead of an ‘I’m sorry’ all Margaret could do was slap the other side of his face.

After studying neuroanaotmy a bit in the morning I decided I’d brave the NYC subways and relax in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. It was a great choice! My favorite parts were the bonsai tree exhibit and the herb garden. Here are a few not so polished poems I wrote sitting on a bench beneath rows of trees in the park. Good thing I’m better at science than writing…

Roses Before the Rain

Glaring up towards the dusty clouds,

Crowded and thirsty.

Waiting for a food drop,

In a refugee camp.

A splash of rain for each,

But not a bite more.

The rainbow sprawls and recedes.

The sun sets and rises.

And they glare up into the brilliant blue,

Still crowded and thirsty,

And dying.

… The next one was a far stretch paralleling the bonsai tree with improperly raising a child…

Stunted

From the promise of a dry seed,

given drips of hope, words of praise and daily attention.

To the first green twig,

clipped to a stub, drained of potential and desire.

Bonsai.

From the fuzzy sheets of the crib,

given sips of milk, songs of love and daily kisses.

To the first malicious spank,

bruised on the bottom, devoid of emotion and empathy.

Psychopath.

I wish I could write poems in my head while running. Sometimes I think of good lines, but then they disappear three steps later 😦

So I have been working on this long story connecting the lives of ten college students who all see the same psychiatrist and end up in a terrible bus accident, or rather a terrible bus ‘on-purpose’. I’m not sure where it will go, and as of now I have tons of little paragraphs that don’t fit into one picture.

This little section is the beginning of the psychiatrist meeting the students for the first time…

The month of September was usually the quietest for me. The freshman students were setting in to the routine of late night parties followed by early morning seminars, but their new found addiction to the campus café’s cinnamon vanilla lattes was still boosting energy levels. The sophomores were busy finding dates with juniors, and vis versa, and the senior had yet to realize that in nine months they would be unleashed from the safety of the campus kennel into an unforgiving world where young pups work a full day for a meager bone.

Some years I had taken vacation in September, once on a cruise to Bermuda, another time to the Shenandoah forest. This past year I decided to wait until October to take a vacation to intentionally miss the first stampede of over-privileged and disillusioned children. Even the seniors were still children. Maybe they had moved on from diapers and sippy cups, but given the option, I’m sure a few would choose to still drink fresh milk from the breast if it was easier and cheaper than making the weekly trip to the grocery store.

I had miss judged the clock, substituting the magical midnight charm when the princesses really turned back at 10pm. The storm came on September 29^th, the morning after I bought ink to print my boarding pass from the office. First came Sharron, in tears flooding the hallways to the point I considered buying a kayak to make sure I could escape from work. As she sat on my tan leather couch, slouching like a geriatric sloth I noticed a faint smile when I asked about greek like, my favorite subject of conversation when there is no common ground. Before she could spell out the third delta of Tri Delt, there was a furious knock on the door, a knock asking to be addressed 3 weeks ago, and not a minute later.

I muttered a “Please give me a minute,” and sent Sharron off with advice to work on studying in the library and not in the living room where the other girls were more focused on figuring out how to make their tongues fit into their boyfriends mouths than how to connect the double bonds of styrene into a polymer of poly-styrene. The challenges of upper middle class Americans never ceased to amuse me, especially after a large dose of caffeine, with half an ounce of chili pepper flavored chocolate melted in. I was more curious about the rigid knock. It sounded confident and powerful, two things seen often in the Army or on the streets of Harlem, but rarely on this campus.

…

I wish I could write better. I feel like my style changes all of the time. Some days I am inspired and others I am not. Hmmm.

Yesterday after studying for a few hours in a dark cubby in the library I decided to start writing about the worst three month period of my life. I don’t have the courage to but the whole piece up but I wanted to share the opening part.

…

Can I tell you a secret? I need to be able to forgive myself and I’m not sure how else to do it.

They say the human spirit can endure anything, fire and famine, weather and war, but in truth most of us experience pain, that sensation telling us to stop and change or else we will not persist.

Children in Africa, Asia, South America and even blocks away here in New York must know that feeling of hunger, the one that turns your stomach upside down in knots tied tightly of pretzel dough to the point that food no longer sounds desirable. Many of them carry through the day, helping their families, going to school, and passively suffering not knowing a different time. But I knew a different time. I knew of a time when I felt strong and powerful, when I could run up a hill without my legs feeling like someone had glued them to the pavement, when I could study with out feeling frozen with tingling fingers and toes, when I could smile at the people I love. It was a time when I knew how to take care of myself. Given everything in a privileged life how does one choose to neglect his or her own health? Why do they choose to give up the very combination of things any third world child will be thrilled to have. In a life of gluttony we need control, and we have to fake scarcity. Only this scarcity does not make one stronger in mind and in soul. It is life draining, and as I found out, relationship draining…

 

I’m so glad that time is long over. I wonder how many girls go through the same thing without help from their relatives and friends. I wish I could have told my secret when it mattered most.

Mmmm, peanut butter honey and banana sandwich for lunch, delicious. Anyway, I thought I’d add a short 5-7-5 poem I wrote yesterday. It is kind of quirky and silly but in a away a very accurate picture of the face of a runner in a blizzard. I’m not sure what inspired the idea given that there was perfect running weather all weekend. I may have sparked some bad luck because it was dark and drizzling which made running less than perfect. A least my new sneakers with ‘super feet’ felt comfortable!

“Nature’s Makeup Artist”

Whipping winds, blushed cheeks.

Crusted snow, white mascara.

Frostbite, cold Botox.

I wonder if other people have experienced that “white mascara” look after  a long run in the snow? The only thing more funny looking is when sweat freezes and looks like a rampant fungal infection.

Today I was trying to write poems because my attention span has been dwindling from an already low level. If this poem seems incoherent, it is probably because my head is still scrambled with emotions.

… Unresolved Anticipation …

Can I ask where we stand?

Or are we diving

Off the cliff into a rocky sea bed

Low tide in the bay.

Or have we landed with scrapes,

Cuts, gashes and bruises,

Too later for the soothing water to rise.

And where did we start?

Or was it over before the beginning,

On a secret cloud or hidden

On a Candyland board somewhere in the gum drop forest.

Fantastic or fantasy?

And where will we go?