liveSTRONG and other hypocracies

So it's been a while for me. The holidays, you know. Given the commuting distance for my medical preceptorship over the break, it was almost like I was working a real Doctor's schedule. Since I had to leave the house around 6:30 every day to make it to the office by 8 and since I got home every night around 8pm, only to fall quickly to sleep and repeat it all the next day, I really feel like I got a taste of things to come. I realized at the end of that experience that before I start rotations in July I'm going to need much more comfortable shoes.

Today we picked our rotation blocks. Or rather, we stated our preference for the rotation schedule "lottery" that will take place probably about 2 weeks before we start rotations. I have very little to pray for these days, but tops on that list is that I will somehow manage to complete my rotations without having to spend any of that time in Odessa, TX. Odessa is one of our rotation sites for Ob/Gyn and Pediatrics. One of three sites to handle roughly 30 students at a time. Can't be that hard for God to keep me out of Odessa, even if I don't have the excuse of being a single mom, or having a family that can't go with me, or a debilitated relative that needs my constant attention, or any of those other wonderfully amazing excuses that seemingly every other student in my class has managed to come up with. All I've got is a functioning memory that includes Odessa, Texas as part of its components. And that's excuse enough for me.

This semester I vowed, as part of a myriad of New Year's Resolutions, to not only eat better (now with fewer grease pizzas!) but also to commit myself to greater success in class. So far, during these first few weeks, I've done it. I've read ahead, and been prepared and even when I got quiz answers wrong I was still using feasible logic to arrive at good answers, just not the BEST answer evidently. I'm hoping that this sticks, and it seems likely that it will, especially given that every time I start drifting away from my newly formed studious habitus, I remember that on the horizon is BOARDS and everything BOARDS represents. I remember that at some point I'm going to need to be capable of pulling 8-14 hour days every day of the week for 6 weeks. 8-14 hours of CONSTANT STUDYING. It's like a marathon, waiting there for me the second week of May - and here I haven't really run in several years.

And along with that marathon are two options - I can either fail bitterly and be laughed at, abused, and hopelessly in debt. Or I can suck it up, train myself, and endure through the grueling 26 miles of unyielding desperation until I finally make it to the other side of that line, and the glorious thought runs through my head that I'm now half-way to Doctor!

Wait.

Half-way?

DAMMIT!