A new life
Hello, World!
I am still alive, under all that sadness, stress, and bitterness. I'm officially a second-year peds heme/onc fellow and I love it so far.
My schedule these days consist of sleeping in (relatively speaking), going to the lab, sitting in front of my computer with two screens (screen space is considered real estate in this new 'business'), work until I'm hungry, eat, work some more, and leave whenever I want to. I can run errands in Westwood Village in the middle of the day if I need to. I can make phone calls in the middle of the day if I need to. I can make my dentist appointment in the morning and just come in a little later that day. It's so wonderful.
I have to admit... it's not all that easy. I'm working on sequencing the genes of a patient who was born with leukemia... this generates billions worth of base-pairs, and the trick is learning all the computer tools required to process the data and then to eventually analyze it. The amount of data that I'm working is mind-boggling... and it's all encrypted in these weird symbols that mean nothing to me yet... so I'm learning the command line and eventually I'll need to learn a computer language (Python), etc. I'm a little overwhelmed with how little I know (the more things change, the more things stay the same!), but I'm excited to take on this new challenge.
Most of all, it's a welcome relief from being fully clinical. I love my patients. They are the reason why I get up in the morning and go to work at all. But I can't see them every day, watch them relapse, watch them go through bone marrow transplants, and watch them die. It's too hard.
Now I see patients in clinic a half day per week and occasionally on weekends. It's the perfect balance. If there is a patient that I really want to see, I can just head on over to the hospital and visit for a few minutes. It's really nice.
I have much more to report... but I'll have to save it for later!
I am still alive, under all that sadness, stress, and bitterness. I'm officially a second-year peds heme/onc fellow and I love it so far.
My schedule these days consist of sleeping in (relatively speaking), going to the lab, sitting in front of my computer with two screens (screen space is considered real estate in this new 'business'), work until I'm hungry, eat, work some more, and leave whenever I want to. I can run errands in Westwood Village in the middle of the day if I need to. I can make phone calls in the middle of the day if I need to. I can make my dentist appointment in the morning and just come in a little later that day. It's so wonderful.
I have to admit... it's not all that easy. I'm working on sequencing the genes of a patient who was born with leukemia... this generates billions worth of base-pairs, and the trick is learning all the computer tools required to process the data and then to eventually analyze it. The amount of data that I'm working is mind-boggling... and it's all encrypted in these weird symbols that mean nothing to me yet... so I'm learning the command line and eventually I'll need to learn a computer language (Python), etc. I'm a little overwhelmed with how little I know (the more things change, the more things stay the same!), but I'm excited to take on this new challenge.
Most of all, it's a welcome relief from being fully clinical. I love my patients. They are the reason why I get up in the morning and go to work at all. But I can't see them every day, watch them relapse, watch them go through bone marrow transplants, and watch them die. It's too hard.
Now I see patients in clinic a half day per week and occasionally on weekends. It's the perfect balance. If there is a patient that I really want to see, I can just head on over to the hospital and visit for a few minutes. It's really nice.
I have much more to report... but I'll have to save it for later!
posted by Vivian | 11:26 AM
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