But Tuesday found me re-living my not-so-distant past of medical education & residency. [Relatively speaking....I graduated from medical school in 1999.]
For the past week I had a strong urge to focus on my writing. I realized that I hadn't blogged in about two weeks, even though I had had some ideas. It was just that time wasn't easily available.
I'm one of those people that when I undertake a project, I tend to hyper-focus all of my attention on the project, until I get it done [or mostly done... <sigh>]. There are pluses & minuses to this approach. The biggest minus is that I tend to not start until I know that I have a dedicated block of time. And if there's been one thing I've really discovered after motherhood, it's that uninterrupted time is a rarity. Which means I have a lot of projects that I haven't even really started....
So especially when it comes to my thought process and "flow" for writing, I prefer to write when I'm by myself and the house is quiet. [Again a rarity!] This means either when Tab is at school, or late at night when everyone else is sleeping/occupied. So schedule-wise lately, with the snow/ice days, Tab's posse of 1/2 a dozen kids at the house, my clinic schedule, pets underfoot, etc - I really haven't had a chance to hear myself think.
So this Tuesday was a gift.
I got Tab to school, got a large Coke Zero from Sonic, and returned to my desk at home.With nothing on the agenda until 3pm, I used my time to revisit my paper stacks from residency.
Some background:
During residency, every procedure that I performed had to be documented ad infinitum. So knowing this as a medical student, I started keeping track of what I saw, what I did, what I learned, the mistakes I witnessed.... I was a habitual paper pack-rat, noting my observations about medical education the entire time I was going through the process.
By the time I got done with four years of medical school, a year of general internship, and then three years of residency; I had accumulated a huge amount of paper. Since that final graduation, I have schlepped every bit of it, all over the state of Texas. Interestingly [and this is one of many reasons I maintain I had PTSD from residency....] I would know the papers were piled up, but I couldn't get rid of them. And I couldn't get myself to sort or purge them either. So they remained stashed in a file box in the garage, a set of binders in a dining room buffet, and overflowing out of a drawer in my office.
The first great purge probably happened about 2005. Although volume-wise I don't think I actually threw away much. But just the fact that I could let go of anything was a victory. Then about 2007, I decided that I really wanted that office drawer for something else -- probably scrapbook related. So I managed to trash a bit more. In 2009, I actually went through the whole collection and made some serious progress at getting rid of useless paper. And I started to evaluate what I had in terms of "what would make for good writing material?"
That time around I managed to condense what I kept into a 2 gallon ziploc bag.
So on Tuesday [2011 -- sensing an every-other-year pattern here?] I went through my writing material stash and started to get serious about categorizing what I had. What I ended up with, after 5 hours, was essentially three piles and a whole bunch of ideas.
So I'm going to try to seriously work on writing some of these stories, instead of letting them collect dust in sealed ziploc bags...
Stay tuned....
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