School started

After a week of orienting the first-years and having fun partying all week, I went to bed Sunday with the depressing feeling that I, too, had to start medical school back up again the next morning. Ugh. I picked out my clothes the night before, laid out a good plan for getting ready in the morning, including making my lunch, and then I stood in the shower for about 5 extra minutes, which on top of snoozing one extra time (9 minutes) made me late. I had to wake up Eric and get him to drive me in because I didn't want to be late for my first class. I walked in at 8:04; apparently, at 8:03, Dr. Lockwood, the path course director, asked all the class officers to stand up so he could see who they were. Oops. For the rest of the day I had people asking where I had been. I didn't really care, and I introduced myself to him after class, but it was just the fact that it was the second-largest attendance our class has ever had (after the first day of first year) and everyone knows I was late.

Other than that, this week has been pretty good so far. I really like path -- at least, I like it when I'm sitting in class, looking at the pictures and only having to understand things in passing. It's interesting, you know. I haven't yet tried to actually memorize everything I need to memorize, so we'll see how I like path in a couple weeks. We also started immunology, and so far it's basic stuff that I remember from undergrad, so I have a few days to stay ahead of the curve on that one. And in ICM we're doing an ethics block, which is much more interesting than I thought it would be. If a doctor fudges a diagnosis or clinical sign to get insurance to cover a test, is that lying? Is it wrong? What do you do if you know a patient's family member is a match for a living organ donation but the family member doesn't want to donate? What do you tell the patient? Interesting stuff, and they're doing a good job with it, which is a surprise. What's not a surprise is how off-kilter my own moral compass is; I always seem to want to do the wrong thing. Guess I need to work on that :)

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We came up with a new goal for meals: eat out at least once a week, but no more than three times. We're doing this for the financial aspect of things. I think I'll be able to do this pretty well, because I often get free lunches at school and stuff -- in fact, I'm getting free dinner tomorrow night for participating in a research study, then free lunch on Friday for a meeting, then we're going to a Bats game Friday night with the school where we get free dinner, so that's going to work out really well, and since we got Qdoba last night for dinner, that means we can eat out on Saturday AND Sunday if we want to!

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My mom got fired from her job last Friday after a week of craziness. (Background info: she's a barber on a Navy base for the base barber shop.) A week earlier, she had been called into a special meeting where she was asked if she had ever given free hair services. She admitted to having cut my brother's hair one day after work and to having another barber in the shop give her a hair trim when there were no customers -- these are things that all the barbers do. A couple days later, she was sent home and told she didn't need to come back until they gave further notice; she and another barber were sent home on the same day. Later in the week, barbers #3 and 4 were sent home for the same thing, but they went ahead and quit on the spot. After barber #5 (the manager) came back from vacation a day later and had been apprised of the situation, she decided to give notice as well. Barber #6 was finally questioned and then she, my mom, and barber #2 were all fired officially. Barber #6 was a full-time hire, so she has termination rights, while my mom and barber #2 were the equivalent of contractors (sort of) so they don't have any termination rights.

Anyway, they were all fired for providing free hair services, which for all of them included cutting each other's hair and occasionally cutting a family member's hair -- never providing free services to clients. They even insinuated that my mom had done something wrong by keeping the shop open 5-10 minutes late at times to cut the last customer's hair. What crap. Where the story gets interesting is the fact that barber #7 was NOT fired. In fact, what everyone has determined is that barber #7 was seen pocketing $20 as a tip when it should have gone into the cash drawer a couple months ago, and when she was turned in and questioned about it, she got really pissed and decided to get even. So she waited a while and watched everyone closely, keeping notes on what everyone was doing, then called the regional corporate office and said there was shady stuff going on in the salon, then cleaned up her own act so that she was not fired while everyone else was. What a bitch. So apparently there's only 1 barber working the shop right now, so I can only imagine what the lines are like. On the one hand, it sucks that my mom lost her job. On the other hand, she wasn't totally in love with it, because the atmosphere was always really catty and vicious like that, and she's not that good at holding up under that sort of negative environment. I think she should just open her own shop, like she's often thought about doing, but she's worried about the huge financial risk. The Navy shop was good because there was a very steady stream of business due to high volume and low prices (a man's haircut is only like $7). You can't survive in the civilian world with prices like that. Such injustice in this world. On the up side, though, since my mom now has lots of free time, she might come visit me!