The disappearing hat

It's been so freaking cold for the last couple of months, that even for my 2 minute commute to Bellevue, I have been putting on a hat every morning. Then we go round on the floors. Sometimes, believe it or not, in our coats (that is mostly because we are always in a hurry and sometimes we have to go to a different building after rounds, and so just in case, since it's -25C outside, we all carry our coats). So last week, one evening as I was leaving the hospital, my hat was nowhere to be found. I tried to run through my day in my head to figure out where I might have misplaced it. Maybe at the cafe downstairs in the lobby where I got my coffee in the morning? Or the surgery call-room? I look everywhere but it was nowhere to be found. I must have dropped it somewhere in the hallway. It's a 20+ floor hospital with countless units, and my team has patients on 5 different floors some days. My hat could be anywhere!

So I resigned myself to the fact that it was permanently lost. I dug an old hat out from my closet and wore that for a week. Paul would say it looked silly. "Where is your nice hat?" he would ask. "Somewhere in Bellevue maybe" would be my reply.

And then today, during afternoon rounds, I am standing around the surgical ICU, waiting for a patient to be transported, and I look down and there is my hat just sitting quietly on an otherwise empty and unoccupied desk. It was MY HAT!!! Undoubtedly! So I grabbed it without much hesitation, inspected it for familiar marks, like the one string that was a little loose on one side, and quickly stuffed it into my white coat pocket, where it hung out for the next few hours until I was ready to leave for the night. Of course today the weather warmed up and I don't need a hat anymore :)

At either end of life

I am now into the second week of clinical rotations, namely my Obstetrics and Gynecology rotation. I spent last week on the labor and delivery floor, and it was pretty crazy! I saw babies being born, the very beginning of life, I saw the happiest families, the craziest Dads, the coolest Moms, the tragedy of losing a child. Every day in the hospital, you see little miracles and big tragedies. That is what life is. That is where the beginning of all of it is.

On Sunday morning, my dear grandmother Babi left this world forever. She hasn't been herself for many years, and what had finally happened was the best for her, to end her suffering in this world. She had a long life, and a difficult one. She lived in a time and a place where women were not allowed many opportunities in life, and I think that had made her bitter in her old age. But she was also a beautiful and loving person, who raised her three children to be the best people they can be. I have many many fond memories with her. There is one in particular I like to remember. Who knows if it ever even happened...

I was a child of around 10 maybe, and it was Christmas eve and we were celebrating at our house. She always came to our house for Christmas. In Hungary we say that babu Jesus comes that night to decorate Christmas trees and brings the presents (I don't know if there are other countries where Jesus takes over for Santa, but at least in Hungary that's the case, silly, I know, but that's just how it is). In order for me to not see that my parents were actually the ones decorating the tree and putting gifts underneath, Babi took me for a walk around the neighborhood while the preparations were underway. I have this very vivid memory of walking with her hand in hand in the cold and snow, her telling me about baby Jesus. Memories is all we have left.

I do not believe in any sort of afterlife. But sometimes I think about her being in some better place than this world was for her over the past few years. I have an old photograph from 1942 from her and my Dedi's wedding. She is wearing a gorgeous white dress and is stunning in it and he is so handsome in his military uniform. I like to imagine them together again, wearing those beautiful clothes, arm in arm, happy again.

Humans of NY today

I can officially claim to be a "real" New Yorker now that I know someone who's been captured on Humans of New York!!

Check out the HoNY Facebook page - blue jacket and glasses, with baby head poking out from under the coat! One of Paul's classmates, a future doctor :)

Next step: try to be on HoNY myself!

NYC Marathon 2013, with some delay

It's already Sunday of the 4-day weekend (really 5 days for me, as I skipped all classes on Wednesday). Conclusion of the past 4 days: I am really really bad at doing nothing. Judging by how many episodes of Homeland season 3 I have watched, I had about 6 hours of free time over these 4 days.

4 weeks to the day after the NYC marathon, I am trying to keep up the running. I read an article in the NY Times before Thanksgiving about how daily exercise can help prevent becoming a couch-potato over the holidays. Duh! I don't think one needs to do a scientific study on this. In any case, according to a study, even after a week of overeating and spending too much time lounging, fat cells begin to change, accumulate bad molecules, insulin levels rise; overall, bad things happen quickly in our bodies. I've been thinking about this when I forced myself twice over the past 4 days to run on the treadmill, an activity I almost never enjoy. Even while watching my favorite bad TV show...
But today, finally, the temperature went back over 40F (+4-5C) and the sun is out, so I went out by the river for an easy run, 5 miles or so. Felt good. No pressure these days in terms of the distance, the pace, the regularity of these runs. It's nice to just go, and decide on the way how much and how fast.

I never got a chance to write about this year's marathon. It was great! Really really great! And I am not saying, "well, it was good for the first couple of hours and then really really painful for the last couple of hours, but overall, enjoyable". It was really really fun almost the whole way! This year, I started the race with Daniel and David, and ran almost the whole thing with Daniel. It's nice to have a buddy around, even if too tired to chat, just to see a familiar face. Just like seeing the familiar faces in the crowd. As always I saw a lot of friends on the course, which is always the highlight. Check out what one of my biggest fans was wearing on his head so I could see him from blocks away! :)

In terms of the actual running, I started at an ~9 min/mile pace and finished at about the same pace. Which is a novelty in my marathon career, so to speak. Sure, there was some pain and during the last few miles, I was thinking more and more about the finish line and about finally stopping, but overall, no "wall", no falling apart, no walking, just looking straight ahead towards the finish. 3:58:28. New PR. I was very happy.

On our way to the start with Daniel and David:

Start village pictures :

List of all the people I was going to look for on the course (note: you might notice Paul isn't on the list, as he could not make up his mind about where to stand - but fortunately, he had a pretty distinctive look that day)

At 10K, all 3 of us still in the shot, then near 18M, I am trying to grab Janice's goodie bag (cut-up bananas and oranges):
This whole biting the medal thing is weird, but I felt compelled to do it:

My orange finisher cape matched Paul's hat well (this is at the Plaza Hotel after-party with some friends from out-of town
who also ran):

 

Home away from home

I just came across a new blog I liked. It's by someone not very dissimilar to myself. It's interesting how we can connect to someone we have never met and don't know anything more about than the thoughts they put "on the (electronic) paper". In any case, reading this blog made me nostalgic about my own blog. And made me feel a little guilty about how bad I have been about keeping up with it. So here we are.

Thanksgiving is coming up in two days. A lot of people came to class today with their suitcases, heading to the airport straight from school to head home. I suspect I will see even more people tomorrow with their suitcases, assuming anyone will go to class even. After class I met up with a friend who is a med student at Einstein and just had a baby, so she is taking the year off. I met the 5-months old cutie-pie, caught up with her Mom, then walked around the city in the rain.

I don't get homesick often; almost never to be very honest. New York feels like home, it has for many years and I don't long to be anywhere else. Of course, there are a lot of people I miss very much who live all over the world, literally. But that's the reality of life these days, especially for us emigrants. Around the holidays though, I do get homesick. This year, it seems to have just set in today. Like I said, it's not because I don't feel at home here and it's certainly not because people don't make feel at home. It's just a fact.

I usually travel to Kansas for Thanksgiving to see the dear family I once lived with when I was in high school, now more than 13!! years ago. Going there always feels closest to going Home, with a capital "H". But this year I have already used up my travel budget to go to El Salvador, Montreal, and then going home to Budapest for Christmas in a month! Plus there is a big vacation in the planning for next summer (more about that later, I hope). So that, with the ridiculously pricey plane tickets this year, I decided to stay put in NYC this week. Ultimately, I am looking forward to a quiet weekend without travel stress, much studying and all that. That was, until I realized that I had something planned already for every single day of the week. Not that I am complaining! Oh no no no! It's great! I love it! It's home!

Tomorrow night, I am going to Becky's parents' house in Brooklyn to make latkes for the first night of Hanukkah, then off to New Jersey to Kelsey's parents' house for turkey day, then plans with friends who are visiting from abroad or from up north, catching up with friends I never have time to see. Going through my to-do-list for the weekend, I realized, just now, that being far away from Home home just means that I have multiple homes: one here on 26th Street in Manhattan, another one in Brooklyn, in New Jersey, in Kansas, even in Ohio and in Budapest. It's not that bad, after all :)

Life cycles

It is sometimes said that our lives are made up of 7-year cycles; we somehow reinvent ourselves, or just simply change a little bit in a cycle. I don't think it matters how many years our "cycles" are, but it is definitely true: we do go through phases in life in which we think differently, do things differently, take more or less risks, meet more or less people, become more or less open to the world, or just simply change out paths.

Recently, a few close friends of mine have been going through such life changes. My closest friend while growing up in Hungary just left her residency training in Medicine to travel around India for 3 months, looking for something that she feels is missing from her life. While I firmly believe that whatever is missing from one's life can be found more locally than traveling halfway around the world, I do commend her on taking the risk and embarking on this adventure of a lifetime. I sincerely hope that she finds whatever it is she is looking for, or at least that she returns to Europe with a new world view, or just a sense of being more at peace. Another friend of mine here in New York left her decade-long career in science and is trying to find her real passions. We had dinner earlier this week and she mentioned that she knew a lot of people in their 30's doing the same thing. Another close friend from grad school just started law school a few weeks ago to become a patent lawyer.

I was thinking about all these things while out on a run in Central Park a couple of days ago. I am training for the 2013 NYC Marathon, which is just a little over a month away. I am really excited! The first time I was in these same shoes was 4 years ago now, training for the 2009 NYCM. That season ended up being a huge turning point in my life. Whether or not it had something to do with the running, I can't say, but I'd like to believe it. In August that year, I ran a really difficult half marathon in 80+ degree weather and managed to fracture a metatarsal bone in my foot. With 6-8 weeks of recovery, the marathon was out of the question. I was very disappointed. Also, I suddenly had a lot of time freed up that fall. So maybe it was all that free time that suddenly got me to think about bigger things, who knows. But it was that fall that I made the decision to embark on this new journey that I am still at the beginning of right now.

It's amazing how things turn out in life. I wish I could tell myself 4 years ago that everything was going to be ok. But how wonderful life is, that we can look back and realize that 4 years ago, if someone had told me that 4 years later I would be starting my second year in medical school, I would be in love with a great man and would be in the greatest shape of my life training for the NYC Marathon, I probably wouldn't have believed them at all. While it's easy to get bogged down by the little daily struggles, it's so important to think about life as a whole sometimes. Starting my second in year in medical school was a little rough. This past summer was a blast! Having a 9-5 job was so nice! I had my evenings and weekends free, took a long weekend trip to Montreal with the boyfriend, spent another week in El Salvador with a college friend, and just did a lot of relaxing in general. Being thrown head first into 4 weeks of anatomy after this was a shock to the system. Things have calmed down since - being done with anatomy FOREVER helps a lot! - and now I am just really excited to be just 3 months away from starting clinical clerkships!

Maybe my life turns in 4-year cycles, who knows. But in any case, it's good to think about these things at least every 4 years.

The perfect amount of pain

Been feeling sort of anxious over the past couple of days. School, work, boyfriend, whatever else there is, sometimes it all seems a little too much to handle at once. And then it's been raining for days, and every day, more and more lecture pile on top of the ones I am already behind on. And the weekend offers no relief in this matter with a wedding plus friends and relatives in town!

When I got home from class in the early afternoon, the sun was beginning to poke out from under the clouds. Finally! I put on my running shoes and headed out to the river. I desperately wanted to let go of all the shit in my head, to relax, to find that sweet spot that all runners know about. That spot where your legs propel you forward without effort and where all inner dialogue disappears for a few moments at a time. 

As I was running south, the wind was gently pushing me forward from the back, but I was getting distracted by every little thing. Shoes coming untied, layers coming off, sweating too much, nose running, nothing quite right. When I got to the 2.5 mile spot I usually turn around at for shorter runs, I stopped to stretch, to look at the water, take in the view of Brooklyn, the bridges, a little bit of NY Harbor. It's no Central Park, but can't complain!

I contemplated going on south, trying to make it a longer run: maybe I'll be able to relax a little more after a couple more miles. Then I remembered all those lectures, the 100's of pages of notes I have yet to review, and quickly decided to turn around. This time, the wind was in my face, it was hard to speed up, there was ni hope of me trying to do any intervals or sprints. I finally let it go: it's just not meant to happen today, I thought. Not going to find that sweet spot. It's ok, it's still a workout, I am outside, it's sunny, I will feel better later on when it's raining again and I am stuck inside. I kept pushing against the wind, with less effort and more acceptance this time. After some time - a few minutes, maybe more - I realized that I wasn't thinking of anything anymore. I also noticed that I was in pain. My shoulders were aching from a yoga class I tok a few days ago, my legs were getting tired, I could feel a small blister developing on my right pinky toe. I notes all these sensations. They weren't bothering me, they were just present. Beyond those sensations though, I felt empty. No racing thoughts, no worrying. Just the perfect amount of pain occupying all that space now. The thought of stopping or slowing down exited my mind as soon as it entered - I needed to hold on to the pain as long as I could. 

Sitting at my desk with the piles of notes sitting right next to me now, I still feel that sense of calm, of letting go. I wish it was easier to hold on to it.