Adventures in Haircutting...

One of the fun parts about moving to a new place is trying new things. New restaurants, new cultures, new sights… However, that’s also one of the bad things about moving to a new place. When you think about the hurdles you cross in a new area, one of the most underestimated hurdles is the haircut… I know what you’re thinking… “He’s such a man! Why does he care about his hair?... I mean I thought he cut it himself with a piece of broken glass, for Pete’s sake?” And you’re absolutely right… maybe I am obsessing about this a little more than I should. However, as I moved from Utah to Milwaukee (where it took me 2-3 disasters before I settled on a place) and now to Chapel Hill I’ve had some interesting haircuts… Here’s the highlights:

• When I first arrived in Mil-town I was getting ready to go do dinner with some friends. Without saying too much I was definitely trying to impress the people I was going to dinner with, so I figured I’d get a haircut the day of this particular dinner (I mean nothing impresses people more than good personal hygiene). With all of my nervous energy, I head to the nearest SuperCuts (or something of that ilk)… the kindly haircutting fellow says, “How do you want your haircut.” After a moment of stunned silence with the classic, “Ummm… just a trim… I guess.” (I almost said “Like my mom always cuts it,” but figured it probably wouldn’t have gotten me as far as the answer I actually gave). He proceeds to start cutting, I relax a little bit until a moment later when he says, “do you want me shave around the ears?” Now, I had definitely memories of my mom shaving around my ears (although I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty whether or not it was during the same period that she was giving me mullets), so I gulped and franticly said, “Yes!” He proceeded to give me what I can only describe as a bowl cut for my ears, with a good half inch border all the way around. Now I have no idea whether the people I met that night even noticed, but I can tell you it’s hard to be yourself when you feel like you have a haircut that Opie Taylor would’ve made fun of…

• This is by far the most surreal of the stories… A few months later (after a busy test week in school) I decided to spend my Saturday off with a haircut. I proceed to find the nearest GreatClips-type place (and I will always remember this one as the definitive reason that I will never patronize one of the places ever again). I get in line and I’m called by a sweet little Chinese lady (I know she was Chinese because she told me she was). When I say sweet, I mean it… Definitely one of the nicest most caring people I’ve met in a while… I guess that’s why I feel bad when I tell you that her accent made her impossible to understand… Luckily, this sweet lady and I both admitted, at some point in the conversation, that we both speak Spanish (although my definition of speaking Spanish was definitely different than her definition). How do I know what exactly she described as “speaking Spanish?” Well because she proceeded to spend the rest of my haircut, speaking broken Spanish to me through a Chinese accent. The result you ask?... my hair was three inches longer in the back than the front (literally 3 inches!). I asked her, in both English and Spanish, to maybe take a little more off the top, and like the fantastic stylist that she is…. She took a little more off the front, before whipping the cape off with some Spanish flare…

• After completely swearing off bargain basement hair stylists, I went to a salon in CH (whose name we won’t reveal here). After getting a decent haircut, we went to the shampoo bowl. Unlike conventional shampoo bowl/chair sets… this chair did not move up and down… the bowl did. Only this bowl just tilted, and instead of allowing me to rest my head comfortably in the bowl it was like having a plexi-glass shovel rammed into the base of my skull. If this exact chair wasn’t used for shampooing hair in Medieval dungeons it should have been. So instead of spending the entire shampooing thinking relaxing thoughts, I spent it wondering why me? What had I done? The pain was definitely overwhelming and definitely enough to make me decide this salon is not one that I’ll continue to patronize…

I haven’t lived in Utah for a little over 4 years. Of all the things I knew I’d miss about Utah (the Jazz, the mountains, the hunting… well maybe not the last one), the one that I miss the most with absolutely no idea that I would’ve missed it this much are my mom’s haircuts. I mean between ear-bowlcuts, Chino-Spanish reverse mullets and the torture chair of death… I’d almost rather have a real mullet with lightning bolts, so long as it was my mom doing the cutting… you really can’t beat it.

Newbie...

So I've got a new job... you may have heard (link the graduation post). For those of you who don't know I started on pediatric surgery, and it's been a steep learning curve (especially, since my fourth year of medical school would never be described as "rigorous"). Every fifth day, I take call and cover the thoracic, urology, and trauma surgery services. That means that on call I cover anywhere from 50-65 patients (some of whom are in the ICU, and way too complicated for me... which means that if it's serious, I cover them by immediately calling someone else). It's definitely a far cry from a fourth year full of transfusion medicine, radiology, noon quitting times and a little bit of golf. The adjustment; however dramatic, has been a smooth one and I've never felt overwhelmed (there are too many people around waiting to take over for any feelings of inadequacy to set in). However, it is frustrating to be reminded on a daily basis that although you've spent years in school, you have very few practical skills. It's like getting punched in the face by Mike Tyson, only he's wearing pink boxing gloves with extra padding... so while there are plenty of benefits to pad the new job and make it look pretty... you're still getting punched in the face.

The pink gloves and padding...

• Every time, you page someone/return a page and the overhead intercom calls out Dr. P....
• When pharmacists call you on your day off to clarify prescriptions, that you wrote...
• When you walk into a room, and speak with parents and children of are sometimes rather sick and you get to see the look on their face when you can give them more information about their child's hospital course...
• Making a decision late at night, and finding out the next day that it was the decision the real doctors would have made...
• Getting paged by a nurse to do something, because hospital policy states that only a doctor can do it...
• Doing a procedure on the floor that someone else couldn't do, and successfully doing it...

Punches to the face...

• Answering the page, to learn that it's only your co-intern looking for someone to go to lunch with... and you can't go because you're busy.
• The clarification is only necessary because you prescribed a tylenol suppository for a 15 year old, instead of the oral medication like every other 15 year old in the world gets (it's only happened once)...
• The look on the faces of worried parents when, fifteen minutes after you've given the parents a long drawn out explanation, the attending comes in and completely contradicts everything you just said. Because he just got off the phone with another attending because they didn't want to talk through the intern...
• In the morning you learn that the correct decision you made over night, was neither important nor necessary (i.e. the nurse didn't see the order already in the chart)...
  Learning that hospital policies are silly and require stupid things like a doctor pushing down a plunger on a syringe... and of course you have to walk clear across the hospital at 3AM to do it...
• Doing the procedure and no one ever knowng, because the nurse never paged anyone else... so all your superior have to judge you are all the mistakes/"I need your helps"...
• Realizing that after all this, you've never loved your job more... So while someone who loves being punched in the face is clearly not a logical person, at least I'm a happy one...

Well off to bed... The hospital needs its punching bag...