Evil and Swamped

So I'm evil. I know it. I know how dedicated you all are - coming to my blog everyday in the hope that I might have posted some vain little tidbit regarding my titillating existence, and yet I still run off to the Mediterranean coast without so much as a 'ta ta'! I feel like one of those callous jet-setters, casting off the shackles of obligation to you little insects to pursue a sleepless life of decadent hedonism (the whole 1 insect who actually cares about my existence enough to read my blog, that is - Thanks Mandy)! OK, you know me too well. I've been wracked with guilt, flagellating myself with a cat'o nine tails daily because I've neglected my page so much. I had hoped it would give me some sort of discipline - lure me to the 'Study Landscape' (the med school's fancy term for 'library that you can't check any books out of') where I would type away for a while then the shelves of medical texts would scream out deafeningly at me 'Sarah, come taste our knowledge. Do you want to be a bad doctor? Do you want to be ignorant and kill all of your future patients?'. Unfortunately the soft undulating tones of pret-a-porter.com and sephora.com are far more hypnotic. So here I am apologising and you're all groaning because now you actually have something to read and lords knows I'm not a particularly captivating humorist or a witty intellectual, so I guess I'd like to take this oppotunity to apologise not only for my absence, but for my presence and thus my entire existence, because if I'm not absent I'm present and neither of those two options can please everyone. Back to my old ways. Since liveing in Scotland I have learned to not apologise for my existence - I've learned to say 'get stuffed' to anyone who doesn't like it, but when I know I'm typing to a predominantly American audience I can't help but say sorry all the time, as if I were (or was, I never know - any English language majors who can help with that one?) back on the hockey pitch apologising to my opponent for taking the ball away. So, has anything exciting happened????? No, not really. Spain and the vinyards in the south of France were lovely. We stayed in a beautiful house on a steep mountain on the Costa Brava, in a little town called Begur in an area known as Aiguablava (strong water in Catalonian I think) and it was very pretty and my bathroom rocked, and it was owned by an Irish colonel and his Argentinian wife. I ate lots of yummy bread, watched Smallville, sat in the car a whole lot going from town to medival town, looked at a lot of cold and mouldy catherdrals (do they ever clean them????), drove all the way down to Valencia to meet up with Andrea's (the Bolivian exchange student that is living with my dad) pen pal. There was a festival on - Les Falles, where each neighbourhood commissions a huge themed papier mache sculpture and then they all burn them and set off those popping things that MacCauley Culkin uses in Home Alone to scare off Joe Pesci ???, then women in traditional dress carry flowers to the giant virgin Mary outside the cathedral and men use the flowers to make her a dress and that's about it. And then we went to France and stayed in 400-year-old house owned by English people in a tiny place all Paleriac which had a phonebox in the square and a little WWI monument with the dagguerotypes of the 7 sons of the village who had lost their lives. There were at most 14 houses in the whole village. I took a picture of a bunch of it and I'll post it when I get them back. The nearest 'civilised' town had a pizza van that actually had a wood stove inside - a definite OSHA no-no! All in all, a fun trip and it was good to see my family and the Jenkinses. I missed a week of lectures and got an e-mail saying I'd have to 'self-certificate' if i was ill, so I sent in a form and under the heading 'illness' is wrote 'apathy and dissillusionment'. Now I've started my 1st surgery block and it is shit-scary. I know nothing about surgery and we have this scary consultant surgeon as our supervisor. His name is Mr. Eltahir and he's a general surgeon with a specialty in breast cancer. He is very tall and skinny and bald with a thick Egyptian accent and his colleagues call him Fattie, but I'm sure we'd be hung by our toes if we dared. The Sub-dean of the hospital described him as a 'rotweiler' and she definitely hit the mark. All the doctors claim he is actually very nice, but this is probably because he uses all of his aggression up on us. But I think I will learn a lot as he requires us to have 7 half days of teaching per week, attend outpatient clinics, organise radiology teaching, pathology teaching, go to theatre and learn about whatever we've come across that day in our 'own time' (meaning when we get home at 6pm rather than when we have a spare moment at the hospital - we should not have a spare moment apparently). He wants us to make up for the 2 days we had off at Easter and everytime we run into him in the hallway he asks us for a detailed list of what we have done so far that week. He'll be none too pleased when I describe in detail my scheduled Papsmear or my appointment at the dermatologist next week, I'm quaking already. The end is in sight though. I finish classes next April and join the ranks of junior house officers in August 2006, hopefully they will discover the cure for death by that point, or else you're all screwed! If anything funny happens to me at any point i will recount it with gusto, but until then 'ta ta'. XOXO