Crocs by Day...Cowboy Boots by Night

While most of my cohorts were traveling around the country during these past few weeks that we have had away from classes, I was perfectly happy sitting in my 3x6 space snacking on popcorn and sipping on my version of a Cuban latte studying systemic pathology.  Am I getting old or what?  Actually, maybe it’s just me being so focused on my reason for being here and loving medicine so much, that I chose to be that homebody who is perfectly content with sitting in my gifted, oversized San Bruno Fire Dept t-shirt, snacking on popcorn, drinking coffee, studying hours on-end simply because the material intrigues me.  I wouldn’t have spent my 3-weeks of no class-time any other way.  Now, I am transitioning into my last semester of my basic medical sciences here at ELAM.  Then, it’s off to the teaching hospital Salvador Allende in La Habana for 4 years where I will gain all of my hands-on clinical experience.  God…I can’t wait, but at the same time I am beginning to appreciate how I really have been taken care of at the ELAM campus.  My job here is to study, and I get paid for it.  We have “tias” who work at the school who cook for us and clean up after us (when there is not a soap opera on or it’s not nap time).  This is where I really begin to learn about medicine.  I will begin to integrate the physiology, embryology, histology, and clinical theory I have received over this past 1.5 years and begin to integrate it into pathology.  Understanding disease!!!  I guess if you don’t get excited about it as I am, then nobody will.  Actually, my buddy Heather will.  You know, she’s my cohort from Texas who has become a hood ornament on my bike, actually more like a bumper sticker since she rides behind me.  I am so blessed to have found a cohort and a friend who compliments me like she does.  I realized that even though I might not necessarily befriend everyone in my program, I hope that in 4.5 years my cohorts and I will support each other as we begin transitioning back into a system that we have all rejected.  Whether we like it or not, we have formed a family—a big, multi-racial, bi-polar, dysfunctional family.  We will look to one another for a network of support, as we begin working in the U.S. healthcare system that is not founded upon the ideal that health is a human right.

So, this Valentine’s Day, I will be starting a new semester, saying hello again to my Crocs and lab coat and hopefully soon will have an occasion to rock my red cowboy boots again.  Oh yeah…much love to you on this Valentine’s Day.   By the way, I’m so grateful that I don’t have to deal with the commercialization of Valentine’s Day anymore.  Phew!