Full of Tamales

This is a photo from a hike in the Organ mountains last weekend. We hiked a beautiful in bloom desert trail up to "Dripping Springs". It used to be a resort and sanatorium. This window is from one of the buildings of the ghostly hotel that sits in silent ruin.

Has it been a week since my last post? It feels like a year has gone by, a years worth of learning, tears, frustration and joy. What a place I am in right now, and how fortunate I am to be able to experience it all.

Here is a sample of what I did yesterday:
1. Began the day with someone crying in our morning circle check in (not me-I don't cry, ever. Ok maybe once or twice I have. )
2. Hopped in the car and toured Thomason hospital with 11 other students, got lots of dirty looks when staff read our badges.
3. Stopped on the way home from the hospital at a local bakery that specialized in pumpkin empanadas and rockin tamales. I won't tell you how many tamales I ate.
4. Came back to MLL and participated for 100 heart thumping minutes in mock emergency scenarios. We dealt with shoulder dystocia, hemorrhage, baby with a serious birth defects, resuscitation of a baby and one normal birth.
5. Restocked the room where we had the scenarios.
6. I think I ate more tamales after that.
7. Umm...oh yeah, began a short shift from 5-8pm.
8. Did 3 blood draws, got stabbed twice myself. Oh yes and did a hemoglobin check and glucose check. All on my sister students.
We are quite comfortable experimenting on each other-yesterday we did pap smears. I will skip the description of that and leave it to your imagination.
9. Was handed a chart by one of the interns and told to do an observed cita (huh, I am not ready to do that yet) on a 17 year old with a STD. Needless to say I bumbled through it, was pushed out of the way because it was way to complicated and she had too many issues to deal with.
9.5 I did a successful finger stick on her-yippeeeeee. Am I truly excited that I hurt someone and drew blood? Yikes.
10. Came home and read 1/2 a story to my children while they drifted off to sleep. A sweet 10 minutes that I got with them. Sigh. They are better than all the tamales in the world.
11. Passed out myself at 9pm.