Friday, January 05, 2007

Internship? I must be dreaming?!

So I can tell I'm starting to worry about internship. Last night, I had a dream in which I reenacted a conversation I've had about 50 times over the holiday break, which usually begins with Distant Family Member X saying something like "So, what exactly is internal medicine?"

My stock answer is "if you're over 18, not pregnant, and don't need surgery, you come to me." Which isn't exactly true, but it is close, and of course every correct medical answer begins with "it depends." (Thank you Dr. Harvard)

Anyway, so, I'm having this dream, and all of a sudden, the random person I'm talking to about my chosen field starts getting hives, falls over, and codes. (I swear I'm not making this up.) And I look around, see someone else, and yell at them to bring the code cart as I start CPR. (Code cart? I don't remember this conversation being in a hospital.) And then I start trying, in my dream, to remember doses of epinephrine and atropine. I woke myself up after getting frustrated trying to start an IV, and not being able to find my ACLS handbook. In my sleep.

Maybe this is a good thing. More likely it is a sign of things to come, and that's not entirely pleasant. I know in college I thought it was a positive sign when I started dreaming in Russian, but now I'm not so sure.

6 comments:

Thainamu said...

Sometimes your intensity scares me. :)

Ibid said...

Last night I had a dream that I was trying to convince the head of the University of Idaho cheerleading squad that I was gymnastic enough to make the team. I started jumping up and down in the dingy college basement where we had happened to run into one another. It worked, so she gave me her card, and I thought: "no way would I ever do this. Except that my brother is on the football team and I could keep an eye on him that way."

It's odd how pseudo-logical one can be in the rediculousness of dreaming.

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm surprised that so many people don't know what internal medicine is.

LSI said...

Nathan, I love dreams like that. My dreams are admittedly boring and work related. I dreamt once that I knew all of the properties of an obscure chemical element, so I woke myself up and opened the CRC Handbook of chemistry and physics that was next to my bed and flipped to that element. I was so wrong that I closed the book and fell asleep peacefully.

Dreams! What a wonderfully rich domain of discoveries in the years to come.

medstudentitis said...

that's one freaky dream! It means that you're missing medicine!

Nathan said...

thainamu - me too. Heheheheh.

ibid - I can honestly say I've dreamt I was a cheerleader. I'm curious whether this was satifying or disturbing for you to imagine.

zwerver - so am I, sometimes.

s. lee - I think the fact that you keep the CRC next to your bed is the best part of that vignette. I can see you in 10 years, reading your children the table of specific gravities as a bedtime story. "Now kids, selenium is a very special element because..."

medstudentitis - probably so. Only a few short months now, and that's all I ever have to do.