Metamorphosis of another kind

May 10, 2008 at 10:53 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I used to keep a journal in med school–you know, the paper and pen kind. Actually, I still do, for the things I want to keep private.

In any event, I was reading through it the other day, and it was striking how many of my entries began by mentioning a humongous roach flying around my bedroom. Usually I had tried to kill it with bug spray, and then lost track of it. And I can’t sleep when a roach has gone MIA somewhere in my house. So I would write, in order to keep myself awake until it showed itself again. It was one of the few constants in med school, and really only my OB/GYN rotation was worse than dealing with the roaches.

It’s true, I’m a slob. But the big flying southern roaches have nothing to do with how clean you keep your house, and everything to do with how well sealed off it is from the humid air and wet soil outside. They love moisture, and they aren’t afraid of people. In fact, if disturbed, they’ll fly at you rather than away. Ugh, I still have flashbacks.

It was particularly awful to go back to roach land after living for a year in Seattle, where there are hardly any bugs at all. And definitely none so brazen. Back in Texas I had always made a point of living in well-sealed apartments with good pest control. But I had forgotten about the issue when I was looking for a place to live in New Orleans–not that there was any such well-built housing in my price range, anyway. It cost me untold hours of sleep as a med student, and its absence has without doubt been the best part of internship.

Likely the only thing better will be the end of internship.