Did it!

I ran my first 5k! I ran the whole thing, I can't believe it. My time from race start was 29:30, but I was waaaay in the back of a huge crowd of people, so I'll have to wait a couple of days to see my real time. Not that I really care. It was pretty cool...although, note to self, if you want to run in a 5k run/walk, don't be shy and start in the back—that's where all the walkers are!

Suppressing & Medicating Grief

The mom of a very critical young patient was explaining to me how her physician initially put her on an antidepressant and has now put her on a benzodiazepine, clonazepam (Klonopin, the pills with the cool K punched out of them), for anxiety. She showed me the bottle because she didn't know what it was, but thought it might be a tranquillizer and wanted to know if it would knock her out or make her addicted. (Yes to the first, probably no to the second, but I said she should talk to her doc more if she has these questions!)

The meds have been good for her, she said, because she used to come into her kid's room and cry uncontrollably. But isn't that a normal response? What was wrong with it? I mean, she has the right to do whatever she reasonably can to get a handle on herself if she wants to. But I don't see why an MD would resort to sedatives and anxiolytics right away for depression and anxiety which have an understandable origin. Crying is a healthy response to seeing your child near death, right? Why would you want to suppress it? What if her child dies while she's in an induced state of calm, and she finds it hard to manifest her emotions about it? What kind of psychological problems could this suppression of real emotions lead to, thus leading to more medication?

Her other kids are going to therapy, and she said she'll start attending it too. So that's good, probably. But I wonder why that wasn't initiated first, and a long time ago, rather than going straight to meds.

It reminds me, in a way, of the woman I heard talking about how the L&D nurses were telling her to be quiet, stop moaning, and get a handle on herself during labor, or she should really think about getting an epidural. But that was how she was handling herself. Just because a healthcare clinician can't handle sadness or grief or difficulty is no reason to compel a healthy person to anesthetize their feelings—physical or emotional.
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Blood is so girly

My wife gave a red spoon to my oldest son and a blue spoon to my oldest daughter, who had a fit that my son got the red spoon. Red is a GIRL'S color, she said. To which my son randomly and happily replied, "We have a girl-color inside of us!!"

The Man-Nurse Diaries' Couch to 5K in 5 Months Plan*

I SIGNED UP FOR MY FIRST 5K RUN. I never thought I'd be doing anything like this, but I'm pretty excited. I think I can do it. If I can run 3 miles at the gym, I should be able to run a 5k, right? Should probably get the paramedics and the bypass surgeon on standby, anyway.

My wife is making fun of me for not running the 10K, but she's probably just wants to cash in my life insurance policy. :-) It's not like she can talk since she'll be sleeping through it. Or as my oh-so-encouraging brother-in-law stated, if I can't jog three miles, I might as well kill myself. (I think he used to run track.)

Most of you probably remember that I began exercising in January despite being a sloth most of my life, because I was overweight and I discovered that I possess enough bad cholesterol to make a cardiothoracic surgeon swoon. I joined a nearby discount gym with the wife, and we're still going nearly every day or every other day. Proximity is key; I don't think we'd go if it was far away.

I've managed to lose 15 pounds without really trying. Fifteen. I mean, I wasn't trying anything weird or special; just running on a treadmill. It's all about your daily (or weekly) net calories; calories spent versus calories taken in. Recently I began lifting weights and doing bodyweight exercises (i.e. pushups), and that helped drive me down a few more pounds. Fat tissue expends very few calories at rest, while muscle tissue has to burn calories 24 hours a day just to maintain itself. So muscle raises your basal metabolic rate. In other words, even if you sit on your butt all day, you'll burn more calories and reduce fat if you increase your proportion of lean muscle mass.

Eating better to reduce my cholesterol also helped, because it meant less carbs, less fat, and more protein.

That's about it. If I was smart I'd market this as a special weight-loss program and write a book! I'm not done, though; I still have a gut and I'd like to build more strength. And I'll post if I survive the 5K.

* It's a tad slower than the famous Cool Running: The Couch-to-5K Running Plan but, since it didn't involve planning or organization, it worked for me.

How to tell the guys from the gals in OB

New dude-nurse blogger nurseXY posted about the first of many adventures that we male students got to enjoy in Labor and Delivery clinicals: just trying to get the hospital-issued scrubs. In L&D, RN uniforms are (to get all elementary school here) for girrrrls. And judging from his and my experience, L&D floors only have one changing room for the RNs: the women's locker room. The men's locker room was the obstetrician's changing room next to the OR suite, and locked. So not only do we have to change in the public restroom, but the scrubs are kept in the female locker room, and our teachers expect us to be wearing them promptly at 0700. Girls handed mine out to me, which sometimes meant I got two pairs of pants. NurseXY had to obtain an Act of Congress to be cautiously ushered in when nobody was in there—more than once, since apparently women's scrubs with darting busts and shapely legs didn't quite fit him right.

On top of that, nurse scrubs were blue, and physician's scrubs were green. There was a definite WOMAN=BLUE=NURSE and MAN=GREEN=DOCTOR dichotomy going on. People were surprised to see me, a guy, walking around in blue. Sometimes there were no blue scrubs left for me, though, so on those days I was granted access to the surgeon's changing room and got to wear green. Then everyone just assumed I was a physician, which was okay as long as nobody asked me to perform any emergency deliveries.