Luckily for our pocket books, I’ve been working a few hours a day covering vacations and such at various hospitals, but it appears that the glorious world of part-time work is now a thing of the past for me…why didn’t anyone tell me to stop complaining about my lack of job?

I suggested to Jeremy that I should go sight-seeing, but apparently that requires money…of which I am making none. So what does that mean, no money=no fun? Maybe I’ll look for a bar tending job today??

Jeremy’s only request for the day…”please don’t start drinking before 3:00″, hmmm all I can say is “I’ll try”.

If not for our mothers and the help of a co-worker this packing madness would have devolved into insanity. Instead it went off without much of a hitch. And yesterday’s rain held off!

Now on to Chicago! (via Indy)

We are very excited, though, to finally know where we will be unloading our stuff in 4 weeks…we were beginning to get extremely worried.

Now on to worry about getting a job…first phone interview tomorrow, we’ll see how it goes!

So, now we are waiting… again… waiting on option 2, much smaller, just as fantastic, but taking just as freaking long to find out if we can simply RENT it! Since when did it become so hard to RENT a place? Maybe we should go ahead and line up option 3…

People actually push babies around in strollers in frigid weather!

There are true Southerners in the Clemson alumni group…and of course we all know someone who knows someone (we are from S.C. after all!).

The “El” has “pretend” heaters…who knew?!? We were very excited about them until we found out they sucked!

We used hand sanitizer more than ever!

It seems every time we visit (which has only been twice) there is abnormally warm weather, which gives us a very misconstrued idea of what life will be like there!

Turns out the price of milk and coke are slightly higher.

There is no pizza in West Loop.

Half of Chicagoans must have come from the North Pole, given the fact they wear shorts and skirts in frigid weather!

We left the hotel the second day, walked a block, thought we could handle the cold, and one block later turned around to get more clothes/gloves/scarves, etc…we’ve got a lot of adjusting to do.

So….it appears it really is a windy city, and boy the wind was cold!

Tri-Taylor is in fact not up and coming.

We have already taken our obligatory wrong way ride on the El headed toward the burbs instead of downtown.

My nose will be eternally red in this city

Also, I still liked it!

There were three code pages throughout the day, but two were canceled quickly because the MICU doesn’t like to announce codes–they deal with them internally. The final code came at about 4:30 AM–from Radiology. Oops. When I got there it was merely a respiratory code. The patient was tubed and shipped back up to the floor.

But the main problem with call is the “cross cover”. I fielded phone calls all day and night on patient’s I’d never met. I ordered some Phenergan. I gave a patient a bit of morphine. I sent off a couple of blood cultures. I even wrote a work excuse for a patient’s husband.

In all I worked 29 hours and slept a mere 2 of those.

Welcome to residency.

Would the system fall apart?

What moron decided it would be a good idea to tie health insurance to employment?* Why should those two go together? My car insurance doesn’t come with my job.

Yeah, yeah, I get the “but healthy employees are good for the company bottom line”…but are you sure about that? Does providing health insurance to your employees even help the bottom line?

The point of insurance is to pool risk. I suppose that a business is just as good as any other place to cultivate that risk pool. But why can’t the insurance business operate like the car insurance business? Pool risk from the public at large.

If you unraveled the health care industry from employers, wouldn’t they be able to spend more on employee wages and salaries thus putting cash back into the working man’s pocket allowing the working man to purchase his own insurance plan? That would give the working man…Gasp…choice! Such a dirty word.

Could I ask a few more rhetorical questions?

*Those Blue Cross folks at Baylor in the 1920′s probably get the nod for the prepaid business of health care–but the “HMO” existed for a decade or two prior to that.

“I don’t need to study. I’m Asian.”

Heh.

I’m with these guys. The PBL idea is great as an idea. In practice, it’s miserably boring.

(via HalfMd)

Of course, the inspiration is from this SNL skit:

(via Kevin, MD)