catching up

Wow - starting school has been even more intensely busy than I imagined. I apologize for the total abandonment of the blog - most of my life just got moved to the back burner.

That said, here's a wee bit of what I've been up to in the last month and a half:

More awesome Deep Tissue Massage classes from Brian Utting

One on QL (quadratus lumborum), psoas and the diaphragm and one on chest and shoulders (subscapularis, pec minor, and all manner of connective tissue around the sternum). Both were cozy little classes in his living room in Ballard and left me feeling relaxed and excited to be doing massage. It really was amazing to see how much easier it was to breathe afterward, especially with all the work around the sternum.

Needles, old folks and early mornings

Some of the things that have scared me most about this program - nasogastric tubes and catheters (yep, tubes going through nostrils and into stomachs or up ureters to bladders) we fortunately got to practice on eerily life-like mannequins instead of on each other. We did, however, get to poke each other with needles in several places. I was amazed to discover that the injections didn't hurt at all, but the pokes for a simple glucose test sure did! (At least to my massage-therapist fingertips - we ended up poking my earlobe, which was not bad at all.)

Perhaps the hardest part has been the idea of not just getting up, but actually being AT my clinical site at 6:15 am on Tuesdays. Yikes - I haven't been up before 8am on a regular basis in years! I've spent two days with my first resident, "B," and just briefly met my second - "A."
"B" is the sweetest little old lady, and still quite lucid and capable. She's made me think about how very little time I've spent with actually old people in my life, and how sad that is.

More updates to come!