Wait, when did that happen?

I took a vacation day Thursday. Well, actually I took a day off from being Mommy and went and worked. Well, actually I went in to Dan's school and spent the day being a standardized patient for 3rd year med students to practice on. So I spent the day pretending to have some complications in my pregnancy. And I got paid for it! It was actually quite an enjoyable and eye opening day. I would do it again in a heartbeat if the next time they were doing it weren't in 6 weeks and by that point I hope to no longer be pregnant.

Which brings me to the point, sort of, first let me say that as a standardized patient I was supposed to be measuring 4 weeks bigger than my diagnosed due date. I don't know why, but saying this over and over again all day made me realize that this baby boy is really going to be out soon! I think it must be that if I were actually four weeks ahead of what I thought, my baby could be born and not really considered early in any way. Which makes me realize that I have a boat load of things that I wanted to "get done before the baby comes" that really wont be getting done.

Oh well, I've become accustomed to shifting my expectations of myself in the past two years. Other words that have been redefined for me: goal, success, productivity. I've come to realize that so long as my children (can you believe that I put down the plural form there?) are healthy, fed, clean, and happy I'm doing good. I feel productive when I am teaching my daughter something. The time I get to work on my projects no longer spans a whole afternoon. I get small increments of time here and there, but that doesn't mean I'm not getting things done. My goals are a lot less visible, not only to others, but also to myself. Which makes counting successes much, much more difficult.

Secondly, and only related in the fact that it has to do with my experience this past week, I have found out how difficult it can be to take a history of a patient, listen to their problems, and analyze the situation. Being the patient I knew all the questions the student doctors were supposed to be asking and what they were supposed to be looking for and how they were supposed to be doing it and I realized that it's not really all that clear looking at the situation from their end of the map. I ended up wishing that I could have guided them. Or at the very least, acted as though I would act on presenting myself in the ER. My mouth would be going a mile a minute telling the doctor anything and everything I could think of. As a standardized patient I had to only give responses to questions they would ask. And I realized that sometimes, even though they wrote down my answers, they didn't actually listen to them. They would end up asking me the same question three or four times. If I had a doctor that did that in the ER I would be nervous, very nervous. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up now I couldn't really give them what I would appreciate as meaningful feedback. I just hope that through repetition they get more comfortable with what will be expected of them when they are residents.