Ummm, how about today?

So, I'm on call, and writing this from State Hospital (shh!). Which means that this may be abbreviated if the pagers go off, or the patient down the hall tries to grope me again (it's been a bad night. The theme of the entire evening has more or less been, "Men Are Gross"). But since I already reloaded the pictures into Blogger this morning before I left, I'll try to write what I can.

So the Interns went to the beach this weekend!


It was SO MUCH FUN. I cannot even tell you the fun that was had.

Now I know you sometimes hear "retreat" and you think "designated time hidden away to work on something specific." Or possibly "forced bonding awkwardness." But, no. Our retreat was more or less this: the faculty donated money, and the upper levels covered our call (don't feel too bad for them, they were handsomely compensated), and they rented us a house on the beach and gave us money for food and alcohol and said, "Go. Go to the beach."

And so we did. The place was on Topsail Island, NC, which is on the coast just south of the Outer Banks.

Here's where we stayed. Literally ten feet from the water at high tide. It's a duplex, so, six bedrooms, and two kitchens. Amazing views. Fantastic.

And we just went to the beach. We didn't have an agenda, we didn't have anything we were supposed to accomplish, we just were supposed to go, and bond, and have a good time. And relax, and be far away from the hospital, our pagers, crazy patients, all of it.

When I came back Sunday night for call (I came on at 8pm. So, not a totally call-free weekend, but, darn good), my attending was asking me about the weekend, and he for some reason couldn't get his head around this. He was like, who went, besides your class? I said, two spouses came. He says, what about faculty? I said, no, no faculty. He said, how about upper levels? I said, no, it was just for interns. And he thought about that, and he was like, but, what did you do? I said, well, we played on the beach. We played board games. We cooked good food in big group efforts. We drank a lot. We made sand castles.

Dude, we hung out. We laughed. We talked. We vented. We kvetched. We enjoyed being up until the wee hours of the morning because we were having fun and we wanted to be, not because our pagers were going off. We enjoyed each others' company. We kicked back, and we had a really freakin' good time.

And we were in a gorgeous place to do it.


And for me, it really was a weekend about hope. It sounds silly, and I'll have more to say about this later, I suspect, but our class fits together really well. We support each other and from what I've seen thusfar we're good about having each others' backs. Now, my three actual classmates back at the Emerald Palace were pretty good to me, it was a lot of the other residents who were awful, but this level of alliance is really something pretty remarkable, and I think it's really going to serve us in good stead, all of us. And I have to say, it was nice to hear that while we're all a little miserable, it's a uniform sort of misery. Everyone gets worked to death - it's not like my bad old days where all blame, misfortune, and scapegoatery got heaped onto roughly three people (and unevenly distributed, even at that). It's just nice to not be alone, you know? And it's particularly nice to not be alone with a group of really fun, generally awesome people. Who can make deadly margartias and teach me about scrimps.