jenniferhawke.com

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“So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

dearest Nevis,

i keep looking at my calendar in an attempt to keep up with my study schedule, but since the chunks are divided into hours and days, i almost forget to notice when a month is about to rollover into the next one. March! wow.

back home, the snow refuses to stop falling. and the cold temperature refuses to start rising. here on the island, it has been windier and rainier than i can remember at this time of year. some days it feels like another Omar is around the corner, even though i know the season is off.

February has been a wonderful month. i mailed in my ECFMG Form 186 to prove my identification for when i write the USMLE Step 1. i went to my last Nevis Humane Society meeting. i spent every Friday morning and Sunday afternoon in the hospital with Dean T. Brandon took me out for a romantic Valentine’s dinner where we forgot about studying for a couple of hours and remembered what it was like to just stare at each other all night with hearts floating out of our big round eyes. block 2 exams came and went with a little less disappointment than block 1. we threw a party. Brigette arrived all the way from Vancouver! i baked cookies and cupcakes and brownies for a bake sale. i canceled my parents’ trip to visit us here. and i hopped over to St. Kitts for a day.

oh yah. i went to class and studied every day too.

and yes, you read that correctly. i canceled my parents’ trip down to your beautiful shores. after 7 months of flight changes and juggling and sitting on hold with Travelocity for 2-hour chunks of time while they tried to sort things out and tried to get us overnight accommodation due to cancellations and re-routes, my mom gently suggested on the phone one night:

“well, maybe this is the way it’s meant to be.”

Nevis, you’re really not an easy place to get to. and having two out of three airlines that fly in here outright cancel their service after March* 6th doesn’t make it any easier. as much as i would love to have them here, i think my parents are going to save their money** and come to my Real REAL graduation in Gardner, Massachusetts in 2011.

in the meantime, i’m just hoping my (rather convoluted, as usual) flights home will go off without too much hassle. i already know that hauling my bike through 4 airports in 3 days and 2 overnight stays is going to be a huge pain in the rear.

but before then, March promises to be a whirlwind. 5 days of classes left. 3 clinical medicine labs. 2 shelf exams. 1 block exam. 1 practical exam.

they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, dearest Nevis. i think we need to break up soon, so i can have time to miss you before i come back again.

all my love,
`Jennifer

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*for WinAir and i believe early April for American Airlines/Eagle.

**not only is it hard to get down here from the middle of Canada, it’s expensive. my parents’ tickets through Travelocity were not cheap and my Evil Wicked Stepmother spent at least another $1800. add to that the fact that i no longer have a second bedroom for them to stay in (i was still in the old house in July when i planned the trip) and the “best deal” rooms we could find still ran $200US/night. that makes their 10-day trip close to the cost of a semester of tuition down here. and HOLY CRAP that is a lot of money.

thankfully, Travelocity is fully refunding the tickets without penalty (or silly airline voucher) because of the multiple leg changes and cancellations. after all, i booked my parents’ a trip to Nevis and getting them only to St. Maarten just isn’t good enough.

one of the best things about having visitors is getting to skip school and roll lazily around the island pretending to be a tourist. Brigette and i headed to St. Kitts today to find a little adventure.

because killing cockroaches in our kitchen with her bare hands wasn’t adventure enough.

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*photos: the top one is from Herbert’s beach with the MUA campus on the far horizon.

Emmet indulges my camera fetish. can you feel the Irish love? he’s single, ladies… and looks great in his biking spandex. oh, and he makes an amazing spaghetti bolognese.

Hanna, Ed and Kola working the drinks. Kola’s shoes were a disaster at the end of the night and Hanna got puked on.

Brandon told me a few people complained about the music he was playing. yah, i can see how everyone is having such a horrible time because there’s no room to dance without falling off the elevated stage.

we work hard so we can play hard. MED 5 is tired. we are ready to go home.

he also enjoys collecting old movies and cooking meat.

so when i heard he fell off a ladder and broke his rib, here is what i sent him:

i know it’s a safe bet he doesn’t already have the movie because i’m sure he thinks Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn are too sappy romantic cheesy. which is part of the reason i picked it. i figured he deserves a little torture for being so silly.

also, do you have any idea how many songs there are out there about broken ribs?

from The Sydney Morning Herald on Feb 16th:

Hotels on an upmarket Caribbean island have decided to offer potential customers a rebate on the cost of their flight in a bid to keep cash-strapped tourists coming.

The airline credit scheme is one of a number of quirky innovations that tourism operators across the world are introducing during a global recession.

In recent years, tiny Nevis has become a luxury hotspot, with Hollywood stars and moneyed-up CEOs choosing it as an ideal spot to get away from it all.

But with the global economy having taken a turn for a worst, the island’s hoteliers are taking steps to keep business coming in. A group of Nevis top hotels have got together with the island’s tourism authority to launch an airline credit scheme.

Any visitors staying for four or more nights in a participating hotel will be given a $US200 ($A306) credit on their final bill to cover part of the cost of getting to the island.

yah, airline credit is nice and all. if you can find an airline (other than Liat) to fly in here.

i love how they call tiny Nevis a “luxury hotspot”. people pay thousands of dollars to come on holiday here. and i have another 49 sleeps!

UPDATE: Brigette’s bag arrived the next day. and i was probably more excited than she was because it was full of goodies like Twizzlers and Canadian-flavour chips (Dill Pickle & Ketchup!) and Oreos and Lindt chocolate and M&Ms and Werther’s. she brings us good tidings of sugar and we wake her up at 6am (2am Vancouver time). she is awesome.

i have mentioned before how much i enjoyed (and needed) the memoir-novel Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. it came into my life at a particularly vulnerable point when i needed to read it.

and today, i had two people (thank you, Jen and Jessica) send me the link to her TED talk. i filed the URL away in my “TO DO” folder for when i have 20 minutes to spare and planned to spend some rare time getting caught up on a few blogs. then i went to visit Beach Bum and he has Gilbert’s talk linked on his front page. so i had to watch it RIGHT NOW.

and i just have to pass it on to you. because it’s brilliant and once again fell into my lap at a time i needed to hear what someone wiser and older and prettier than me had to say.

our MED 5 class is throwing a party tonight to raise money to have a nice White Coat Ceremony at a nice location with nice food and nice beverages for our family and friends that are having an impossible time getting to the island in April.

so yah. come out and celebrate our last block of classes. ever.

Brandon has volunteered his time behind the sound system and hopes everyone has a good time on the dance floor.

i have volunteered my time behind the bar and hope everyone designates a driver. stay safe.

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photo: Joyce and i at one of the the only other parties i’ve been to here on Nevis. Brandon was DJ-ing that night too. for those of you that have wondered where Joyce is these days, i miss her too. she is still one semester behind me and working her butt off to make it through MED 5 by the end of August. she is good. i miss her though.

i am painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly, annoyingly shy. pick your favourite shade of fuschia or red and you’ve just about guessed the colour i turn when (on purpose or by accident) i am made the centre of attention. as soon as i was old enough to get my hands on a hairbrush, i frizzed out my blonde natural curls into a messy halo so strangers wouldn’t stop my parents and scoot down to my level to tell me how cute i was. in high school, people used to think i was a snob when i was actually just too introverted to talk to anyone other than my close friends most of the time.

add to that the fact that i have spent hours and days and months training my brain to work in the multiple-choice USMLE question format, and i have a bit of a conundrum when put on the spot with medical questions on rounds…

i just can’t get the words from my brain to my mouth fast enough.

over the years, i have developed an adequate number of coping mechanisms to deal with my annoying shyness. this website is probably one of them. writing for you guys every (other) day is much different than standing up and speaking in front of you all.

but i have 72 weeks of clinical rotations and “pimping” to get through on rounds. and i can’t answer those questions via Twitter. i might know more than the guy next to me, but it really doesn’t matter if i can’t get the information down from my brain. i am so painfully aware (self-consious, imagine that!) of my deficit that i am genuinely considering joining some sort of Toastmasters club to work on my public speaking when i get back to North America. while still here on Nevis, i am attending every clinical opportunity available to us MED 5s because i figure practice can only help.

which brings me to the reason for this post… i don’t often solicit advice from you guys, but i’d like to put you all on the spot. i need some ideas for how i can work on this and improve my demeanor both on rounds and with patients in the future. most of the people that know me in real life understand that i’m not shy in EVERY aspect of personal contact and conversation. and some will probably be surprised to read my lifelong claim of introversion. there are more than a few things that come naturally and easily for me, but answering questions on the spot even from an information bank that i know backwards and forwards cold is not one of them.

so, should i start talking to myself in the mirror? should i figure out if i am nervous about being wrong and just get over it? or do i simply need to study more so i OWN the material and am more confident?

how can i improve? what did you do to improve?

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photo: from a “365 days” project on Flickr that i participated in to improve my self-awareness, creativity and confidence.

UPDATE: apparently the woman removed her blog (thanks for the tip, Jillian). something about reaching national news was a bit too much, i guess.

awesome. just awesome.

i’ll be keeping up with this lady to look for tips and tricks to keep down my bulging student debt. rather sadly, i can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to live on only $1500 a year… can you?