Zig for Great Justice*

This is not I, but it might just as well be.

I've worked all the hours I can work for a time, and am on vacation as a result. It seems to me that I would learn more if I worked more twelve-hour shifts and fewer twenty-eight hour ones, but scheduling is not my decision, and it's not just about me. Regardless, I end up with ample time off this way. By the time I return to The Great White North, spring may even have sprung or at least started to spring.  I am visiting California relatives briefly, after which I will visit my brother at his place of employment two-thirds of the way across the continent.

Work has been a mixed bag. You can't please everyone, and I haven't even come close to doing so. I have to be satisfied with the few crumbs that have been tossed in my direction. When I had to assist a pediatric surgeon in an abdominal surgery, he told me that I do very neat and precise work but that I suture about as efficiently as an eighty-nine-year-old woman at a quilting bee, and that my patients are all going to die on the table while waiting around for me to finish my beautiful handiwork. When I backed into one surgeon's car while driving a car belonging to another surgeon, damaging both cars in the process, the owner of the car I was driving told me I had more spine than he would have guessed I possessed because I didn't cry or pass out when the surgeon who owned the car into which I backed came looking for me, shouting obscenities all the way down the corridor. I also didn't cry five minutes later when an attending physician came to scold me over a medication order I had thoroughly screwed up, which fortunately was caught before the medication was administered to the patient, but unfortunately was caught by the only nurse to the best of my knowledge in the entire province who actively dislikes me, and who seemingly considered it her sworn duty to inform everyone within a thirty-kilometer radius of my incompetence and idiocy.

When the best I can do is work neatly and precisely but too slowly, remain conscious, and not cry, it would seem to be rather clear that I'm not exactly thriving. I was mildly concerned that I would not be invited to continue my employment here after this fiscal year, but an acquaintance who shall remain nameless and who has inside knowledge of such matters told me that I'm on neither the list of those whose fate has already been decided against them nor that of those who are still on the chopping block. This doesn't mean I couldn't possibly screw something up so congressionally as to be arsonized, but if I continue with my status quo quasi-mediocrity, my employers are too greatly in need of even minimally competent cheap labor to give me the grand DCM.  (I should clarify at this point that it's only my level of competence that is lukewarm.  I'm tired now, so I undoubtedly come across as apathetic at best, but I remain passionate as ever in regard to the prospect of saving every life and/or stitching up every boo boo that comes within my reach, if painstakingly and at a dead tortoise's pace.) All of this is contingent upon passage of Step 3 of the board exams, but that's the least of my worries. It's not that I'm not worried about it, but it's quite literally the least of my concerns at this point. I've been studying in what spare time I have, and I will commence with active worrying as exam time draws nearer.

I wish I could share some of my more interesting stories, but, alas, I have these rather pesky addictions to food and a roof over my head, the satiation of both of which necessitate my continued employment. I'm keeping the stories in a journal, and someday I will disguise the location and everyone's identity enough that I can share them in some form. For now, though, I shall be professional.

* zero wing dialect