living

I’ve not been a good blogger lately but I have a good reason.  I promise.  I have been playing :) . . . hard!

For those of you who  haven’t heard, I just got to spend the week, and my 30th birthday, in Huntington Beach, CA, with my aunt and one of my roommates.  The trip, again, was more than I expected.  We rode tandem bikes from Huntington Beach to Newport, got 2 hour long pedicures, napped on the beach, went to an Angel’s baseball game and got to sit, and eat :), in the diamond VIP section, went to California Adventure for free :), took surfing lessons again but this time was successful, and went kayaking off Balboa island.  The whole trip was wonderful!

 

If you are interested, you can see a slide show of our pictures at Snapfish.  Somehow, our attempt to get pictures with the sea lions didn’t make it to snapfish.  I am going to try and fix it though.  They are great.  Stacey was afraid that we were going to get attacked by the sea lions which made it even more fun and funny for me.

I got back to work and was pleased to find that everything worked perfectly fine without both me and Lori being there.  Our real sliding scale was started while I was gone; meaning that our patients are actually charged for their visit based on income.  It is a really good  thing because it is one of the requirements that we need to meet to become a federal qualified health center.  This will enable us to keep our cost of service low and once the pharmacy is running, it will allow us to purchase stock for the pharmacy at a much lower cost. 

Aside from that, this week was a good one at the health center.  Josh Menendez, a fourth year medical student, finished his month long rotation with us.  He is going on to do Neurosurgery and will be an excellent physician one day.  Emily Whitty, a UAB nurse practitioner student, started back with us again for her clinical time.  She is so wonderful to have and does a great job caring for our patients.  Lindsey Pimentel finished working with us.  She is starting back her sophmore year at Samford.  I was sad to see her leave.  She has been such a huge help to me and she is bilingual so she has helped me take very good care of our hispanic patients.  I scheduled a hispanic patient for Wednesday next week and realized the Lindsey won’t be there and I just looked at her and said “What am I going to do?”  She is going to come in and translate for me that day.  If you know of anyone that is bilingual and has time, we desparately need a spanish interpretor.  I also am going to have a Samford nurse practitioner student that is going to start a clinical rotation with me some time soon.  So, alot of movement and change this week but it has been good.

Now, I am sitting in a Hampton Inn in Nashville.  One of my roommates from Nashville who is also a very good friend, is having a baby shower here this weekend.  It is so exciting!  There were four of us that lived together here.  Now everyone is married and only one of us still lives in Nashville.  The last time we were all together was several years ago for one of their weddings.  We are going to get to hang out together all day today!  I will definately post some pictures soon.

Fortunately, after this weekend, my life will slow down again and settle back in to “normal.”  I am ready to slow down a bit but this has been a great summer.

Much love my friends! ( . . . and another one from Cali :)