A Big Year Ahead

So I started writing this a week ago, and I have finally sat down to finish it...

My baby sister recently brought it to my attention that we have been blogging slackers and haven't posted in a while!  I will use this post as a kickoff to a series of posts about our upcoming year, since lots of big things will be happening, and I would love to have a record of our decisions!

This spring and summer we have been hanging out in Tucson quite a bit, enjoying new friends, each other, the heat (well maybe not so much), but we have also been able to do a little bit of travelling (well me more than Drew for sure).

A few of the highlights:

Margaret's Wedding in Asheville, NC

 

 

Margaret and Brad started singing halfway through the first dance!  It was so much fun, and Margaret was a beautiful bride. :)

Drew, Bill, and Albert on top of Mt. Lemmon

Drew's parents came out to visit for a weekend in late June.  We went up to the mountains to try and stay cool!  We also went south to explore Tubac - a cute artisan village just north of the border.

Cutie Ruthie at her bachelorette party in NYC

At the end of July, Katie and I kidnapped Ruthis and flew her out to NYC for a weekend of bachelorette fun and excitement.  Although she claims it was torture to be surprised, I think she had a pretty good time.

The newest member of the family - Mina Damerville-Sadow

We also got to meet the newest and cutest member of the family - Mina!  My cousin Sam and his wife Laura just had a sweet baby girl.  Don't tell Ruth, but I think she might steal the spotlight in September.

Laguna Niguel, California

Then in August, I took a visit to Southern California to see my long lost (and newly engaged) friend Fuzzy, or as most know her - Lisa.  We had a great weekend catching up and cooling off, and talking a little bit about weddings.

So now, we are nearing the end of the summer (though it will stay in the 90's-100's around here through the end of September), and we have a big month ahead of us.  We are heading to Vegas for a wedding in a couple weeks and mini high school reunion and 30th birthday bash for a dear friend.  And then the wedding of the year will be the following weekend in St. Louis!  We can't wait for Ruth and Matt to be married, and I know it will be a great party.  Then it is on to Africa!!

With so many fun things going on, it is hard to remember that there are some other big things going on as well.  Drew is in his third and final year of residency which means the job hunt begins!  He is looking for practices in Nashville and the surrounding area.  He is also studying for a couple of more tests that he has to pass before he can officially practice on his own (one in October!).  I have been thinking a lot about what I want to do next as well, but I think details about all of that is better saved for another day. :)

For now, I will leave you with a beautiful Tucson sunset...

Africa-Bound

It is hard to believe that in 6 weeks, Drew and I will be heading around the world to Rwanda for a month.  We have spent the summer making travel preparations, and now we are getting to the final stretch.  Since there is so much going on before we leave, I know that it is going to sneak up on us so quickly!  We had a conversation to work out some of the logistics with one of the staff members from Humanity for Children the other day, and we are both getting so excited!  Before I tell you a little more about some of the details, I guess I should back up a little and share how we got to this point (since we have been a little behind on the blogging front).

Last spring, as Drew was planning out his third and final year of residency, we both talked it over and decided to take advantage of one of his electives to do something adventurous and out of our element.  We explored a couple of different options - Africa, Australia, South America, something stateside that is a little closer to home - but ultimately connected with a non-profit that is based in the states, but has been doing work in Africa for a few years now.  Their main focus is on providing health care to children, but they also do some work in education as well.  The organization is called Humanity for Children.  You should check out some of their projects.

Through this connection, we decided to travel to a small city in Rwanda called Kibungo which is about 2 hours east of the capital city of Kigali.  There, Drew will be working in a hospital with a couple other foreign doctors, and some local doctors providing care for women and children.  I will have the chance to work alongside a Peace Corps member that has been there for a few months and is working in the schools.  It sounds like I will be doing some teaching of English, but may be working on some other projects too.  I think it is going to be so interesting for both of us, and I know that we will learn so much.

While planning for the trip, I have been doing a lot of reading and have learned so much already about Rwanda.  For those of you who don't know much (I didn't), I'll share a little here (hopefully I will be able to share a lot here throughout the experience, especially once we are over there). And, if you have other knowledge to share about travelling to Africa, we would love to hear it! :)

Rwanda is a small country (about the size of Maryland) that sits on the equator in the eastern region of Africa.  It shares borders with Uganda and Tanzania, as well as Congo and Burundi.  It is very mountainous, and the climate when we are there this fall is supposed to be very similar to Seattle, so mild, gray, and drizzly (a welcome change from the desert heat!).  They don't have a lot of the safari type animals that you usually think of when you think of Africa, but they do have mountain gorillas (which Drew and I are already making plans to try and see!)  While some really scary things happened in Rwanda a while ago (did anyone ever see Hotel Rwanda?), the country has had a really successful reconstruction period, and is supposed to be one of the safest in East Africa now (so you can all sleep a little better while we are gone).  While we are there, we will be living in a house in Kibungo with another American couple who are also volunteers (the Peace Corps volunteer I mentioned earlier) that we haven't met yet.  Hmm..let's see what else have I learned so far....they speak English and French there as well as some Swahili and other tribal languages.  Drew and I had to get a bunch of new immunizations, and I have had a couple nightmares about mosquitos the size of my head (especially since it will be a wet season there!).

The biggest challenges ahead of us for right now are figuring out how to pack for a month in 1 large backpack and 1 small backpack (for each of us), and getting the puppies to grandma's in Nashville.  I am much more worried about the packing though, since Mary will be joining me for a road trip with the puppies! :)  I will be taking a leave of absence from work, so I am getting things in order there, and we have our housesitter set, so now just a few more weeks and we will be on our way! :)

Best luck EVER!!!

The last two days have been quite the experience for us out here in sunny Tucson. It's gotten to the point where if something goes wrong, I'm more likely to just start laughing than get upset. It all started yesterday afternoon. I had just finished attending our weekly teaching day at the hospital, and I was on my way to my afternoon clinic across town. I thought I'd run home really quickly to check on the dogs on my way there.

To set this up, let me explain a little bit about our recent adventures will Albert. He just turned a year old on Cinco de Mayo. Since around that time, he's been figuring out how to get out of his crate. At first we thought it was just a mistake closing him up by one of us. But then it happened when Emily left home last, and we all know Emily doesn't make mistakes. Anyway, we tried tying the crate shut with a shoelace, which worked for a day or two, but then he started chewing through the shoelace. Even if he didn't escape, there was quite a bit of damage. The crate would be found moved across the room with hole in the opposite wall. If he got out, he'd destroy the house. On his tally are two feather pillows, an avocado, countless wine corks, and sandals. The rugs in the kitchen often end up in different rooms as well. Well, yesterday we decided to trial Albert outside of the box from the start. We had the house cleaned up, and we locked him out of the two bedrooms. We figured, if he peed in the house, at least it would likely be on tile.

It sounded like a bad idea already, but we were running out of options. He hadn't peed in a few days, so we thought we'd give it a try. Well, we missed something on our cleanup of the house. He had retrieved a tomato-shaped pincushion from one of our coffee tables. When I got home, I found sawdust, pieces of pincushion, and pins/needles all over the front of the house. I initially wasn't concerned, but after thinking about it for awhile, there was a small chance he had swallowed a pin. If you've seen Emily's Facebook posts lately, you know the answer to that question. Albert had a pin inside his stomach and required an emergency endoscopy last night to remove it.

Wait, we're skipping ahead a little bit. On my way up to the emergency pet clinic, I stopped by to pick up Emily from work. Walking back out to the car, I pushed the unlock button, and my passenger window decided to fall into the door. It was unable to be raised, and I knew it was broken, as the same thing had happened to the opposite window several years earlier. Gotta love Chevy quality! We finally made it up to the clinic, and Albert had the pin removed without incident. However, it took him several hours to recover from the sedation, so a quick 15 minute procedure turned into an entire evening of sitting in the waiting room. Albert's back to his old self again, and just as crazy as ever. We just have to figure out how to keep him contained.

Today found me dealing with the other mishap. I took my car in this morning, and our mechanic has a complementary drop-off and pick-up service. They took me across town to the clinic without incident. Unfortunately, the clinic finished about 4 hours earlier than I had planned. While this is usually a great thing, I had no ride home, so it was an issue. I called the mechanic, and he said the van would be sent as soon as it was available. I stopped to eat lunch, waited a little bit while playing Scrabble with Kiran and Curt, and then I got the most brilliant idea of my life. I decided to start walking toward downtown. It would only take an hour and a half to walk to Emily's workplace, so I figured I'd make my way there in case the van wasn't ready in time.

It's now time to remind your brilliant narrator where he lives. Is it in a cold climate? Is it a cooler time of year? The answer to both of these questions would be a deafening NO! I think my frustration of waiting all night for Albert to recover got the better of me, and my brain was a little more cloudy than normal. I walked about 2.5 miles, dressed for work, in the blazing heat before the van finally picked me up. UGGH!

I suppose things could be alot worse. Our condo could have been damaged in the Nashville floods, and Albert could have required open surgery. However, after spending a full paycheck on emergencies in just over a 24hr period, I'm really hoping our luck starts turning for the better. We better stay away from stir fry for awhile.

Future Plans

I've had quite a bit of free time for myself for the last few weeks. There have been two pretty major events that are looming on the horizon. The first is our trip overseas for an away rotation. As Emily has already mentioned, one of our options is going to Africa. While that option is incredibly exciting, another one is also out there. Our friend, Rachael, from Australia was recently in Tucson visiting. She just so happens to be a pediatric (or paediatric if your an Aussie) nurse in Alice Springs. She's been looking for an excuse for us to come visit there for awhile, and she jumped at this opportunity. Australia was at the top of our list when we first came up with this idea. Rachael mentioned our desire to work overseas to the head of "paediatrics" in Alice Springs, and we're currently entertaining that possibility as well. So, we're likely heading to Australia or Africa in the next year, which is very exciting!

The second thing that I've been doing alot of thinking about is fellowships. I went into "pediatrics" (we're back in the US) originally thinking that I wanted to do general pediatrics. I love my continuity clinic and seeing all of the little kiddos I've cared for grow up. However, during my behavior and development rotations in my fourth year of medical school and earlier this year, I took a huge interest in a different subject. Emily and I both noticed that I seemed to be really energized when I'd come home from these rotations, and I started to consider doing a fellowship. I looked into where my fellowship options were, and I even sent some e-mails to many of the different directors, asking for some more information.

As I mentioned above, I've been doing alot of thinking and self reflection lately. I had just recently completed four straight weeks of working nights. I was doing an elective rotation for the two weeks before my vacation started, and during those weeks, I was able to return to my continuity clinic, which had been canceled while I was working nights. I suddenly realized how much I had missed it, and it made me question whether I really wanted to do the fellowship. There were a few other factors, outside of medicine, that helped me make the decision, but a decision has finally been made. I'll be going into general pediatrics. I decided that I could always go back to training to do a fellowship at a later time, but there are too many factors leading me to do what I already know I love.

Now, what does this mean for us? It means that we're most likely Nashville or Nashville-area bound in the summer of 2011. Of course, there are always chances that our destination could change, but that's our current plan (I'm sure you're happy Mary).

Explanation (The Nighthawk)

So, Emily's previous post left something for me to explain. She expected me to post something fairly soon. Unfortunately, I've been super busy being lazy on vacation, and I never got around to it. So, I think it's finally time for me to explain this:

Our residency program recently created a new position. It was wonderfully named, the Nighthawk. We all thought the name was a little bit awesome, and it just seemed to conjure up some image of a super hero. Well, we were right... I discovered this. As it turned out, the wonderfully lucky person who got to be the first Nighthawk was yours truly. At our first meeting about the new position, I jokingly asked what the new costume would be. Everybody laughed, but I kept thinking that it would be hilarious to actually come up with something funny.

Well, it just so happens that my wife is a pretty crafty person, and she thought the idea would be funny too. So, we sat up one night and sewed together a cape and mask based on the comic book character. I don't think anyone actually thought I would go through with it. I showed up on my first night in full Nighthawk garb. While the mask was pretty poorly crafted, I did wear the cape for most of the night, including when I went to see a few patients and walked up to the NICU and down to the hospital cafeteria. It all went well, except that one of the parents complained about my cape. Unfortunately the Nighthawk met his fate to the dreaded Momster. I thought it was a pretty fun thing to do for the kids, but apparently, it wasn't professional enough.

Currently, there is still a night hawk, but he/she goes about his/her duties is a much less flamboyant fashion. However, the cape lies dormant in the resident's lounge, waiting for the next person to take of the banner of the Nighthawk.