Back again

It has been some time since I was last able to blog. School is back in full swing, and the stress is somewhat different at this stage of the process, but very palpable. I hit a wall of sorts about 2 weeks ago, when I felt I just couldn't do this for one more moment. Of course, I have to...there are 6 months left before graduation. So, like high school seniors around March, we continue to go through the motions and do what we have to do.

Our days are now mostly clinicals, which I mostly enjoy. 4 days a week we are in the operating room for 8 to 10 hours. In our training, we also happen to generate a lot of billing for the anesthesiologists, but we are not paid because it is part of our training. (This could be an entire blog post itself, but this blog isn't about anesthesia politics, so I'll spare you all.) On Thursdays, we have classes and no clinicals. In our off hours, we study for our classes, start studying for boards next spring, prepare for the next day's cases, and work on our research projects, most of which are wrapping up this semester. Then we have our real lives on top of that. Most of my classmates are parents, all but one are married, and we have the same complicating factors in our lives as everyone else does. It will be nice when we are graduated, have taken boards, and can start earning money for our work again. Mostly due to my school loans, we will be around $100K in debt by the time I graduate.

On the weight front, I haven't made my follow up appointment with Dr P yet, partly because I haven't remembered to do it when they are open, partly because I don't have my November schedule yet, and partly because I want to have more success to show before that happens. It's been a good fill most days. Some days, I'm still super hungry. Other days, I'm not hungry at all. I have had two days of mild heartburn in the past 3 weeks, which is something I am monitoring. If it becomes any more of a problem, I'll have to see the doc about it. Right now I'm about 4 pounds down since my fill. Meh.

I'll be posting a guest blogger post from my husband in just a little bit. He generously offered to write a guest post on WLS from the spouse's perspective. I think when I was spending time on the lap band boards, I heard a bit about marriages ending in divorce after WLS, but not much on the experience of spouses. I hope you enjoy his post.