Staying afloat in the Rain

It's starting to feel like fall here and I LOVE it!  The temp has been nice (60-low 80's).  Tacy and I have worn pants and sweatshirts some days.  It's just lovely.  I'm so excited for all of the leaves to start changing colors!  Fall is my favorite season!  I remember being the only kid in kindergarten to draw a picture of fall when we were asked to draw pictures of our favorite season.  Most of the kids drew pictures of the beach, there were a lot of snow, and then there was me.  I felt different but you know, I do love Fall!  Spring is a close second, but I love these cooler seasons (not the crazy extreme ones).  

On that note, I have now been working for 2 weeks.  I have had 2 days of general orientation and one day of computer training for Epic (the electronic medical record/scheduling they all use out here).  General orientation was at Rex Hospital and boring.  Most of it applied to people who actually work at the hospital.  Then the computer training was at this closed down outlet mall (it looked like a regular mall to me but the east coast is a little different than the west obviously).  Anyways, one wing of this mall has been taken over by UNC for all of this Epic training.  It has all been converted into a bunch of computer rooms (making it look nothing like a mall but more a computer prison - there is a guard at the door and you have to have a key to get in and out of the rest of the mall).  The training was mildly helpful, but it mostly applied to things a Family medicine clinic would do (vaccinations etc).  Oh well.  We did have a really long lunch break at which point I did get a key card so I could go out to the center of the mall.  Here I could look down the two creepy vacated/unoccupied wings of the mall.  The last wing was the food court, which amazingly almost all of the food places were open.  Epic must bring in a lot of customers for them to all stay open.  Honestly this mall looked like a good scene for a scary movie.

Work at my clinic has been good, just slow.  The neurosurgeon I work with is really nice and funny in a very sarcastic way.  He does not like people to call him doctor (he told me he thinks titles are very smug) but asks that everyone call him by his first name.  It throws patients off a little.  The Office Manager/Administrative Assistant for my doctor just avoids saying his name because she refuses to call him by his first name.  It makes me laugh but I agree it is weird not to call him Dr.  Afterall, he is a doctor.  Angela is the office manager but also Dr. Herzig's secretary, so we work really closely together.  She is awesome, loves soccer, is from the bay area but now loves NC, so basically we have a lot in common.  She is also a really relaxed manager which makes work much better.  Since Dr. Herzig is a new neurosurgeon, he is still building up his practice so it's a little slow. It has given me good time to get familiar with the system and time to learn how to do things the right way.  I also help Angela with what I can.  However, Tacy got sick again this week and I had to leave work early Wednesday to go pick her up from my friends and take her home.  Because work is slow, this was fine and no coverage was needed for me.  

No worries. I took Tacy to a pediatrician and while it's hard to say for sure what's wrong, the doctor said her lungs sound a little crackly in the left and since she has had a cough for over a week, and with all the kids getting lung infections right now, she started Tacy on Amoxicillin.  Tacy is still sick with her runny nose and a cruddy cough, but she is playing and acting like the crazy toddler which she is again.  So today I went back to work and she went back to playing with our friends.

Tacy loves her daycare arrangement.  She gets to play with friends all day (well at least the 3 year-old), they have a lot of fun toys and activities at their house, and they also go a lot of fun places too.  I'm glad she is happy.  Plus being around older kids might help her with her talking.  She did help clean up toys yesterday while singing "clean up clean up everybody do your share".  She only sings "clean up clean up" but still, that was nice.  

Tacy is now also counting different.  When my mom was out here the 8th - 10th, Tacy counted "1,2,5,6".  Then a few days ago she counted "2,4,6,7".  Yesterday she added five in.  Today she did say 1, 2, 3.  So we are making progress.  She also loves to asks "what's that?"  So I spend a lot of the time telling her what everything is, even when they are things she knows like her toys.  It is most difficult when she asks me while we are driving, so I don't know exactly what she is pointing too.  Yesterday we drove by construction and Tacy kept asking "what's that?" while we passed lots of construction machines.  I threw out the few I know (bulldozer, tractor...haha) and finally had to tell her that I did not know.

Brad is still keeping his head above water with all of his tests and skills assessments.  They have been told that it calms down after October.  So as long as he can make it to his birthday, then it should get easier.  But he really is doing great.  Now he also understands how hard pharmacology is!