This is it! After 15 months of traveling, and 27 months of graduate school, the finish line is in sight! I will graduate on August 13th and, after passing my board exams, be Blair Monell, PA-C! Whoop whoop!
Until then, though, the tunnel is long, dark, and oddly familiar. I am ONCE AGAIN behind bars. This time it’s at a prison in Galveston, Texas near the gulf coast. There is a certain appreciation I have for the ying/yang of the situation however. I really enjoyed my first prison rotation and this one, while different, is okay so far. It’s really hard to come off an amazing rotation like GI (new passion of my life. Please call me and ask me questions about your poop! Haha) and try and get pumped up about… prison.
But it has it’s highlights. For example, I am welcome to eat, for free, my lunches at the prison. Because it is prison-provided food, it comes from US government surplus supplies AND is cooked by the prisoners. Yep. So every day it’s kind of exhilarating to weight the pro’s and con’s of taking up the offer of free food. And if I do eat it, it’s like another game for the next 4 hours to see if anything is going to come back and upset me later. Being is prison is risky business! Other highlights include getting to work with lots of interesting pathology. This prison is the one prison in texas where the really really sick people get shipped to from outlying facilities. Most of the inmates here are near end of life or have diagnoses that carry poor outcomes such as cancer or end-stage renal disease. So it’s kinda comparable to a nursing home just for old or sick inmates. Thus the security is minimum (really, how far is that lady with the walker going to get?) and I feel very safe.
What I don’t feel safe about is going outside! It’s been in the low 100’s with high humidity. For a person who just came from freezing, rainy, 50* Portland, Oregon this is going to be a difficult adjustment. But at least at the end of every day I get to walk out pass the multiple barred gates and into the open air. It’s a nice feeling.
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