Margarita, my traveling companion. Despite her extensive experience traveling the country by bus (she's never owned a car), delays and missed opportunities abounded on this trip. We made the best of it and enjoyed the sunshine and butterflies in this park by the Metan bus terminal. Click on the photo to enlarge it and see all the white butterflies in the shrub.
Pan criollo (bread with lard) and Muscatel grapes -- the breakfast/lunch of champions when stranded all day in Metan! The butcher let me go behind his counter to wash off the grapes.In the past seven days I traveled three times, the trips steadily increasing in time from 12 hours to 23 hours to 26 1/2 hours. Despite the facts that I cannot sleep sitting up and that the second trip should have only taken less time (a few mishaps along the way), the trips were rather enjoyable. During all three trips I had a lot to think about and process, and on the second trip I had a traveling companion. Also, when tempted to whine about the lack of sleep, I remembered my former career: as a medical student and even more as a resident, I frequently worked 24 - 30 hours at a time, the longest stretch being 34 hours. I remember once at my 34th hour I tried to dictate a lengthy discharge summary so that I wasn't leaving work for the next day. After several confusing starts, I realized it was a ridiculous idea! In my last job I was on call 24/7, usually including vacations. Thankfully, that call was by phone only, but the time on the phone easily added up to several hours per evening/night. Some nights I stayed awake to make follow-up calls or await results.
I've never held a job involving heavy manual labor. I was thinking about this on my last trip back to Buenos Aires -- I started the trip tired and was thinking about the more than 24 hours to go, then looked out my window and saw people working in the fields. Perspective is a good thing.
My medical school just started publishing a literary review. I really enjoyed one of the articles by a current student, Kurt Holt, entitled, "An Answer to the Question."
"The genesis of this is the questions we all get from the uninitiated. "So what's medical school like?" And maybe they're not really expecting an answer and they're just being polite, but I like to take people at their word, and here's the best answer I've been able to come up with. I welcome you to try this with family, friends, or innocent passersby this holiday season. You may tell them it's like imagining you're in Alaska, and you have two years to get to southern Chile. And you have to walk. To do this you only have to average about fourteen miles a day, you tell them....
You see it's not that fourteen miles in any one day is going to kill us....It's just that, let's say, you happen to want to take a day off, or there happen to be hills -- read tests -- coming up, and you know there's no way in the world you're going to get your fourteen miles in. So now that manageable fourteen miles has turned into thirty-five for the next four, and all you can think is if I had maybe four more hours everyday this week and I didn't need to sleep that much, it'd be fine. So, you sleep less and work more, you find your hair protrudes at odd angles, bags appear under your eyes, non-medical school friends make suggestions that you, say, shower more often, or maybe shave once in a while -- be you male or female.
But somehow we do it. We make up the time, and we're back to caught up, and we wake up happy as all get out that we only have to walk fourteen miles today. So, no, it's not brutally hard the way things can be, over the short term, but it's steady like old age....Because we live our lives in little snapshots. For a click of time we know a whole heck of a lot about, say cell biology, and then tomorrow, click, and it's gone."
