Biproducts of Raising Children While Trying To Study A Lot of Random Stuff

I get a lot of questions about how I ever managed to get my biochemistry and DDS degrees while raising kids. First of all, it really doesn't seem that weird to me because I've never really known any different, so I can't really imagine it any other way. Secondly, I am a chronic multitasker.

When I first started back at school and I was still managing apartments to pay the bills, I was considered a full-time employee, a full-time student, and a full-time mom. To illustrate the many hats I had to juggle, I recall an experience that highlighted all the ways I was being stretched:

I was sitting in my office, which happened to be attached to my apartment. It was the first of the month, so there was a lot of traffic coming and going as people came in to pay the rent. I was also trying to study for a midterm exam I had coming up. Hayden was still in diapers, and Nathan was in kindergarten.

So I'm sitting in the office with a biology book on my lap, my shoulder holding a phone to my ear as I was talking to a prospective applicant, another tenant sits waiting on the couch for me to complete my phone conversation, I'm cutting an apple for the boys' afternoon snack with my right hand, Hayden clings to my ankle begging for said snack, and I'm cradling a baby hummingbird in my left hand because Nathan had just rescued it after it had been pushed out of its nest (did I mention I'm a humanitarian, too... *barf*).

I remember that day very vividly because it was my life, personified: Every limb occupied with a different task, trying not to drop the ball in any respect.

Usually, however, life was not so crazy. I actually enjoyed some of my conversations with the boys as they watched me study for various classes about physics, chemistry, and especially anatomy. Sometimes I would even take them to class with me. My boys have both attended lectures at a four year university. Ask them about the time we calculated rotational velocity in physics class. They thought it was a hoot! (They actually did, as the demonstration involved my professor "rotating" a hockey puck through the wall of the auditorium with a formidable slap shot.)

One time, while studying about the brain, Nathan came in and sat next to me as I studied the images carefully, trying to compartmentalize all the various regions and functions of the human "noodle." The cerebellum caught his eye, as its texture and shape look a bit out of the ordinary, comparative to the squiggly grey matter that comprises most of the brain. So I took the time to explain a little bit about it, pointed to its general region on the back of his head, and that was that...

Or so I thought.

Weeks later, as I was helping him wash his hair in the bathtub he points to the same region I had demonstrated to him while conversing about cranial anatomy, and says, "Mommy, don't forget to wash my cerebellum!"

My studies of anatomy were not lost on my (then) three year old Hayden, either. He came to sit with me as I studied about the inner ear. A picture of the cochlea was particularly fascinating to him, as the organ looks like a snail. I explained to him that the cochlea helps us to hear. I then proceeded to explain to him the semi-circular canals, which give us the capability of balancing and, when spun around too much, give us the sensation of dizziness. I figured my toddler was just humoring me, trying to find some time to cuddle with mom, and all the while he was listening to "blah blah blah."

Nope.

Once again, my words came back to me at the oddest of times. Hayden, performing one of his favorite past times, spins himself into oblivion, loses his balance, falls dizzily to the floor, looks up at me and says, "Oh mommy! My cochlea is so messed up!"

So there's proof: Our kids DO listen to us every now and then. You just never know what's going to sink in and make a big impression.

I'm A Pretty, Pretty Princess... But I Don't Wear Sea-Shell Pasties

If this whole pediatric residency thing doesn't work out for me, I have a back up career in mind: I figure Disney might want to hire me.

You see, in the Children's Dental Center, I am Ariel: Able to woo frightened little girls into relaxing through their dental procedures. I have even been requested to leave my own patient in order to help my colleagues in another room when they have a particularly scared patient of their own.

So how did this remarkable talent surface?

One of my co-residents asked me to assist her with a three year old patient one day. "She screamed and cried during the entire exam last time she came in, and now I need to give her a filling. I just need someone to help contain her while I slap the material in her tooth as fast as I can," she pleaded.

When I walked into the "quiet" room (which, for anybody who doesn't understand that euphemism, should more appropriately be called the "Screaming" room) , a beautiful wide-eyed little Hispanic girl was perched in the seemingly giant dental chair, looking like she was ready to bolt out of the room at the first sign of trouble. BOTH of her parents were holding her hands, and her blankie was on her lap. She was wearing sparkly shoes adorned with the Little Mermaid, with a shirt to match, and socks, and her blankie, and a hair clip... all of which was covered with the love-lorn bikini-clad princess.

So I just started singing a refrain from (what certainly appeared to be) her favorite movie. "Look at this stuff. Isn't it neat?" and I held up a mirror. "Wouldn't you think my collection's complete?" ...and the girl had suddenly loosened her grip on the blankie and was staring, slack-jawed at me. Mom and Dad were easily able to convince her I was the ACTUAL Ariel from the movie, come to help fix her teeth (despite the fact that I had blonde hair instead of fiery red, and I had obviously traded my shell-shaped pasties for dumpy, bluish-gray scrubs). For the rest of the appointment, I just kept singing while handing the other dentist the equipment she needed. And for the rest of the appointment, our little patient was completely entranced and never uttered a peep. She even left smiling.

So from that time forward, I have been met with, "Hey, Ariel! Can you give me a hand?" ...and I'm off to one screaming kid after another to soothe the savage little beasts with a tune or two.

I really need to expand my repertoire, however. I have yet to find anything that works for boys as well as "Part of Your World" works for girls. Somehow I don't think Mulan's "Be a Man" would have quite the same effect on screaming little boys.

The Man of My Dreams

While I was managing apartments, I would often wake up to random noises outside: car alarms, acts of domestic violence, possums attacking escaped house cats, gunshots...
You know. The usual.

One night, I woke with a start to the sound of a fight right outside of our window. Wayne would often help me with security on the grounds at night, so I shook him awake.

"Wayne! There's a fight outside!"

To which he responds though groggy, half-closed eyes sounding something like THIS:



And then he promptly rolled over and attempted to return to sleep, undaunted by my frantic plea for help.

Now, baffled and frustrated, I try to rouse him again, this time with more urgency. "WAYNE! There's a FIGHT! Please HELP!"

Again, my response from Wayne is this garbled, cryptic language I cannot decipher.

At this point, I am downright MAD! My blood is pumping, adrenalin coursing through my veins, huffing and puffing. "What good are you, anyway?!?" I say in one final, desperate attempt at ticking him off enough that he might finally emerge from his beauty sleep and kick some a** (or, preferably, call the cops and let them kick all the booty.)

It didn't work. Wayne snoozed on.

Maybe there is something to be said about being deaf. At least you can be assured of getting a good night's sleep...

Even when your wife is dreaming that there is a brutal fight ensuing beneath your bedroom window...

And especially when you are happily slumbering in the magical dream scape known as "Backwards Land," where you have apparently been learning the local dialect.

My Greatest Fear Realized

Most of you know my feelings of absolute horror when it comes to feet. I hate 'em! I realize I need them to walk. I realize everyone else does too, but I hate them, nonetheless. Particularly if I have to touch them or if they ever wind up near my face. I HATE commercials where they show cartoon fungi nestling under people's toenails. There's even one that depicts a foot with a face on it, bursting into flames from the agony of athlete's foot. *shudder* Who thought up that piece of advertising genius?

I can certainly keep it together if I see someone in flip flops. I wear flip flops, myself. I touch my own feet. But if anyone's feet touch me, or if I have to touch someone elses' feet, I get pretty grossed out. The nastiest scenario is someone else's feet touching my own. If Wayne tries to play footsie with me, he is summarily rejected. Sorry, Babe. Ain't gonna happen... Not today. Not ever.

So I've been pretty pleased with my decision to go into dentistry. That's about as far away from feet as you can get. No problem, right?

Wrong!

A ten year old little girl came into the clinic the other day with a bone disease of unknown origin. Her x-rays showed she had absolutely no enamel formation on both her baby teeth and her permanent teeth. The teeth she had in her mouth were orange and lumpy. They looked like chewed up, half-eaten cheese. She was disproportionately built and very short for her age. She had problems with her joints, such that she was about to have knee replacements , was hard of hearing, and the whites of her eyes were blue. All of her joints were really loose. She could bend her wrists back like one of those Cirque du Soleil performers that can squeeze their entire body into a shampoo bottle.

So the Craniofacial specialist, Dr. S, and I were working her up to see if we could crack this case. The lack of enamel pointed toward one diagnosis. The blue eyeball thing pointed to another. All told, this case was weird. So Dr. S turns to me and says. "Look between her fingers." ...and I know what he's getting at, because one of the diagnoses we were grappling with is sometimes associated with webbed digits. It's called syndactyly.

So I look between her fingers, and sure enough: Webbed fingers. Not like the creature from the Black Lagoon, mind you, but up to about the 1st knuckle. So we tick that little factoid off on the list and start digging a little further. Then Dr. S turns to me and says, "Check her toes."

*Deafening silence*

"What?"

"Check her toes to see if they are also affected."

"Uuuummmmm. She has the finger thing. Why does it matter if the toes are webbed, too?"

"We need to assess everything."

"Seriously?"

Then he starts taking off her shoes. ...and I am trying not to puke, because this poor little girl is sitting there, mortified, that there are all these people staring at her and musing, "Look she has this wrong with her" and "Oh! She has that wrong with her." So I didn't think puking because I had to look at her potentially webbed feet would work any wonders for her self-esteem.

"Go ahead and look," he says nonchalantly.

So there I am (in my latex gloves, thank goodness) prying the kid's dirty little downtown digits apart and checking for w.e.b.b.e.d f.e.e.t.!!!!!! And NO she didn't have them! And NO, I never puked. And NO, we STILL don't know what she has. But maybe she has a friend in Ashton Kutcher.

Sometimes, Kids Just SUCK!!!

A darling little specimen (who, for the sake of confidentiality will be "Z" for all intents and purposes of this blog) came to visit me after a bonk to the face sometime the night previous.

Z was a precocious little thing. She proudly announced to anyone who would listen, "I'm waiting for Dr. Shana!"

Soon after she became aware of her eager little patient, Dr. Shana went back to the residents' room to collect a few things, where several of her colleagues stared at her sympathetically and said in a very ominous manner, "I am sooooo sorry." Now wide eyed with fear, Dr. Shana looked inquisitively at her colleagues who answered her growing concern with, "Use the quiet room." ...and left it at that.

Back in the clinic, Z eagerly hopped up into the chair, asking ALL KINDS of questions. She seemed quite unconcerned that she had suffered any kind of trauma, and there was very little in the way of outward signs of such a struggle. But Mom was insistent that she had injured her tooth, and was terribly concerned that the tooth underneath was going to be infected if her daughter was not promptly seen to assess the injury sustained by mysterious forces.

All the niceties out of the way, and a somewhat fuzzy patient history was collected (nobody would say exactly how the tooth suffered its catastrophic injury, and Z was having difficulty keeping straight exactly where in her mouth it actually hurt... sometimes up... sometimes down... sometimes left... sometimes right...).

Time to examine Z.

The chair reclines gradually. Z makes a joke about Dr. Shana's funny gloves. The overhead chair light goes on....

And then the demonic possession begins...

Suddenly, the energetic and inquisitive Z has begun screaming... Not like an everyday frightened child kind of cry. This sound could only be described as an emission from the depths of Hell: A high-pitched, hatred-filled, ear-piercing Nazgul-esque scream that rocked the clinic walls. Mom (so helpful of her), forcefully shoves Z back into the chair by the shoulders and pins her down, at which point the darling child rips at her mom's face like the dude at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." She has also managed to pull out chunks of her own hair as well as her mom's. All the while, she continues the devilish blood curdling shrieks.

Dr. Shana is concerned.

She steps away from the mother and daughter and says, "I am not going to be able to examine Z unless she can calm down and sit still." Mom assures Dr. Shana that her daughter is in excruciating pain, and this MUST be why she's acting like this, but Mom will let Z sit on her lap, and then surely Dr. Shana can get a good look and some x-rays in this miraculous position.

This time Z gets a chunk of Dr. Shana's hair too.

"Don't TOUCH my child!!!" Mom reacts, in a most protective manner.

Happy to oblige, Dr. Shana has already retracted the solitary finger she was able to glance across Z's upper lip for a brief second, still unable to assess Z's condition. Dr. Shana is pretty sure the x-rays would prove futile to obtain as well. Mom begins to think that maybe this emergency exam isn't going to work. But before she takes Z home, she decides to make one final plea:

"While we're here, Dr. Shana. Could you do Z's cleaning today too?"

"No, Mom. We can't. Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out."

My Past Life

Yup. I used to have it pretty good. Free rent. Free cable. A decent salary for a young starting-out family. Lived by a pool. Worked from home. It was the good life, indeed.

Except... I was a slumlord.

• 93 units of low income housing.
• Mustard yellow facade. Avocado green stoves.
• Roaches that would rain down from the door jams when you inevitably had to kick in the doors for evictions.
• Gunshots and sirens in the neighborhood almost every night.
• Taggers marking their territory.
• Having to call CPS on families neglecting and/or abusing their kids.
• Kicking out drug dealers, pimps and hos... some who proudly sharpen their machetes on the front porch on the night you deliver the eviction notice.
• Helping a tenant fax their release of liability to the Jerry Springer show, on which they are proudly scheduled to appear the following week.
• Car getting keyed and all tires slashed the night before Christmas Eve.
• Gang-bangers screaming in your face while your toddler looks on from his stroller... Screaming back at said gang-banger for getting in your grill in front of your baby... Gang-banger stomping away.
• Pregnant and climbing into an overflowing dumpster to stomp down the brimming trash in order to keep it from spilling into the parking lot.
• Picking up used condoms off the playground.
• Calling the cops on the crazy old lady threatening to kill herself.
• Chasing nasty people out of the pool "doing it" in broad daylight.
• Getting sued because your black security guard quitting decided it would be a nice opportunity to cash in on a bogus civil rights claim.
• Wading through 30 years of little-old-lady pack rat memorabilia when her water heater floods her apartment.
• Disciplining tenants who have moved in from Africa for fire-eating on the tennis courts (I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried).
• Trying to convince the tenant who lives above the pool that he should not throw bologna in the water to chase away the "evil spirits."
• Coming home from the hospital with your newborn baby and having somebody walk up to you as you gimp out of the car just to inform you that their toilet needs fixing... RIGHT NOW!!!
• 20 year olds telling you that they have "perfect credit" only to find that they had already amassed 34 collection accounts in the two years that they've been allowed to own credit cards.
• Having the FBI rifle through your tenant files after 9/11 because they suspect a sleeper cell is living in your complex.
• Cleaning out human waste from people's bathtubs because the sewage line has backed up into three buildings.
• Telling the two sets of missionaries living in a top floor apartment above the parking lot that it is NOT okay to hurl flatware at passing vehicles.
• Shutting down birthday parties for toddlers because their parents' guests have become drunk and disorderly.
• Catching your security guard and your assistant having an adulterous affair while they are supposed to be on duty.
• Laying out Easter Eggs for a hunt that is to transpire the next morning, only to find that the raccoons have opened all the eggs and eaten the candy inside before sunrise.
• Dragging an 8 year old kid back to his dad's apartment because he was caught "huffing" aerosol cans in the parking lot.
• Convincing an AIDS patient that it was NOT okay to sell his medical marijuana to his neighbors.
• Cleaning out a transvestite's closet who had left town without leaving notice, but neglected to pack his fake boobies and size 14 stiletto heals.
• Opening doors for locked out tenants at 4:00 in the morning.
• Kicking out your neighbors upstairs, which ends in a retaliatory 10-hour heavy metal guitar marathon aimed at your ceiling.

Yup. Those were the days.