All Crazy on the Western Front

Busy has become a permanent state of being it seems.

My sweet Kara is fighting valiantly through her second to last semester of her masters degree. Her battles include, but are not limited to, papers, patients, preceptors, professors and particularly boring presentations by both professors and peers. (I don't know if I should mention some of that.) Please understand, she does love it and I am extremely proud of her. My favorite part of her school is when she comes home from a day of clinicals, usually tired, but beaming because she figured out a particularly difficult diagnosis or handled an unexpected situation so well that even she can't deny it. Most recently, Kara made a smart decision to work longer with a flustered patient to understand a his needs and worries. As the appointment was wrapping up, the patient stopped Kara to thank her, to which Kara replied with a polite, of course. The patient stopped her again and said,

"No, really. Thank you. No one has ever taken the the time to help me understand my condition the way you just did. I hope you are here for my follow up next week."

Needless to say. I am very proud of Kara for making the call to work with this person even when her physician preceptor thought it was time to move on.

In other news, we have been all over the ups and downs of applying to my graduate program in physical therapy. After a much longer stay on the wait list than anticipated, we finally heard that Northwestern was not going to be taking any more students. This was the bad news, and a real disappointment because they have a pretty remarkable program. However, the good news is that I had been accepted several weeks ago to another school. Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science is its name. It is located about 25 minutes north of Chicago and promises to be a different sort of experience than the big school downtown. Cozier comes to mind. The class is only half the size of the class at northwestern and the Professors at RF pride themselves on their open door policy with their students. The program starts at the end of May so right after graduation here at BYU, we will be off to the races. We have about a week to pack and move after I graduate before Kara's last semester starts. This is certainly a lot happening all at the same time. But it seems we get bored if we are doing anything less than a thousand things and the same time. Did I mention we are also working part time (only a few days a month) and teaching Sunday School on the side?

Anywho. No short of interesting for us. More news soon.