Yes, I do exist — I have the TOAD hours to prove it!

(By Jeanie)

Okay, Okay!

I would imagine some of you are wondering if this Jeanie person who appears in some of Erik’s posts really exists. Well here I am, I really exist. I was allowed to leave the realm of the University of Oklahoma Pediatrics Program to leave this blog entry.

However, to pay the penance for this one night of blogging bliss, I must give the tour tomorrow for the would-be interns, attend the noon conference on some sort of anemia, and then spend the next twelve hours taking care of the children of Oklahoma who would be in need of the services provided by Children’s Emergency Department. Hope you enjoy!

(Oh, and by the way, TOAD stands for “Time On Active Duty.”)

I guess I should use this initial post to tell you a little about me. For some of you who know all this stuff, I apologize for the boring post. I grew up in a little town called Altus, Okla. When I graduated from high school, I went to Oklahoma Christian University and received a bachelor’s degree in biology.

In between undergrad and medical school, I worked in two different research labs. My job in the first lab was to take umbilical cord blood and process it to collect stem cells. I then grew the cells to form platelets. I thought this was a cool job!

The second lab was devoted to polycystic kidney disease. For this job, I had to take rat organs (hearts, livers, kidneys, brains, etc.) freeze them, put them on slides and then stain them. This did not have quite the same appeal as the cord blood.

The next move in my life was to go to medical school. After one semester, I felt so isolated from the singles group at Memorial Road that, although I had only had four hours of sleep, I decided that I needed to go to the service project at 6 a.m. It was breakfast that morning that rewrote the story that I thought I had already published for my life although I did not know it at the time.

It was that morning that I met my future husband. We began dating in January 2002, were engaged in September, and married the following June. (For those contemplating a career in medicine, might I suggest not planning a wedding four days after your medical licensure exam.) Well, I graduated from medical school in May 2005 and now I am a pediatric resident for the University of Oklahoma.

Well, I have probably bored you enough with who I am and what I do. Before finishing this post I must say that I have been very blessed. I have a wonderful Christian husband who has been blessed with a job at The Christian Chronicle. My parents instilled their values in me and worked many long, hard hours to send me to private school.

I am a member of a wonderful caring church at Memorial Road, and our Connection Group offers unending emotional and spiritual support. I will tell more about these later.

(This blog post is dedicated to Ann, who reminded us that we hadn’t posted anything new in a while.)