Almost Done!

Today I have a bit of down time before heading off to work. Melissa, on the other hand, is as busy as ever. Today she is practicing for an upcoming practical, attending class, then heading strait to work. And she’s doing all this one handed! This past Tuesday Melissa went into surgery to have her tendonitis taken care of. The entire procedure only took a matter of minutes but the wait before and after the surgery took forever. We must have waited three hours before she was wheeled off to the surgery suite.

On a lighter note, we have gotten our tickets sorted and we are officially one step closer to Australia. Melissa is so excited she can hardly stand it. I, on the other hand, am a bit more nervous now that we are less than two months away. That’s standard for me really. I just worry about finances, living arrangements and all the little details that surround moving to a foreign country. I am far more excited than nervous, but every once and awhile those thoughts sneak in.

This weekend is Easter weekend so Melissa and I are planning on a quick trip to Bend for one last taste of some of the best BBQ to ever grace Oregon, or the Pacific Northwest for that matter. The only place that could come close would maybe be Pig Feathers out near the coast. Back Porch BBQ in Jacksonville runs a very close second.

That’s about it for this week. We will be sure to give you an update after Melissa goes back in for her follow up appointment. I also have a very informative story about international apartments that I will have to save for another day.

Thanks for stopping by, we both appreciate the support and we hope to see you all soon.

Nothing but love!

Let the Countdown Commence!

Well, we can officially say that our VERY LAST TERM at OIT has gotten in to full swing, and the immense to-do list has quickly become an overwhelming force to be reckoned with.

It was a difficult start as “broke” seemed to be the word of the month.  First our internet broke (hence a bit of a delay between our last few posts), then a visit to my hand surgeon led to a surgery appointment for my broken wrist (trying to get rid of a lesion on a tendon), after that my little ‘ol trooper of a car broke (transfer box went out – yipes!) then we had to purchase our many tickets to get us to our final destination Adelaide, which on top of previous mentioned repairs left our wallets broke! 

All in all though, we are recovering – we are making do with internet, I get my wrist taken care of next week, my car just went in for repairs, and at least a bit of stress has been relieved by knowing our seats are secured on a few planes.

School in itself is a bit helter-skelter.  Chad and I have been stoked to get in to the Cadaver Lab course, and on Monday we made our first dissections of the abdomen and pelvis. By the end of the day we had formaldehyde migraines and it took hours of hand-washing to remove the latex-formalin smell from our fingers, but the fascinating first-hand education of the human body cannot be traded for!

We are also getting our taste of Cardiac Interventional Technology (Cath-Lab), CT, and for me Mammography; for Chad Quality Assurance.  All topics which present their own interesting challenges of memory and recall, and incredibly impossible concepts of Fourier transformation and image reconstruction algorithms created by some mathematical geniuses whose intelligence in incomprehensible.  If nothing else, however, it is at least reaffirming some desires of what we might – or might not – want to pursue in the field.

On the front of our big “move”, we have been trying to balance the packing and cleaning, with studying, and trying to avoid letting the rest of the world know that we feel like chickens running around with our heads cut off.  It is hard to explain the laundry-list of things we keep building in our heads “sort through the things we want to get rid of, figure out what we’re going to do with the stuff we don’t want to sell, find out how to ship anything we might need, where are we going to stay, how to pack everything, where to put it all in the meantime….” I could go on and on, but my heart is already starting to race!

We have 60 days left before we leave Klamath, and a mere 67 before we depart our beloved “States” for our beloved Australia. With the intermittent snow we’ve been getting, I have to say that if it weren’t for our staggering  to-do’s, those 60 days couldn’t pass fast enough!