Pot Committed

Today I had my first day of ACLS training, and for me it was a recertification so for the most part, it went quite smoothly. The only additional issue I had to address was to memorize all the different amounts of medication to give, and at what times to give them, and at what times to shock someone and how many joules to use. I didn't remember being as specific the last time I certified in ACLS, but I did all the necessary memorization the night before, so it was fairly straightforward for me.

I don't know how smart these people are who I'm working with, and while some of them were better with all this stuff being presented to them today and some of them weren't, the reality is I still have basically no real idea of how smart these people are. It's scary to think that my partner on my first month of residency will come in and just destroy me academically and procedurally at all aspects of inpatient family medicine. The problem is, to avoid that situation from happening, I have to do a fair amount of Harrison's Internal medicine reading which I haven't been doing because the residency keeps throwing nonsense procedural paperwork and certification business at me. For example, today I learned that I am supposed to buy my books through the residency coordinator, who gives a book list to UPMC, who searches for them off a website and acquires them and then passes them back to her. There's no buying off amazon and simply acquiring the reimbursement in CME money. This meant that, in order to secure the ebooks I wanted, I had to go online and search for them on this database I had never used before, and find books that were horrendously overpriced (which doesn't really matter to me in a sense because of my CME money) and then had to note down their ISBN numbers and email the website coordinators about books I hadn't found. With any luck, they'll update their database before I submit my list and I won't have any problems. Being occupied with all this and with buying things from REI so I can commute to work by bike, I ended up taking up quite a bit of time today. My hobby-related purchasing time, however, has been filled for the next week. This leaves Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evening to do nothing but read for the upcoming house rotation.

The title of this post is based on my purchase today at REI. It was unexpectedly large since an item which I thought was going to be on sale ended up not being on sale. I guess I just manage to surprise myself sometimes with how many of these ancillary purchases I manage to make, so I said to myself, ha, I'll fool them. I'll buy the things I want, and then I'll actually use them! That'll teach them to sell things that they know most people will just throw into the back of a basement cupboard. I know they don't actually think that way, but I really do hate spending money on myself. Unless it's something glaringly necessary, I can't bring myself to buy something that I think may somehow lead to joy. I was and still am even more uneasy about the purchases I made today because I know how few people commute to work by bicycle, let alone residents who would do it.

There's a phrase in poker known as being "pot committed". I'm terrible at poker, but I understand it to indicate a stage within a round of play when someone has put a significant portion of their total playable chips in the pot and has to call a subsequent bet laid because it offers them better mathematical odds to call than to fold. Ideally, I would like to somehow apply that to the situation I am currently facing in order to better motivate myself to commute to work by bike. However, my accounting alleles handed down to me from my father have black-and-whited that and it is simply not true.

Commuting by bike saves me 15 miles a day in driving. Mutiplied by 26 days a month (which will not realistically be happening) and by 4 months a year, I'll be riding 1560 miles by the end of October, assuming I last that long. Anyway, that means, factoring in the average current price of gas and the mileage of my car, I will have saved $227 by commuting. The problem with this calculation is that my costs for outfitting my bike and myself to commute (much stronger bike light, massive U-lock, special folder for packing clothes, shoes into which to change when changing out of road bike shoes) put me over $260. Again, this all assumes I bike to my July rotation, my obstetrics rotation which starts at 6 am, my night float rotation which ends in the morning, and then my surgery rotation which, ironically, is lighter than all the others I just mentioned.

Of course I'm not factoring in the benefits that make up part of the reason I decided to take this up in the first place. I didn't want to take up commuting by bike to save money, I wanted to take it up to get into shape and be fit and healthy. Hopefully it actually works, because if I don't manage to pull this off, there will be many embarrassing and time-consuming returns to make. Being the accountant, I also perfectly stored all the tags and receipts, so I suppose returning is at least possible. Maybe if I burn them I'll be more motivated to go through with this whole thing. Nah.