In brief: Poz blog carnival, internship preparation

1. The International Carnival of Pozitivities was kind enough to include my AIDS vaccine post in its recent round-up of blog posts related to HIV, AIDS, and especially, living with HIV.

2. I went to pick up my Advanced Cardiac Life Support manual from the hospital. Walking back from getting the ACLS manual, I saw a woman and a man walking in the corridor in the opposite direction; the man was in scrubs and was carrying a portable defibrillator. As they passed me, she said, "So, you're going to do the spiel to the new interns, right?" "Yeah," he said. She said, "That's a big one. Like, 200 MDs."

I thought:
--People are preparing for us showing up, and it's a big event.
...and...
--Ha! She said, "MDs!" She meant us! Ha ha ha! ... oh crap! I realized that other people think of us as doctors, more than they distinguish us from other doctors--even when, as in this case, they understand the distinction between us and other doctors. And that means that I won't be just an intern--I'll actually be a doctor also. Of course I know that the two categories of intern and doctor overlap, with intern completely contained within the larger sphere of doctor. But I've been a sub-intern and I can imagine being an intern. Imagining being a doctor seems harder. Even though, as I remember with a combination of delight and dread from time to time, it's actually the same thing.