As a pregnant woman, my nightly dreams have become even more vivid and wacky. For those of you who know me personally, this is probably a frightening thought! I am already a very vivid dreamer, but add in pregnancy and we are in for a whirl. During the month before my wedding, VargasGirl (who has equally as wacky and vivid dreams as I do) and I shared daily e-mail accounts of our dreams regarding my wedding. I still giggle at her dream of my mom as an Amazon woman in a pink gingham dress.
Last week I had a dream about my time working in the dermatology clinic where I worked as the Mohs surgery histotech (a method for removing skin cancer) for five years. Three of those years part time while I was an undergrad – I did a job share with a woman who had toddlers and wanted the flexibility to go home to her kids at 3pm on the four days a week we worked and have summers off. It worked great. I had a good paying job through college, she worked a flexible schedule. When I graduated from college she quit and became a SAHM and eventually moved to California and I worked full time in the position for two years until I could deal with it no longer and knew a change had to be made in my life.
I loved that job in many ways. I also hated that job in many ways. Everyone has that job that defines them as an employee I believe, this was mine. I had a tremendous amount of responsibility, patients respected me, I came out of my shyness shell a significant amount and I really learned how to interact with people and console them – a trait that aside from my own son, doesn’t come natural to me. I gained experience in running my own (albeit small) lab as well. The downside came in working in a doctor’s office with three physicians and their all female support staff. There was as much bickering and hormones flying in that office as my freshman dorm. As hard as I find it sometimes to work in a male dominated field, it doesn’t hold a candle to that office.
I worked for a super doctor, in more ways than one. He was a Super Doctor in that he was sent all the hard cases and had incredible skin cancer cure rates, I saw more wacky stuff working for him than I ever hope to see in the rest of my life. I also met many local and even a few national level celebrities who were referred to him. He was super towards me to give me all his confidence in my abilities and sought to teach me everything he knew. Still today I believe my knowledge of dermatology and skin cancer probably surpasses many new practicing dermatologists. We spent lots of time together at work, often working until 11pm, we routinely lunched together and he treated me like his daughter. He had hopes and dreams for me (going to medical school at the University where he taught part time) and he was good to me and offered me lots of flexibility in my job. I adored his family and often babysat his three kids when he and his wife would vacation.
When I graduated college he held a twinge of disappointment (I am nearly positive) that I decided to go on working for him full time and had switched from talking about med school to talking about grad school. Our friendship changed somewhere along those lines during those last two years. I think it was my being there full time, him seeing lots more potential for me and my getting a much closer look at him as a shrewd (but very savvy) business manager and finding out later on how incredibly cheated I was on my salary. The mentor/mentee phase was over and I was now just his employee. AB still wrinkles his nose and talks about how much he hated the man when my time working for Dr. Stinkbug comes up in conversation. AB was of the opinion that when things started going sour with him I should have told him to take a hike and left him in a huge bind to scramble for a new histotech. Maybe I should have, but it was never and still wouldn’t be in my nature to do that to him. He was and I am sure still is, a good man.
When I dream about work, I dream about that place. I have never once dreamt about washing animal cages in the tox lab I worked at in high school, or the lab and university I worked in through grad school, and rarely do I dream about my current job. (Yes, there is my extensive resume.) Yet once a month or so, come rain or shine, I dream about cutting slides, assisting in cutting on people’s faces and stitching, running from room to room and consoling patients, making an effort to reassure them that their faces will recover. (Side note, please wear sunscreen.) I would dream that my slides are perfect, I dream of the stress and I dream of Dr. Stinkbug barking orders at me.
Surprisingly my dream last week was vastly different then previous dreams. I dreamt I was in Colorado visiting my mom, Dr. S found out and asked me to come in and cut slides for him one day. I tried to decline but finally went in. He introduced me with huge pride in his face to everyone in the office and then, with Leif in tow, I went back to my lab and tried to work. But instead of cranking out perfect slides, I couldn’t cut them. I was plowing through chunks of embedding medium and skin in the quest for the perfect thin slide that encompassed the entire length of the dermis and into the fat layer. I could not do it. Leif was being patient for Leif, but still he didn’t want to be there. The Petri dishes were stacking up and patients were waiting for their results. I could not get a slide made. I had forgotten how.
This is something that I have told AB I will never forget how to do, I will never forget how to cut frozen sections. The other night in my dream I had forgotten. Dr. S came over to me and instead of his face turning beet red as he yelled, he patted me on the shoulder as he looked into the cryostat at the mess in there and said, “it’s ok, you don’t need to do this”. And I picked up my son and left.
The dream was immensely satisfying to me. I don’t know if it marked the end of my being plagued with dreams of working in that place (even after 10 years of absence), or if it was just the mental acknowledgement I got from Dr. S (or really myself since it was my dream) that the stress is gone and I don’t need to plague myself with it anymore. I don’t know why the dream was so satisfying to me, but it was.
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