Stained Glass Cookies

Now marks the one year birthday of OB Cookie.  It's been a crazy year.  Last year I was sitting on my couch, freezing my butt off, thinking of things to keep me busy during dead time as a fourth year.  Now, thankfully, it's not so cold.  I'm definitely not sitting on the couch nearly as much, although I do fall asleep on it frequently.

I'm calling these cookies stained glass cookies.  They are loaded with little pieces of sour candies and they turned out really pretty.  They are tart with great textural contrast as well.  So happy birthday blog! I've had a bunch of fun writing here, and even if posts are more sparse than before, I'm not giving up quite yet.


Stained Glass Cookies

2 sticks unsalted butter at room temp
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
zest and juice of one lime and one tangerine
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
8 oz sour candies cut in small pieces and tossed in 1 tbsp flour to prevent sticking

Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add vanilla, citrus, egg.  Beat until well combined.  Add flour and salt.  Mix until well combined.  Add candies.  Divide dough into 2 pieces.  Roll each piece into a 2 inch thick log and shape into a square (or a roll).  Put into freezer to form dough for about 1/2 hour.  Leave other half in freezer (depending on how many you want). Pre-heat oven to 350.  Carefully slice cookies with a serrated knife into 1/4 inch thick slices as candy pieces can be fragile and place on baking sheet.  Bake cookies for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Happy New Year

I’ve started to write a million blog posts but I haven’t quite been able to finish.  As much as I wanted to celebrate the holidays with y’all, I just couldn’t.   I feel in desperate need for free time lately.  The good thing--intern year is officially half over.  It’s pretty incredible to think about how much I’ve learned in the past six months and how much I’ve seen.  I have delivered over 50 babies and done 30 C-sections, and that’s just in the 3 months that I was on obstetrics.

The past couple months I’ve been off service on internal medicine.  I had to take my white coat out of the bag to start the rotation.  I’m learning a lot and the people are very nice, but I’m just homesick in a lot of ways.  I haven’t had enough time to see my family in quite some time, and I really miss OB.  I was just starting to feel happy and comfortable as an intern in obstetrics as I switched to something completely new and different; it felt like starting all over again.

I love being a doctor, but it’s really hard.  It’s not the hours or the daily grind of the work per se, it’s just that being a doctor is now synonymous with being me.  Work isn’t just work when it involves life and death.  It isn’t just your job when you catch an exhausted mother’s beautiful newborn in your hands.  It isn’t just a vocation when you declare a 32 year old dead from a horrible cancer on New Year’s Eve and tell his family that he isn’t there anymore as they look at you with their hopes shattered. 

People that aren’t in residency have said “you knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this.”  But how could I, or anybody in residency truly anticipate what would this would be like?  It’s an incredibly surreal experience.  The highs are unbelievably amazing and the lows are ship sinking.  Sure I knew I would work a lot, watch people die, and be far away from home.  The fact of the matter is that the amount of emotional, physical and intellectual energy expended as an intern cannot be quantified or described.

This post wasn’t meant to depress people or to have somebody send out a suicide watch.  I’ll be fine--in fact I’ll be great.  For my New Year’s resolution, I don’t want to change anything.  I can’t spend my whole life feeling bad about all the stuff I didn’t do.  I just want to keep the resolve to be myself even with constricted time and limited sleep--happy, loud and proud.  I dare you all to do the same.