Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Category: Long Reads

Stories that take a bit longer to get through.

  • Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

    A while back my school gave us a pre-graduation checklist of sorts that required students to travel around campus on a “signature scavenger hunt” so that representatives of various departments could sign a single, increasingly valuable piece of paper. Some of them were easy (turn in your scrub machine card, return locker keys), while others…

  • Leaving Dayton

    When I last left off, I was experiencing a smorgasbord of weather variations in the vicinity of Dayton, Ohio while completing my final rotation of med school. Both my mom and Mark came up from their respective states of residence to visit me as Ohio, unlike California, is within a driving distance where one can…

  • Impudent Weather

    Weather is the height of inoffensive topics, typically reserved for such situations as breaking ice, vainly attempting to prevent a relative from espousing their religiopolitical views in polite company, and  interactions that have reached a level of tedium where discussing the class of precipitation seems interesting. One could be forgiven for assuming that, if I am writing…

  • Minor Turbulence

    I’m back in Ohio, this time for ICU rotation, and the week got off to a rough start beginning with the landing. On the first day I showed up naked; that is to say, without my phone, which really got in the way of storing my new coworkers’  numbers for future communication as I stumbled…

  • Game. Set. Match.

    Game news dominated my Facebook feed on Friday night, when, after years of  “up and coming” status, my alma mater UMBC secured a place in history by knocking out UVA in March Madness. If, like my med school colleagues, you managed to miss what will likely be the biggest sportsball upset of the year, the Retrievers…

  • A Match Made to Profession

    You finished medical school. Time to get a job, right? Wrong! Finishing allopathic med school gets one an MD but does not allow one to actually practice medicine. For that you have to complete what is more or less a paid apprenticeship, termed a “residency” because it involves essentially living at the hospital for the…

  • Beginning of the Beginning of the End

    When last I wrote, I had successfully presented my PhD thesis proposal and was celebrating that the progress bar of my ridiculously ill-conceived plan for post-graduate education had reached the neighborhood of 25%. Now, a short while a long while over five years later, readers may be surprised to find out that several events have transpired in the…

  • Occupancy

    Rachel and I have been looking for a new place to live because, well, the rent. One of the options we’ve been considering is finding a house and sharing it with our friend Liz and another guy, Matt, a friend of a friend who has been looking for a place as well. After months of…