luciano

“Well, the cello is the sexiest instrument.”  Wow–John, if you only knew that that was the moment you won me over almost eight years ago, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.

I was first a cellist.  I chose the cello when I was eight because there was this French girl (Marie), with whom I used to spend summers, who played the cello–and I wanted to be just like her; that simple.  And then when I was 13, Luciano–my beautiful Chinese-Italian cello (made out of Chinese wood in Italy) who sings like Pavarotti–entered my life.  He’s currently living with my other love in Boston.  I think we should celebrate our reunion in June with a new bridge and set of strings, and maybe I can reteach my hands how to play you sans horrible screeching.

I hadn’t thought about the reasons I started playing the cello in a long time.  It kind of makes me think of the reasons I chose to go medical school.  When I interviewed at Goucher for post-bac, Liza asked me how much John contributed to my desire to pursue a medical profession.  I don’t really remember what I told her, but I very well might have said that he had nothing to do with it, which is not exactly true.  We never talked through the decision; I think I just blurted out one day that I thought I had made a mistake and that I wanted to go to med school.  But I don’t think I would have ultimately known it was what I wanted without seeing John and his friends living it every day.  I was a little bit of a brat about it–the lifestyle, that is–being extremely vocal in my discontentment with the inflexible schedule, the steady stream of med school speak at any and all social events, leaving me in a daze of acronyms.  (I look at some of my peers’ significant others–they all tolerate us so much more than I did!)  Anyway, back to the point: thanks to Marie and John (and all of UVA Med 2008) for being excellent “role models” (for lack of a better term), and helping me discover two fairly fundamental parts of my life.

To wrap things up, two overly simplified take-aways from microbio:

1) Never ever use antibiotics.  (Okay, sometimes use antibiotics.)  Staph aureus is one scary bitch.

2) Looking back at the number of times I had strep and impetigo concurrently in grammar school, I’m starting to agree with John more and more: children, though adorable, are little germ bags.