NYC Life: One Month In

Four weeks in. It’s been in­tense.

There’s work, which is too com­plic­ated to ex­plain here. It’s… a lot. Amaz­ing op­por­tun­ity, amaz­ing chal­lenge.

And then there’s New York life. Horns. Alarms. Sirens. Kids in the apart­ment above. Ba­bies next door. Dogs be­low.

To max­im­ize my in-per­son time with my new col­leagues and to learn MSK, I’ve been in the city on week­days, tak­ing the train back to Mas­sachu­setts on Fri­day nights and then re­turn­ing on Sunday af­ter­noons. Even though I prom­ised my­self and my team I’d try to stay bal­anced, week­days are run­ning 12-15 hours, week­ends are short and fo­cused on emer­gen­cies and re­cov­er­ing from the week.

Life is noth­ing but work, and so far all I’ve seen in NYC is the part between the hos­pit­al build­ings and my of­fice build­ing.

At first I liked this apart­ment be­cause it was con­veni­ent. I’m quickly grow­ing to really dis­like it.

Sleep isn’t an easy thing in this apart­ment. Street noise plus apart­ment noise plus tem­per­at­ure and fur­niture is­sues… this isn’t work­ing, and lack of sleep is mak­ing every work day that much harder.

Michele’s down here with me this week, which is great. She can do her con­sult­ing work here, ex­plore the city a little, and help try to make the week a little easi­er. She agrees with meh… liv­ing in a fur­nished apart­ment sounds great at first, but it’s not our own and it’s not work­ing for sleep and re­cov­ery.

On the up­side, I’m on plan with ex­er­cise, rid­ing the pelo­ton down in the little base­ment gym. So far.

Hope­fully once I’ve settled in a bit more at MSK we can get week­ends back and deal with some of the life­style head­aches.