Though I’ve found the outpatient and educational components of this rotation very interesting, the recipe project we have to do has been really stressful. I understand it’s an important part of the learning experience, but my goodness. I’ve been needing a lot of extra yoga and meditation time. My body seems to make time for it even when I don’t ask it to.

For example, the morning of our first presentation began at 3:30 a.m. Fitful half-sleep, strange dreams…I’d been planning a rest day but unrolled my yoga mat around 4:30 in the spirit of “when life hands you sleeplessness…” Insomnia yoga is practice I dabbled in during undergrad and rediscovered last year. 7 a.m. found me in the hospital kitchen, stemming and slicing several pounds of grapes before moving on to dicing apples and assembling 51 chicken salad wraps. I was actually grateful to have something to do with my hands—it helped me both to relax and to stay awake. However, I also had to run around looking for the people I needed to nail down last-minute details. By show-time, I was ready to face-plant on the display table.

I tasted the salad to make sure it was ok, but I hate mayonnaise and tarragon, and the walnuts in the butternut squash salad were a no-go, and my epi-pen was in my locker. Ideally, my partner and I would have made a recipe we both liked, but the options from which we could choose were fairly slim, especially since we had to work the tarragon in, and we wanted to do something seasonal and colorful. I snuck in a few minutes before setting up shop to eat some parm-crusted tilapia and braised red cabbage. Totally the right decision. Because I was so hungry and wiped out, it was basically the best thing I’d ever eaten.

Unfortunately, I was still pretty low energy. Sitting at the table trying to entice dubious customers to try this healthy recipe, I must have looked like caffeinated death with a swipe of eyeliner. I kept thinking, “If Britney Spears survived 2007, I can totally get through this project.”

However, there were some really nice people who stopped by to chat about nutrition, so that made up for some of the, “No, I don’t want to try your god-awful lunch special” stares. I can’t say I blamed those folks, though—I mean, I didn’t eat it, and I made it. I did manage to encourage a lot of people to buy it though. It was interesting to note, however, that the main reason female customers declined was because it had meat in it, and most of the men who said no stated it was because they didn’t like butternut squash. Interesting…The lunch combo sold out at the site my partner was at, though, so who knows.

We’re doing this again on Thursday, so we’ll see how it does. I’ll be at a smaller hospital in a very different neighborhood, so I’m curious to see the response.

<strong>Are you good at selling stuff? What do you do when you can’t sleep?