This morning, I went skydiving! On my trip to Arizona, I convinced my family to go. We went to a skydiving place in Casa Grande, about 40 miles south of Phoenix. Skydiving has been on my bucket list for a while, and I had been itching to finally do this since the beginning of summer.
It was a tandem skydive, which meant that an instructor was attached to my back for the jump, so I didn’t have to do much but jump. I was really excited and was ready to go after getting strapped into a harness.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I climbed into the small airplane. Up we went, high into the clouds. I think the scariest part was all the build-up in the plane ride up there. I must have had about a million butterflies in my stomach.
It took a while for us to get up high enough (over two miles above ground), but then it was go time. No turning back now.
My heart was pumping really fast. The door opened and I could feel the strong winds pushing against my body. One leg over, and then the other. Within seconds, I was off the plane and in free fall at over 120 mph.
My stomach turned during the initial drop, but it was pretty smooth sailing after that. Simply exhilarating :) With my arms out wide, it felt like I was flying. I was soaring across the Arizona sky without a worry in the world.
After about 45 seconds of free fall, my instructor pulled the parachute. I steered around a little bit and we slowly glided down to a landing spot. It felt good to be back on Earth haha.
It was one crazy experience, to say the least, and I’m glad I did it. There’s nothing quite like jumping out of a plane two miles above ground.
Whooooo!
Today was the last day of my summer internship at the Health Plan of San Mateo (HPSM), a local non-profit health plan that offers health coverage and a provider network to San Mateo County’s underserved population.
“At HPSM, we fight for you. To make a difficult process easier. To improve the quality of life for those in our community. We also have a vision, that healthy is for everyone. And we fight to make that possible, for you.”
Before this internship, I was interested in the health care field, but had never really had any actual experience working in a health care setting. My time at the Health Plan of San Mateo has exposed me to the many roles and complexities in health care that I will further explore in my future studies and career. I don’t think I could have asked for better, more helpful, supportive, caring supervisors. That’s a shout-out to you, Daisy and Dr.G!
It has truly been a joy working with them and I value all of their advice for my future health career and life in general. I have learned so much about the practical side of our health care system over the course of my internship, and leave with a newfound appreciation for people at the local level leading the healthy fight.
And I can’t finish without mentioning the people of HPSM- friendly and helpful from the minute I stepped foot in their office. That, more than anything, made my summer so worthwhile. I’m glad to know that our health care system has people like them working in it.
As Dr.G summed up, HPSM is truly “an organization with heart.”
Thanks for everything :)
A couple days ago, I got myself stuck in an elevator for about five minutes. Those five minutes felt like an hour.
There’s three elevators in the building where I’m interning. Two of them are regular ones for everyone to use and the other is a freight elevator. I’m not even sure I pushed the button on the freight elevator or not. It’s kind of blur, but the door to it opened.
At that point, it felt kind of strange, but I stepped in it anyway because I thought I had pushed the button for the regular elevators, so I reasoned that maybe the freight elevator had changed to normal use.
Well, once I got in and the door closed, I went to push the first floor button. But the elevator didn’t move. I frantically pushed the button again ten times and several other floors’ buttons too. Commence panic.
I started to freak out a little bit. I mean, this was the stuff that only happened in TV shows and movies… only it was real now. The elevator is actually rather big and could probably fit ten comfortably, but at that moment, it felt tiny. I began thinking thoughts like “What if know one finds me?” and “When will they notice I’m gone?”
All of a sudden the elevator sprung into action and moved all the way down to the first floor. But the door didn’t open. More frantic button pushing to no avail. I waited another minute or so and then the elevator started to move up. Back to the fifth floor it went, and the door finally opened this time! What a relief!
So after a traumatic elevator ride, I ended up right where I started.
Photo by Robert S. Donovan
Yesterday, I locked my car key in the trunk as I was just about to leave work to drive home.
The night before, my laptop crashed. All my files, photos, and basically everything I’ve written the past few years was in jeopardy. I had to pay nearly$200 to recover the data and replace the hard drive.
It seemed like “everything just sucks,” and I wanted to just bury my head in the couch and leave Earth for a while. A string of suck.
Ugh.