I'm finishing up my first week at my new job. It's been pretty overwhelming tyring to grasp the enormity of a new hospital system, and trying to figure out my role here. But as I wander the halls and get lost in its far reaches, I remember that I grew up in places like this.

Even though most of my adult life has been spent pursuing liberal arts degrees and working for financial services companies, my whole family has always worked in health care. My dad was a Pharmacology Director, my mom was a research microbiologist, my sister was a nurse. I remember coming to work with my parents and wandering the halls in much the same fashion as I have been this week. I've been avoiding the cafeteria but I remember thinking how I had the same thing at my school as a kid. Lab coats abound (and contrary to what I was told at orientation, it would be pretty easy to swipe some), and everybody else is in scrubs.

I have been wearing a tie all week, which should feel weird but doesn't somehow. I hated wearing a tie when my old job in finance changed its dress code to business formal. After a while I would just wear the same tie every day, loosening it and hanging it, still tied, to the coat hook when I left. But here I've been meeting with lots of people and the tie not ony seems appropriate, but I haven't seen one other man here without one. I'm sure once I start hunkering down and working on building a new site I can revert to more casual garb. I mean, no one's gonna see me in the sub-cellar.

I have an office, the first I've had really (I did have an office for my first job after graduation but I'm not sure how that happened). But it's in Sub-Cellar 1, which more closely matches my previous hospital experience (at the Columbus Children's Hospital I worked in the basement print shop). However, my office has a window; they somehow built this office with two large shaft-way spaces plunging into the ground, providing much-appreciated sunlight down here.

I suspect my parents are enjoying a little told-you-so feeling from my recent return to this world, they always seemed a little put off by my decision to move away from the medical world, and here after many years of resistance I'm back in it, hopefully for a good long while.