Holidays take one

Our first attempt at a holiday far away from our families went quite well. Yeah, we missed our families, but we did well for ourselves. We ate too much, but not as much as we would've had we gone home. We played video games, hung out with people, and basically went about life as if I were not in medical school...aside from the random bit of studying, that is. It was strange to go to school and study, which I did (only because Husband had to work) and then come home and not have to study anymore. Instead, we could do, y'know, other things. Like watch a lot of "Doctor Who" or "Psych."

We're gearing up for the third round of exams (holy shit, right?) and I finally bit the bullet and bought another biochemistry book on the grounds that our teacher isn't teaching me biochemistry, so someone sure has to, and it looks like it's going to be me. Right now, I am surrounded by anatomy texts and biochemistry texts.

Have you ever seen a picture of the gall bladder? They always color it green. I thought this was just a color convention, sort of like how carbon is always black in organic chemistry.

It's not.

So I just did the nuttiest thing that I've done in a while. I cut my hair. Like, a lot. Now, it wasn't super long to begin with; chin length has been the standard for about three years now. For the past month or so, I'd been toying with the idea of shorter hair still. So tonight, I went to the salon, sat in the chair, and watched as my hair got progressively shorter.

I have no idea if I like it. I'm not sure that I'll know for a week or so. It's dramatically different from anything that I've ever had before.

Hopefully I don't look too retarded. Back to studying histology and watching The Daily Show.

And how do you like that the nuttiest thing that I've done in a while is cut my hair?

Five months out

I have officially lived on the east coast for five months. This is a strange feeling, because it both feels like it's been less time and more time. It feels like ages since I've seen some of my family although I know I've gone five months without seeing them before. I think the strangeness has to do with the fact that I'm unable to hop in my car and drive home in two hours. I can, however, do that with Bangor. Let me tell you, I'm not driving to and from Bangor in one day again. That was a lot of driving.

Since I've lived here, I've learned some strange things, interesting things. Many have little or nothing to do with medicine (thank God, a break is good).

1. Lobster roll is essentially a tuna sandwich with lobster instead of tuna. I don't get what's so good about it, but the locals go nuts. Maybe they really like mayonnaise.
2. Aroostock county, otherwise known as the Alabama of New England, is generally referred to as "the county." Apparently everyone but me knows what they're talking about.
3. "The City" refers to New York city. Always. No exceptions. Unless you're in Quebec. Then it might refer to Montreal.
4. There are two New Yorks. New York City is a completely different animal than New York State, something that you'll see rather quickly when talking to people from upstate.
5. Boston is south of where I live, yet people inexplicably say that they're "going up" to Boston. I think it has something to do with trade winds.
6. Part of Maine is called "Downeast." This is not the part of Maine that is furthest southeast. It's actually north. Somehow.
7. Being bilingual here is a good thing, but it's helpful to know French rather than Spanish.
8. Moose regularly cross the highway, to the extent that there are actually "Moose Xing" signs. No, really.
9. When talking about New Jersey, people tend to drop the "New."

Addendum

On the plus side, my school is pass/fail (with the option of a high pass that doesn't really matter too much in the end) and I don't think I actually failed anything. Yet. Last time I managed to high pass three classes; I'm pretty sure I didn't pull that off this time. If I did, we better call hell, cause their pipes? Frozen. Fully completely. That's a good Tragically Hip song...

Post Block Two

They can't put all of us on the five year plan, right? Even if we royally tanked physio?

Suffice it to say that the second block didn't go as well as the first block. Last block, I knew that I had passed everything directly after the test. This block, there are four classes that I know I passed. The other three? Well, everyone thought that they would fail biochem. As far as histology and physiology go, they curve the heck out of histo because everyone fails it. Physio though, that's a new one. Apparently we are not meant to be cardiologists. At least 2/3 of the people that I spoke to today believe that they failed physio. This includes me.

This is in sharp contrast to last block, where I passed everything and high passed three things. This time? I'll be lucky if I pass everything.

On the plus side, there is beer and children trick-or-treating and a snuggly husband who believes that I'm awesome no matter what.

Also, I don't want to be something super duper. I just want to work with crazy people, little people, or old people (psych, peds, geriatrics).

Hello in there

Long time, no blog, I know. It's been busy. We're nearing our second block exam, and this time we have seven classes worth of material to manage. It's exciting. That's one word for it. Anyway, one of the classes I am taking right now is a medical humanities class. We learn how to use medical instruments, discuss ethics and philosophy, and generally have a good time. It's taught by a minister who happens to have a medical degree and a wicked sense of humor. All in all, it's an excellent respite from our other six classes. Anyway, tomorrow we have a reflection session. We're all supposed to write (or draw, sing, etc) something that expresses how our medical education has changed us, or how some life event has impacted us. Or something like that. It's all incredibly vague and as such, none of us had started until today. We're lame like that. I kind of liked what I wrote, though. It's a little disjointed, perhaps, but that's how I think and write.
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My medical education has been like facing an extremely well functioning fire hose and trying to drink all of the water in at once. It’s not going to work, clearly. My mouth is not big enough, stretchy enough, and even if it was, my body is not willing to accept such a volume of fluid in one sitting. Instead of water, though, I am faced with a seemingly endless stream of information. I am certain that I can never know all of it, but I’m going to try anyway. Every day, I go to class, open wide, and pray that I don’t miss anything too crucial (aorta? What’s an aorta?). In the end, there’s an awful lot of minutiae to sort through, very little of which is actually important. It is unlikely that I will need to remember the various stages of blood cell development. Here I am, though, cramming it into my head as if it were the meaning of life and I the only person who had gotten the message. If only my brain were big enough, stretchy enough. No, instead of being able to remember the types of adrenergic receptors, I am stuck with the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” At least it’s not the entire musical catalogue of Monty Python…oh wait. It is. Damn.

It is a precarious balance, this learning of information. We are taking seven classes, all of which are tested or graded in some manner. Some of them are easier than others, but in the end we need to pass them all. This is complicated by the fact that some classes are forgotten until the week before exams. I know I did this with Embryology last block. Unfortunately for me, it worked out really, really well. There are only so many times this will work. We’re going to see if it works with Biochemistry this time around. I am hopeful.

We don’t need to know every last little detail, but I would like to. Sometimes I joke that it would be neat to have a USB port in my head. I could simply stick in a little portable hard drive and download all of the applicable information. This isn’t so much a joke, though, as it is an honest to goodness desire. I want this USB port in my head. Until then, though, I’m going to have to face down this water hose.

Excitement

In other news, school is going and my parents are coming to visit for a week. I haven't seen them since June 13th. This is a long time for me.

How Myspace changed my life

At some point a few years ago, I got a MySpace profile. I think I was bored. I probably wanted to see if I could stalk some kids that I went to high school with. Seriously, that's about all the thought I put into it. I found a few people that I knew, and found plenty of others to mock. I never though that getting a MySpace profile would change my life in any appreciable way.

And then it did.

I'm adopted. I've got a biological family floating around out there. They are presumably doing the things that come along with living: eating dinner, making car payments, fighting with one another, and having good times together. Although I probably wasn't supposed to know anything about them, my foster mother slipped up and told my mother a bunch of identifying things about them. Y'know, things like names, occupation, home town. Things that i certainly wasn't supposed to know, given that my adoption was among the last closed adoptions to take place in Oregon. I've even got the amended birth certificate that lists my mom and dad as my birth parents, although they certainly had nothing to do with my actual genesis as a human being. My mom also told me that I could seek out my birth family when I turned 21. Maybe they'd want to see me, maybe they wouldn't. There was no harm in trying; the worst thing they could do was say "no." The age of 21 came and went without me doing anything of the kind. I changed my mind about what I wanted to be when I grew up, and eerily enough, I chose an occupation that many people in my birth family favored. Creepy.

Fast forward to this October. I was bored and poking around on MySpace. There wasn't much interesting to see. Most of the people I know from Ferndale are pretty boring (with the exception of you, Stef). I was so achingly bored that my mind was running around in circles, thinking of things to search for. I looked up one of Chris' ex-girlfriends. She had her profile set to "private." What fun is that? I searched for the girls that I had really hated in high school, only to discover that i still didn't like them. Finally, it dawned on me. I knew that I had a brother out there. I knew his name. Maybe he had a MySpace profile. I typed in his name, pressed "search" and was confronted with a male who could only be one person. Yes, he was my brother. I stared at his profile picture for hours. It was like I had seen him before. After a few days of obsessively looking at his profile picture, I took the plunge. I contacted him. Through MySpace. In the lamest way possible. I told him, via a comment on his comment page, that I liked his hat. Thus, an awkward relationship was born. We exchanged emails and instant messages for two months, getting to know each other better. Apparently, both he and his sister are in medical school. They both went to Ivy League schools. They both claimed to remember me. Creepy.

Finally, it happened. Last night, Chris and I drove down to Portland to have dinner with this guy. There are no words that can fully describe this experience, but it was sort of like a blind date with more baggage. We effectively didn't know each other, and yet we had quite a history. I disappeared from his life when he was seven years old. He remembers me coming home from the hospital as a new born. I have some really vague memories of him as a little boy. It was surreal.

And that is how MySpace changed my life.

Bone Box

The second block is upon us. We're still doing all of the same subjects (histo, embryo, physio, anatomy, OPP, EOM) and now we've added biochem. Clearly, we didn't have enough to do. Clearly. We've moved on from the brachial plexus to its evil stepsister the lumbosacral plexus.

Oh, and I have a femur. In my house. That's not mine. That is all.

Geologic time

Someone informed me that 25 years is the smallest unit of time that geologists will use (i.e. a quarter of a century). I don't know if this is true, and I am far too lazy to look it up. I kind of hope it's true though, just because it's interesting. At any rate, today my age can be measured in geologic time.

Happy Birthday to me. Twenty-five seems really old, but I know it isn't. Maybe it's just that I never thought about actually getting here until now. One thing is for certain. Time goes quickly. It feels like just yesterday that I was doing really silly Shakespearean plays with my friends and watching silly shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My how things change.
I have biochem (ick) and a preceptorship at a substance abuse clinic (yay!).

Nurse Ninjas

Most nurses are ninjas, at least when it comes to respiratory illnesses. I have chronic asthma, which I have had since childhood. As such, I am normally quite skilled at managing it and rarely have symptoms. When I do have symptoms, it's usually due to upper respiratory infections or other illnesses. Currently, I have such an illness. Yesterday, I went to the school clinic to get a refill on my albuterol (I know, I know, I shouldn't have even let it run that low) and to have the nurse practitioner listen to my lungs to make sure I wasn't dying. I walk in and she's talking to a drug rep, but the RN is available. I basically say, "Hi," and before I can get anything else out, the RN has whisked me back to a room and is taking my vitals, listening to my chest, etc. It's like she had a weird nurse spide-y sense when it comes to asthma. It was quite remarkable.

I've had that happen before. Once, the nurse did it over the phone and demanded that I be driven to the clinic within the hour.

I don't know how they do it. Freakin' ninjas, I tells ya.

Post Block One Fortunately/Unfortunately Game

It's time for another game of fortunately/unfortunately.
Fortunately, I seem to have survived the block exam.
Unfortunately, with regards to histology, this seems to be based upon a technicality.
Fortunately, I am willing to accept that technicality as a "pass."
Unfortunately, this means my histo barrier is pretty weak.
Fortunately, I was not in the group in my class that had the upper respiratory infection during exam week.
Unfortunately, I have it now.

Post Exam Weekend

I have officially survived my first exam week. I'm a little thrilled, really. Every day was hard, no doubt, but I feel pretty good about how I did on my exams. I am pretty sure I passed everything, and there is a slight chance that I high passed a few things. That wasn't my goal this first exam cycle. My goal was to get my bearings, figure out what works and what doesn't, and then apply it to future exam cycles to do better and to use my time more effectively.

Also, this weekend has been awesome. I've done nothing school related, except for a memorial service for our body donors. The service was nice and respectful, except for the MSII that was wearing a mini skirt that was just barely longer than her short white coat.

I think I may be getting the upper respiratory thingie that's going around in my class. I am happy to have had it miss exam week, but I feel like crap right now and that's horrible. I wanted to go to church today, for the first time in a month or so. I feel gross though, so I may have to go next weekend. I'm sitting here with a glass of water and seeing if I feel better. Mostly, though, my church has a lot of elderly folks and I don't want to get them sick.

Either way, today I do have to do a little bit of work to prepare for classes tomorrow. I think I'm ready to move forward.

Sleep deprivation

This week has been, and will be, an exercise in sleep deprivation. The goal is to sleep just enough to function properly and learn things but not so much as to lose a lot of time to it. Time spent sleeping is valuable and could be used to study. Granted, I have been sleeping about six hours a night, which isn't horrible. It's also not good. I'm a gal that likes massive amounts of sleep, usually like eight or ten hours.

Oh, next week is exam week. That may help explain things. I have a block exam on Friday, Sept. 12th. Prior to that, I have an OPP practical exam on Tuesday, a Histology lab exam on Wednesday, and an Anatomy lab exam on Thursday. It sounds like a lot, and it is. There's a lot to know, although I feel pretty ok about OPP. OPP is a very active class. You are doing things to patients, like soft tissue manipulation and range of motion exams. As such, it's a little easier to learn this stuff. Anatomy is less active, but you can kind of multi-task in the lab by studying for the practical portion and then making sure you think about stuff that might come up in the written. This can be done in Histology too, so as far as those classes go, I feel ok.

Physiology is just a more in-depth version of the physio and cell bio classes I took in undergrad. I can spend some time with the notes, internet, and book and get it.

Embryology is horrible. I mean, it's interesting. It's just so complicated. Once you get to like day nine or ten, it's completely obtuse and you have to have a really good sense of what happens visually, since there's so much folding around that occurs.

Tomorrow, we welcome tropical storm Hannah to the northeast.

Forgetting school

Every now and then, it's necessary to take a day and forget that you're in medical school. Yesterday was one such day. I woke up leisurely, had a lovely brunch with my husband, went to an art show on the coast, and had a wonderful dinner with friends.

So it wasn't a complete success. I kept trying to remember the muscles in the extensor compartment of the forearm, as well as the muscles of the thenar and hypothenar eminences of the hand. Also, I kept finding bony landmarks on my husband. It was weird. Even on play days, you're never really away from it.

The downside, of course, is that yesterday is gone, and now even though my husband has today off and I theoretically have no classes, I am going to go study at school. All day.

Oh yeah, and we're less than two weeks away from our first block exam. Not that I'm stressed or anything.