Exam Week III

Really? This is the third time around? Seriously? It doesn't feel like I've been here long enough to warrant this. I have learned a few things though.
1) snow is really pretty.
2) snow is also a righteous pain in the ass.
3) there's always the same three to five guys at the Sea Star Market, every morning, just shooting the shit.
4) Irish punk = awesome.
5) pretty much anything can be made better by hanging out with the husband, playing with Matt's babies, or going upstairs and seeing Nancy in the clinic. If she has babies around, she'll let me play with them.
6) In the winter, when you lose power, just stick all of your food out on the porch. It's only 20 degrees out there anyway.

On a roll

This morning, I managed to fall down about twelve icy stairs, not get to the bank, not get my biochem reading done, and not get to the gym, all before 10 am. I am such an overachiever. Luckily the clinic at school was open so I could get checked out, and yelled at for not having put salt/sand on my stairs.

Gym may occur later today. Bank? Probably not.

Ouch.

One of my teachers actually said this...

"Just as an aside, a bit of proselytizing here – most of my research is focused
on the spine, spine pain and the anatomy of the spine as it relates to pain. But we’re also involved in doing this type of thing which is targeted dissections and then researching ways of getting them presented so they facilitate learning. If you’re interested in something like that, I’d be interested in talking to you. Some of the criteria for doing it – it’s greatly facilitated if you’ve got wicked OCD and it’s even better yet if you’re
somewhat bipolar. So, if you meet either of those 2 criteria, the thing to do is go off your medication for about a week, stay up all night and then have one of those cinnamon buns up here and a big cup of coffee. Then come and see me. I can really identify with people in that state."
Dr. W

Winter

Today's high temperature was 22 degrees F. That was the high. It's 8 degrees F right now. You can imagine what this is doing to my asthmatic lungs, even with careful administration of the appropriate medication at the appropriate time.

I'm calling the doctor tomorrow. I'm a bad patient. I haven't set us up with a doctor yet, and we've been here nearly six months...

Public Service Announcement

Don't go to medical school. I hear business school is really awesome. You get to take wine tasting classes. Granted, I like med school in general but right now, I hate it. It's exhausting and loads of work and you never catch up.

Flash Back

This fall, I've been helping out with the application process. That is, I've been showing interviewees the campus, letting potential students follow me around for half a day, answering emails and questions, etc. Most of the time it's fun. Right now, though, we're in the middle of a particularly rigorous block. Something about trying to learn all of the internal organs while still taking six other difficult classes makes for some pretty stressed students. As such, everyone in my class, even the kids who are super smart and have their stuff totally together, are starting to get sort of strange, manic, and loopy. This became most evident when a fellow student and I were giving a tour of the campus and spent five minutes showing the interviewees the fish tank.

Granted, it's a neat fish tank. I stop there at least once a day to look at the gorgeous fish that the marine science majors (undergrads) work with. They are a nice respite in an otherwise hectic experience. This is an experience, though, that I would not have understood a year ago. Had some med student spent five minutes showing me the fish tank, I would have thought they were bonkers. And maybe we are. In a year's time, maybe these same applicants will be doing something similar as a first year med student. They'll suddenly realize that they've spent five minutes at a fish tank or a grove of trees. And then they will understand.

Blues

It's four o clock in the afternoon and it's getting dark. I'm stressed about upcoming exams, and worried that no one likes me. Partially, it's because I don't fit in with the "cool" kids in our class. Granted, they aren't really the "cool" kids. They're really just the kids who are fresh out of college and all live together. It's slightly strange to be around them. They're really nice, but they're in a different place in their lives than I am.

Basically, I have the blues and biochem is kicking my ass. That and histo. And embryo. And everything else.

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.