Midblock 2 -- Passed :)

So it keeps getting more and more intense and more busy and all of it! But so far, I'm surviving and even passing! :)

Last weekend/this week was super stressful and busy. I feel like literally all I did was study...starting ALL day last Saturday through late Thursday night, in preparation for my Fundamentals midblock on Friday on Pharmacology (80+ drugs to memorize), Immunology (as it is, a lot harder/not as interesting as one may expect), Cell Injury and Death, and Cancer. It was a beast of information. In addition to memorizing all the drugs, I also had 75 pages of objectives to know and understand. All this to make the point....it was a very hard test. And it only is going to get harder! So Friday was my test. I passed but let me just say, I would not bet my patients' lives on some of those answers. I think I'm gonna be constantly busting out my Physician's Desk Reference :) After the test we had a class on Jurisprudence (read: all about getting sued :() and then I went on a NINE MILE RUN because I had a lot of stress to release...and I'm training for the half-marathon in Fort Lauderdale next month with my college roommates!!! I'm SOOOOOOO excited :) Friday after my run, my roommates and I went grocery shopping (and drove through Jack-In-The-Box for a Pumpkin Pie Shake to celebrate the test being over -- yummy!) because that night we went to a potluck with some other students and second-years on the island. It was super yummy, with lots of good Asian food. So while we were there, a group was getting ready to go into SF to go dancing at some club and convinced me to go! So I called another friend and convinced her to come with me (Angela didn't want to come and Caitlin's boyfriend was in town and Nourah has a sprained ankle) and we all went out into the city! It was so much fun, though my feet/legs are still recovering from the studying-deep-vein-thrombosis/running/dancing combination.

Dancing Medical Students.

So Saturday I woke up and my roommates made a pancake breakfast and then we did a deep house cleaning which was good, then I went with another group of friends to Sushi in Benecia then into SF again to do the tourist-y things because my friend Mike is from Colorado and had never been!

Very excited about going into SF again!
Driving down Lombard St!!
The group of us in SF :)
And of course we had to go to Ghirardelli!
We were very successful with the group shots. From left: Alison, Mike, Josh, me, and T. Future Doctors of America!!
And of course Alison and I had to take a picture with Barack and Michell. In our crab hats.

So this weekend has been super fun and relaxing...but tomorrow is back to school and study-mode again, with Blocks in 2 weeks! :/ Even though I think that in some ways our midblocks are harder because it seems like we end up with 4 weeks worth of information on them, and only 2 weeks of information to know for block exams. Thats just for Fundamentals though. For OMM and Doctoring, we're only tested at every block so we have 6 weeks of information to know, but we have less lectures in those classes so its not as bad.

That's all for now, which is good because right now, life is good :)

Back to The Grind...

Well, Fall Break is sadly over. It was an amazing ten-day break visiting Megan in DC, Margaret and family in DC, and even having some of my girlfriends from Saint Peter's take the bus down to DC to visit me!! So it was an amazing and relaxing time away!

In front of the Louisville Slugger!!
Marie, Margaret's ADORABLE daughter.
In Charleston, West Virginia. Megy had never been to Cracker Barrel!
Hanging out with the President's at the Smithsonian
And with the Washington family at Mount Vernon...
....and some soldiers.
Lunch at the Mount Vernon Inn. One of my favorite pictures of the trip.
And Jo and Mae came to visit!

All in all, it was a great trip. And now life is back to hardcore studying, especially since we have another mid-block exam next Friday. These days we're learning about cell injury/inflammation/and the drugs that go along with treating that. Interesting but a lot to learn.... Ok, thats all for now!

Oh, except one passage from the book I just finished reading, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: "My friend Josh Shipp is one of the greatest communicators I've heard. He's only in his twenties but speaks around the country at high schools and is often a guest on MTV. Kids love him because he is funny and direct. Josh grew up in more than twenty foster homes, never knowing his real parents. And yet he is incredibly successful. I asked Josh why he's so healthy, so emotionally stable, considering his childhood. Josh told me something I'll never forget. He said, 'Don, when something hard happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get better, or better. I chose to get better. It's made all the difference."

[I wrote this first part while at the Minneapolis airport on Friday morning]

This has a been a hard week to focus. With Block 1 successful behind me, and only three days of classes between me and FALL BREAK, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in class and listen to hours of immunology lectures (which, consequently, were not as interesting as one might think. Until we began to talk about vaccines, and how there is absolutely no proven causation between getting vaccinated and developing autism. There is, however, proven causation between not getting vaccinated and dying from highly preventable diseases).

This weekend was fun (and LONg – three days, thanks to Yom Kippur). Saturday, Angela, Caitlin, her boyfriend Aaron, and their friend Josh, all went into San Fran to Chinatown and got real Chinese food and walked around Chinatown and Union Square. So that was fun. Sunday I went to church, did some studying, and hung out with my roommates…Monday was more of the same, then Tuesday-Thursday we had Immunology classes in Fundamentals, learned how to do structural exams in OMM, and got to practice looking in eyes, ears, noses, throats, listening to the heart rate, and checking blood pressure and pulse, thanks to our recently-arrived medical equipment in doctoring! So that’s been really fun (minus people who don’t clean their ears enough….ewwww) to really be able to practice and know what we’re looking at, like REAL doctors!

Today the excitement was FLYING TO DC TO SEE MEGAN! (I’m currently sitting in the Minneapolis airport getting ready to board my flight). I got a ride from my friends Josh and Mike (in exchange for In’N’Out…Mike’s from Colorado so he had only had it ONCE and Josh is from Washington and HAD NEVER HAD IN’N’OUT…so sad!) and only had to wait two hours for my midnight flight to Mineapolis.

My friend Josh from Washington who had NEVER BEEN TO IN'N'OUT

I always take these redeyes and I forget until I’m at the airport/on the flight exactly how miserable they are… Three hours is not enough time to fall asleep, let alone get good sleep! I fell asleep before we took off and was sleeping when the pilot (who specifically said he was gonna stay off the PA to let us sleep!) comes BOOMING over the PA telling the flight attendants to prepare for take-off. I mean I know he has to tell them, but he jolted me out of the little, (relatively) peaceful sleep I was getting. So I try to go back to sleep and then 15 or so minutes later the stewardess comes on to tell us about every possible drink selection, what food we can buy, or how we can donate money to help them raise money for breast cancer. And then proceeded to TURN THE LIGHTS ON. I wanted to be like HAVE YOU NEVER WORKED A REDEYE BEFORE?!? DON’T COME ON THE PA, ESPECIALLY TO TELL US ABOUT THE COFFEE AND OTHER NONSENSE THAT NO ONE IS INTERESTED IN, AND DEFINTELY DO NOT TURN ALL THE LIGHTS ON TO SERVE THE DRINKS. I was so unamused. But now I’m in Minneapolis, so its ok.

Ok, back to today. I landed safely in DC, Megy picked me up, and we started the ten-hour drive to LOUISVILLE, Kentucky. About an hour into the drive, traffic STOPPED and we were parked on the highway thanks to an overturned tractor-trailer. But we used the time for me to try out my medical equipment and take Megy's blood pressure, make friends with a tucker, and take a little nap.

After traffic started moving again we stopped at Chick-fil-A where they have a costume contest for Halloween...and one of the catagories was BEST BIBLE CHARACTER! I could've won for the 10 years in a row I that I was Queen Esther or Pharaoh's daughter... Finally, around 11pm, we arrived at Margaret's ADORABLE house in Louisville... And woke up early the next morning for the Highlands 5K race!

Such beasts! So we ran the race, then showered and went to a local farm (acutally in Southern Indiana) where we got to go apple and pumpkin picking, and wine tasting! It was such a fun day!!!

Margaret and her adorable daughter Marie...we had so much fun with them and Margaret's husband Paul!

It was SUCH a fun and relaxing weekend. After hanging out at the farm, we went out to dinner at this really neat restaurant/bar/art museum/hotel in downtown Louisville. Sunday morning we went to mass at this beautiful church in downtown Louisville, then Megan and I hung out in downtown Louisville and went book shopping, then we all went to dinner with Margarets parents in the Louisville suburbs...

I have lots more pictures to post but thats all for now; time for bed on the east coast!!! Love you all <3