2010 -- Full of New Beginnings! :)

So the new year has finally started! I've been waiting for this one for awhile and I'm excited that it's finally here :)

The New Year started off with a bang as Mumsy and I were in Paris! We had an awesome time, leaving the day after Christmas and staying til the 2nd of January! It was cold but we bundled up and hit the streets of Paris and even spent New Years Eve with a bottle of chanpagne at the Eiffel Tower!! So all in all it was a super awesome week! AND we even got bumped up to Business Class on the flight home!

Ready for the New Year!
Mumsy and I and Mona!!

So we got back Saturday night and Sunday morning I went to LA to see Megan and Evgeniya and Andrew (Megan's brother) and have breakfast for Evgeniya's birthday, then Megy and I drove back up to Vallejo and Monday was back to class from 8-5 (including a 3 hour anatomy cadaver lab). Our classes this semester are Cardio, Respiratory, and Renal, starting with Cardio (which we have an exam on a week from today--eek!).

Getting ready for anatomy lab! (OK so I don't acutally where my white coat to lab--EW--but Megy wanted me to put it on for the picture :)

Tuesday Megy left :( and since then it's been back to the grind. We have much more frequent anatomy labs than we did last semester (when we did the back in August then that was it for the entire semester). Last week we opened the chest and took out the lungs and this week was the heart. Our cadaver is especially interesting for two reasons. One, he has a second vena cava on the left side (normally you just have one on the right side to drain blood from the head and upper extremities), as well as several other extra veins in other locations. In 11 years our anatomy lab instructor has only seen one other left vena cava and even then it wasn't as large as the one that our cadaver has......so our experience has been more watching a dissection of the heart and thorax, rather than doing it ourselves so that we don't mess anything up, as well as lots of photography by the doctors and anatomists. So its actually really neat. The other interesting thing about our cadaver is that he died of B-cell lymphoma and has a huge tumor on his chest that goes down through the ribs, pressing on the lungs, as well as other smaller tumors throughout his mediastinum (and probably other places too, once we dissect more). So anatomy has been really neat. We also have started to have more standardized patient encounters. Today, as a team-based learning group, we took a history and physical of a standardized patient that we're going to be seeing all semester that we can already see is going to soon present with hypertension, related to what we are studying (he doesn't acutally have hypertension that we know of, just playing a role for us to start practicing on).

In terms of non-school stuff, this has been a fun weekend....Friday night was a PJ party (thrown by the same house who had an Ugly Sweater Party--they're very creative with their party themes) and Saturday was a Winter Gala for the whole school!

At Robins house, getting ready to go to the Gala!The roomies and I (plus our friend Sibyl)!
Mumsy, I put this one up for you....this is our 'all the single ladies; if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it' pose!!! :)

But now its back to hardcore studying (so hardcore today I didn't even come home for dinner!), and training for my upcoming Half-Marathon!

Mumsy and Dad and Unka and Aunt Diane -- can't wait to see you guys this weekend! Now to bed :)

FIRST SEMESTER OF MED SCHOOL -- PASSED!!!!!

I HAVE FINISHED MY FIRST SEMESTER OR MED SCHOOL AND PASSED!!!!!!!!!

Besides that, not a whole lot of excitement ;) After all our blocks, Megan flew in to spend some time with me and meet all my friends and roommates and then drive back down to Southern CA with me!

Our house, all decorated for Christmas!!!
Angela, Nourah, and I before our first Standard Patient Encounter!
Christmas Potluck at our house!!!!
Someone brought a pineapple!
Roommates <3
Opening Christmas presents--my roommates got me a Snuggie!!!!!!

And now I'm home, enjoying time with the fam and relaxing, and getting ready to go to Paris with Mumsy!!!! Helloooooooooo 2010 :)

Study Study Study

The end is almost in sight!!! Two short weeks complete with 10 more lectures, one more lab, three exams and two practicals and I will be done with my first semester of MEDICAL SCHOOL! I can hardly believe it!

Just a few updates/photos of what I've been up to these last few weeks before I go back to notecards and bed!
Since I last posted, my friend Mike and I made "complementary" shirts to run the Mare Island 5K in:
In case you can't quite see, those are pink shirts that say "I'm with Muscly" and "I'm with Jiggly"
....if this whole med school thing didn't work out, I think maybe I should consider a job in a) persuading people to do things they don't really want to (like run in matching pink shirts), or b) elementary school teaching (thanks to my awesome puffy paint skills). But so far the med school thing is working out, and the day after out race was our third mid-block exam which I totally dominated! I think I'm (finally) starting to figure out my study groove :) This third block begins our first actual system: blood. Who knew that it was so complicated or that there are SO MANY TYPES OF ANEMIA OH MY GOODNESS. But anyways, after the midblock almost our whole class went out to a bar in Benicia to celebrate which was pretty fun...here's a picture with 5/8 of my small "team-based learning" group. We are team 1 in group A, so we like to consider ourselves "Team Awesome"....:) Actually the theory of team-based learning is really awesome, I think, and I love it when professors give us complicated cases and we have to, as a team, figure out what to do. I plan to call all these people when I have a complicated case in real life ;) Anyways, here's my team:

After midblock we also had the Turkey Bowl which seemed like a good idea (1st and 2nd year med students playing against each other in a fun game of flag football), but was ended prematurely with a fight.... But at least the "432 Kirkland Express" was there to cheer our class on!(Please note how my roomies all really creatively decorated their numbers and mine is......colored in. Perhaps creativity is not my strong point.)

But after all this excitement, the biggest excitement was by far coming home!! Thanksgiving with the fam and wedding dress shopping on Black Friday was AWESOME and a much-needed getaway :)

Happy Thanksgiving from Huntington Beach!

AH MY BEST FRIEND IS ENGAGED!!!
Time for wedding dress shopping!!!
And it even snowed!!!! AWESOME THANKSGIVING BREAK! :)

Getting back from break means we were slammed with work...and my studying has really kicked into high gear. I've spent so many hours at the library, I've started packing my dinner so that I can just stay and study and eat there and not be bothered with going to my house (a mile away).....SO HARDCORE! But Friday night I got a bit of a reprieve with an ugly sweater party hosted by some of my classmates.... So fun!
Mike and I in our ugly sweaters.....we originally bought them to wear opposite (me in the cute snowflake one and him in the Bill Cosby one), but Angela said that they would be uglier (and thus more appropriate for an Ugly Sweater Party) if we switched. So we did :)

Ugly Sweater Party 2009 -- all Future Doctors of America....

This weekend has been filled with lots of studying (as usual), church-going and....DECORATING FOR CHRISTMAS! Our house is gonna look so awesome, I'm so so excited!!!

Decorating our Charlie Brown Christmas tree....
Stringing lights!
Who needs a boy? My dad taught me how to hammer and hang my own lights :)

That's about all the excitement in my life for now....just a little longer and I'm done, I can't believe it! So exciting! Just gotta get through my first Standardized Patient exam this week (Wednesday), then my exams/OMM practical next week, the Megy comes and we have our holiday potluck and then home sweet home!!! So close!
One last thing, I've been reading though Romans (love it so much) and I stumbled across these two verses on love that I really do, well love!

Love does no harm to its neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.....And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God's love
So awesome :)

BLOCK 2 -- Passed :)

So clearly my goal of blogging every week is failing as school gets busier and busier... But in other news: I passed all my Block 2 exams!!! Sooooo happy and thankful. I know that someday I will fail a test or several...I just don't want it to be yet!

The primary occupation of my days these past three weeks has been studying and training for my half-marathon that was this past Sunday in Florida....I have made time for some fun non-studying activities... :)

Pumpkin carving with my roommates...
and going to Halloween parties with my roommates!

In addition to those fun things, my biggest news of late definitely is a) PASSING MY BLOCK EXAMS and b) flying to Florida to run a half-marathon/reunion with my college roommates!!!
We had lots of time to relax on the beach before our big race...
..and by the pool :)
and then of course there was the half-marathon!
Which was on the beach! (well right next to it...)
And I finished!!! 2 hours and 13 minutes -- 7 minutes faster than the one I ran in May!!!

All in all it was an amazing weekend away with my best friends. And now its back to the study grind (MidBlock THREE on Monday!), then home soon for Thanksgiving!! :)

One last thing, I've been reading through the Psalms and I found one a few weeks ago that I've really been loving (I wrote it on a notecard and put it next to my bed :)) --

"I call as my heart grows faint. Lead me to a rock that is higher than I."

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