It's been a crazy last two weeks - with exams coming up and the Red Sox winning game 6 of the ALCS + fun at Harrah's + a ridiculous last touchdown at the LSU game on my birthday + my new pet betta  (hopefully a segway pet to a Schnorkie puppy).

I've otherwise lived at school, studying with Jenna.  Tuesday I took a break in the afternoon to spend time with an internist in the city and do rounds at the hospital.  I met up with him at the LTAC near the hospital, and the only parking spot left said "DOCTOR" on it.  So I parked there.  And giggled about it.  I got to palpate an enormous enlarged spleen and feel a woman's atrial fibrillation and chatted with a bunch of patients.

Today I went to a lunchtime session on how to intubate, which was kind of cool and possibly a disaster.  Fortunately, I also learned that oxygenating a patient before intubation puts their O2 at 100% so there are actually a good 2-3 minutes in which to get the tube in.

Sweet.

...a question posed by a internal medicine physician last week to a bunch of bright-eyed bushy-tailed first year students shouting out answers.

"cancer"

"heart disease"

"Chuck Norris!"

sweeeeeet.


Since last week was the first week of block 2, we've all been a little less intense - mostly to catch up on gossip from the first block party.  There was a girls vs. guys football game in the making, so I went to practice Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, to learn how to play football for the first time.  Friday night we had a pasta party and decorated t-shirts for the big game.   Part of the surprise involved ironing on a giant photo of Coach Brian's head onto the front of our shirts - great reaction from him when he saw us the next day.

Part of the strategy for winning on Saturday was for me to fake an injury to make the guys feel bad about playing too aggressively.  I ended up trying to tackle on of the guys and falling and slamming the back of my head - and my team thought I was faking it.  Oops.

Still sore, today, but all in all had a highly entertaining weekend.  I tried to get back into studying on Sunday but did two loads of laundry and washed my car instead.  Yesterday I watched the Pats beat the Bengals.  I'm going to get cracking on the books today because the Red Sox are playing their first game in the playoffs tomorrow.

Again.  No joke.  And always the day before an exam.

Yesterday morning I woke up early on my own (9 am!) and went stepped outside only to realize the weather here is finally fantastic and decided to go for a 2 mile run around the park.  Must be weekly soccer practice - but I impressed myself by making the loop around without stopping.  I cooked up some bacon for lunch - probably the fattiest bacon I've ever seen (ie. white with red stripes instead of red with white stripes) and ended up with a pan full of bacon grease.  What to do?  Oh yeah, deep-fry two eggs.  Yum.

I planted myself in a chair outside on the front porch after lunch and read Cell Bio.  And then the cable got cut again.  This time I made sure to go hunt down the cable guy before he left so it wasn't a 2 hour catastrophe again.

I'm not sure why our professor told us to focus on studying anatomy and just take a day for cell, but I was up until 2:30 this morning trying to differentiate diseases that make the skin just fall off.  Gross.  I was so tired after the exam this morning I kept walking the wrong way in the parking garage looking for the car.  Don't know what I'd do without my roommates.

So Yiou's written her first blog post www.runningwithscalpels.com.  Not sure where the scalpel's come into play, but theres definitely a lot about running.

so my landlord says.  Somehow their installation of a satellite dish downstairs disconnected our cable.  I got home from studying at school this afternoon to find we had no internet.  Karen and I had a minor fit - she was on the phone with the cable company - and our landlord was telling us how she tells that she's a lawyer or pediatrician or gynecologist to get them to come out sooner.  (Determination: unsuccessful)

Spent most of the morning and afternoon at school - wasted an entire hour to a disastrous attempt at getting the super SmartBoard/cadaver pictures up.  I ended up just reading for awhile, taking a detour to purchase some noise-canceling headphones, before going home and having a conniption over the cable.

on life, blogging, and especially the anatomy of the upper limb, back and posterior neck.

First block of exams are next week so pretty much I've been spending all my evenings in the study rooms on campus.  I study better in a big white box as opposed to my house or the library where people are constantly moving around me.  Plus we've figured out how to study anatomy on cadavers without having to get stinky in lab - SmartBoards and a CD-ROM with cadaver pictures.  Sweet!

Cutaneous innervation of the arm, forearm, and had by peripheral nerves.  I wasn't very good at this one yet, so I ended up drawing the regions and labeling the nerves on my left arm.  Then I went to the gym at the undergrad campus and stopped between sets to stare at the lines on my arm.  Undergrad kids might think I'm crazy, but hey, I know my innervations now.

Yesterday I spent the morning in the office with a breast surgeon seeing patients, so that was a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, Tropical Storm Humberto was also rolling through north of the city a bit so it was pouring almost all day.  I can't even stay dry with rain boots and a trench coat.  (Umbrellas are apparently moot down here because it's always windy during the storm.)

This weekend end promises to be über boring because all the kids are holed up somewhere studying.  I had a long day of class and practice exams and standardized patients so I was looking forward to soccer this afternoon.  We ad to rove around looking for an available field since IM sports have started up for the undergrads.  At one point we got kicked off a field by the marching band.  (Find the dude from last week with the shirt that read "I drove my chevy to the levee but the levee was gone" and it'd be like a modified version of that Don McLean song.)  We finally found a muddy field in from of the zoo and set up cones there.  I made a lame attempt at slide tackling someone and slipped in the mud, then subsequently got mauled by two guys so now I have a number of large hematomas on my lower limbs.  (Bruises on my legs, duh.)

Now I'm vegging out watching the Red Sox/Yankees game on ESPN (Red Sox are up 4, top of the 5th) and thinking about dinner and maybe reading a bit. 

After another cathartic Friday night involving Pootie Tang, late night volleyball at Tucker's, duct tape, and 5am calls from SF, Karen and I still managed to get up at a reasonable hour to drive up north to visit Amelia on her farm and celebrate her sister's twenty-first birthday.

It was a straight shot across the Causeway (only the longest bridge in the world) and following the highway for 60 miles, but well worth the drive.  Amelia's mom served up my first real taste of jambalaya, plus red beans and rice.  Apparently the trick to making everything good is to add a little bit of Tony's seasoning to it.

Kittens!  Three litters, ten kittens, and one pregnant calico.  We wanted to take one home (the yellow bobtail at the top of the photo) but I have no idea what to do with a cat and Dustyn is allergic.

We might have to go back to get our pet fix - there were at least four dogs running around at any given time, including one giant farm mutt that weighed more than me, two toy poodles, a miniature schnauzer.

While we were waiting for others to show up for food, Amelia took us out in her new 3/4-ton pickup for a tour of the farm and around their timber lot.  ("Lot" is really a misnomer; this place is so big you have to drive to get anywhere.)  There's a quite a bit of wreckage and fallen trees leftover from the hurricane.  It's interesting, as Amelia points out, that man-made infrastructure is blamed for damage in the city while further north, everyone just takes it in stride since there's no one to blame for the wind damage.

We jumped on a few giant hay bales before heading back to the house to go eat.  Afterwards, we hopped into Dwight (Amelia's old F-250 we used to ride around in up in Boston) and drove to up to see the cows.  Evidently the cows thought it was feeding time because they went a little nuts chasing the truck (with Karen and I, plus Toby the giant dog and Mick the schnauzer, in the truck bed).

In the last 36 hours, I've heard no less than four times that I need to keep an eye on the weather forecast in case a hurricane is headed in my direction.    Evidently the worst part of hurricane season starts up soon and students aren't allowed to stay if we're told to evacuate.
My newest bookmarked site: National Weather Service National Hurricane Center.

After class today, Karen and I went out down the school gym and met up with 30 other kids in our class for a game of soccer.  I"ve never played before (probably should have mentioned that to our team, but oh well.)  It was ridiculously hot out today and sunny.  I'm not used to running around in the humidity, so that was kind of difficult for awhile.  Then it was sprinkling a bit and sunny.  And then there was a huge downpour until I left, which made the game suddenly a lot more fun since everyone was slowing down because of the heat.  The only downside is that water on astroturf is super slippery and I did a fun little backwards somersault after colliding with Tim as we were both going for the ball.  Shoulder hurts a bit.

I went to home to shower and get the formaldehyde smell out of my hair (anatomy lab today was removing vertebrae T6 through T12 from Horace using a chisel).  My anatomy group made dinner plans to bond over something other than body parts at Superior Grill, some Tex-Mex-ish restaurant in a pretty central location.

Found the limited edition Absolut New Orleans I've been looking for (100% of profits go to Gulf Coast charities) - I'm kind of afraid to try it because it's mango + black pepper flavored and that sounds kind of weird to me.  But the bottle is pretty, and that might be all that matters.

Your teachers joke about your stress with references to the sphincter.

This is what I'm learning about in class today.  (Physician suicide, if that's hard to see.)

So on day 6 of medical school, my email finally works.  I've never been so excited to get redundant emails about who wants to go listen to jazz in the French quarter Thursday evening.

I bought a whiteboard for drawing diagrams and studying and such.  I haven't hung it up yet - it's actually thin plastic that can be rolled up and moved so I can use double sided to tape to tack it on the wall of the dining room.  The other fun purchase was the scented whiteboard markers - here's the DNA replication discussion we had (around Karen's picture of a palm tree).