Ketch-up: The School Thing

So it has been forever since I've blogged. I think that is the hard thing about blogging--once you get off, it's hard to catch-up. But since I went home recently and a bunch of people said they check this, it's worthwhile to write a bit (or a lot).

Hm. Well, I'll start with an update on school things. We've just finished our physiology and pharmacology course, which was probably our hardest course yet because of the vastness and intricacies of everything, though it still amazes at all of things we've learned this year and that I don't still remember. In physiology we learned many of the major systems of the body--nervous, muskuloskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, GI, and other things like acid-base balance, toxicity, and a WHOLE bunch of drugs (how they work, what they do to the body (pharmacodynamics) and what the body does to the drug (pharmacokinetics...things like dosing, absorption and elimination, how the docs figure out how much drug to give you)). I guess we're really becoming doctors? I still can't put much clinical knowledge to this stuff, but it's interesting for sure. We've done a variety of interesting labs--doing pig surgery, collecting our own urine and doing experiments on that, measuring our lung capacities. By the way, being in pig surgery--we got to see and FEEL a beating, LIVE pig heart after we did our experiments. We also got to see and feel after it went into atrial and ventricular fibrillation which is when the heart's electrical activity goes crazy and from which people can die from. It was such a COOL UNIQUE experience, despite the detriment to the (anethesized) pig. I don't think I'll forget that!
Being in med school, I don't think I've ever quite studied so hard in my life in such a sustained fashion. It's been tough the past 3 months or so--but thankfully we made it in one piece (it seems, barely) to spring break, served as a much needed rest and recoop AND see my family which I hadn't seen for 3 months. Seriously, it was evident we all needed a break because even the professors were starting to feed off the class' stress.
A detour on spring break--I didn't do a ton of adventurous things, but I did see my family, a few friends, and got to sleep lots and read some books. The first Saturday the whole family was home, and so us kids went to the Grossology exhibit at the science center and "messed" around there..haha. It was nice to see the grandparents too, and on Tuesday I went with my mom to the Bodies exhibit which was AMAZING. Boy do I wish I remembered more anatomy for all that time we spent learning it. It was very cool to see the dissections, and it brought me way back to the beginning of med school. Sniff sniff. I was fortunate to spend a few days in "retreat" with myself at the beach house where our family always goes that is graciously loaned out by my Great Aunt. It was lovely--no one on the beach, beautiful weather (the first day), time to read, long walks on the beach, think, and pray. I was able to read some of my journal from 1 year ago when I went to China and remember the things I learned there. I also read a book called "The Anatomy of Hope" for our PCM class and a few other things. I came back wishing that we had 1 more week of break, but also refreshed.

Another huge component of the course has been student group research projects. Our group studied the effects of caffeine and sleep deprivation on muscle pain (we used wall sits to induce pain). Kinda interesting seeing that most med students are large consumers of caffeine and are a lot times sleep deprived. We found a few interesting results, but for the most part the whole project was an exercise in learning how clinical research works. There is a lot that goes into it -- project design, getting IRB approval (they make sure your study is ethical and safe, etc), running experiments, analyzing data, and dealing with logistics besides all the teamwork communication stuff. At times it was stressful and took way to much work, but I was defintely proud of our team how things turned out. Actually, I've been very impressed overall with the student presentations--for not being graded people have produced really interesting and quality work. Below is a funny pic we took to try to lighten things up which people appreciated and which make me crack up! This is one of my classmates demonstrating the wall sit position with another guy making sure his knees are at 90 degree angles.

Well--1 more course to go for this FIRST YEAR. I can't believe it's almost over. We're going to be studying immunology, microbiology, and cancer. I'm also taking medical spanish which I think will be very useful, though it's been quite some time since I've taken it. In our Principles of Clinical Medicine course we've been learning about the infant exam, child abuse, informed consent, public health, and will learn about dealing with death and dying among other things. SO MUCH TO LEARN! The fun never stops! Thankfully we'll be done June 15 :)