Tales of a Brown-Haired Freak

What's a good way to celebrate the end of second term? How about with the Best. Dive. Ever? i thought so too.

Okay, it probably wasn't the best dive in the history of diving, and it may or may not have been the best dive I've ever been on, but it was still pretty damn good.

M was feeling a bit delicate this morning (to say the least), but her dive package was about to expire so she transferred the last one to me - free dive = woo! It ended up being just me and a pack of polish sailors (5, who had sailed here with 15 of their friends, all male, on a tiny boat. That's right - 2 weeks + all guys + hetero = crazy. But they were nice enough). Anyway, visibility was decent, Shark Reef was positively teeming with life, and there was a nice little current that ensured that I got to see as much as possible for minimal effort.

The highlight of the dive was definitely the small army of sea turtles that were hanging out on the reef, doing important turtle things. It seemed like we'd barely lose sight of one that another would wander over to say hello! There were also a couple of ginormous sting rays, a bunch of porcupine (adult puffer) fish (according to the divemaster, they're really good eating), and a few giant (a couple of feet in size) rainbow-hued angelfish that I want to take home and keep in my bathtub.

Now I'm home and vaguely considering reviewing for BSCE, but I'll probably just put on House instead.

You want a piece of me, neuro? Huh? You think you can take me on? Well I'm not afraid of you. I'll beat you with one hand tied behind my back. Hell, I'll take you on with one hand tied *and* blindfolded! I'm just that awesome.

You think you're so tough, with your corpus callosums (callosi?) and your epilepsy and you rat sexual maturation tables? You think you scare me with your frontal lobotomies and your conotoxins? I don't care! I'll beat you so bad they'll be scaling you down for the next three terms! I'll beat you, and your friends too. That's right BSCE1, you can run home right now and cry to your mom, 'cause I'm in town and you're next! (Right after some beach time and an episode or 2 of House).

(*edit* - Rocked the physio too. I'm so fantastic I can't stand myself right now)

Ever worry that perhaps an exam was *too* easy? Me neither (immuno midterm doesn't count). But that's how neuro felt - and it seems to be the consensus. First order questions, straight from the notes. No thinking involved, just regurgitation. Am I happy about it? Of course - it means I might get my A after all. But at the same time, I'm miffed - I spent a lot of time studying for this test (complaining notwithstanding) and I kind of wanted more of a challenge, if not the mess that was the midterm.

But gifthorse, mouth, and all that jazz. At least physio's almost guaranteed to destroy my brain, and BSCE after that should be interesting.

Eight (soul-destroying, mind-numbing) hours later, I finally feel like I'm in a good enough place to put down the physio. Do I know it? Not really, but I can fake it until after neuro, when I'll have time to go over it all again.

Tomorrow is set aside for neuro, which I've pretty much given up on as the powers that be have seen fit to set things up so that the exam will be functionally cumulative, ie. far too much detail to remember for one test where I'm unlike to do better than a high B anyway. And yes, I know that was a run-on sentence. I plead literary license. Of course, the midterm was partially cumulative (is is considered reverse cumulative when they test you on things you haven't learned yet?) and I did reasonably well on it (though no where near where my effort-level should have resulted), but it irritated me enough that I refuse to bust my ass on the final. 'Cuz, you know, that'll show them.

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point my "getting off the island" self-reassurances went from "only 15 days left" to "just 1 more year." Bear in mind that this isn't really a good thing. For one, a year is a lot longer than a couple of weeks to count down. For another, it's a sign of how desperate I am to leave this island forever and never return.

Sigh. Only 13 (1 year + 13) days left!

Chatting with a visiting neurologist today, and the topic came up (it's come up in various conversations over the term, as is to be expected while taking a neuro course). Sadly, his take on it is exactly what I expected, though I'd hoped it wasn't as bad as I've heard. Long story short, lower back pain? Sure - go right ahead. Won't hurt, might help (according to more studies than not, lumbar adjustment is slightly more effective than ibuprofen). Sore neck? No. No! NO NO NONONO!!! For the love of DOYC NO! Vertebral artery dissections, brain stem strokes, and fractured cervical vertebrae are commonly (as in, no longer interesting enough for him to comment on when they show up at his practice) seen in patients (of all ages) shortly (within hours) of cervical spine adjustments, even when done by "qualified" chiropractors. Yes, it may feel good, but the dangers far outweigh the (non-existent) benefits.

Yes, I know you love your chiro. I know it feels good. I know how satisfying it is when your necks cracks really well. And if it makes you happy to go, then feel free. Just make sure they stay away from you neck - I like my friends alive, conscious, and with all their limbs intact.

With SGA, that is. After getting home close to midnight last night, I did what any sensible monkey would do and slept late, skipping both my one hour of interesting class and my one hour of I-have-no-idea-what-it's-like-anymore-because-I-haven't-been-since-this-particular-prof's-first-lecture class. Now I'm working up the bother to actually get to campus and do some of that studying thing, though part of me just wants to sit and hit Refresh over and over again until my immuno grade gets posted.

But back to SGA. Things I like - working at events (much more fun than attending them, really), knowing what's going on on campus, being able to bring up topics of issue at meetings and see results happen (well, sometimes). And at least some of the people in the club.

Things I don't like - dealing with the other people on SGA (well, some of them). Long, pointless meetings where nothing really gets accomplished. Not actually have any power (as a whole) to make any meaningful changes on campus on in administration. Being part of an organization who's primary role is to throw parties (or to enable other clubs to throw parties), whereby students end up giving yet more of their limited money to this island in exchange for enough alcohol to drink until they throw up and fall over (not necessarily in that order). Yes, I understand that charity is a noble thing and that we're all fabulously wealthy by island standards, but don't we already give this island enough? We get fleeced on everything from housing to groceries to arriving and leaving the island. The school gives the island tons of money, and sets up programs (undergrad, nursing) that they subsidize by raising OUR tuition. Half of the blood donations here come from students, and locals use everything from our buses to our laundry facilities to our medical clinic freely. So why is it so important that every club become a "charity organization?" This entire medical program is a charity organization, alight an involuntary one.

So sure, SGA gets students new printers and signs (misspelled) on the buildings. The island gets $50000 of money out of the student's pockets every 6 months. Fair? Not really.

Wow - that turned into a longer rant than I'd expected. Sorry about that - I suspect a big part of it is end-of-term irritation, probably combined with missed sleep. (btw - no, the pizza/sandwiches before meetings doesn't play any part in my SGA membership. They're not good enough to do so). Long story short, I like the club, I hate what the club does. Maybe I should switch to AMSA or something next term instead.

Strange to think that it's been an entire term since last term's angry, rant about SGA. And yet here I am, and I'll be back again next term. Why? I'm actually not quite sure but I suspect the biweekly dinner plays a large role. That and masochism.

Currently, we're voting on the new SGA pres, which I'm sure is a very big deal to the various students of SGU. Or maybe not - tell me honestly - were you even aware that we HAD a president? How about what they do? Yeah, I didn't think so. I'm just happy we only have three candidates this time around, and that they kept their speeches short. No tears yet, but the night's still young. We have, however, had a couple of proclamations of love for the "SGA family," but that's about par for the course.

Oh hey! This is an interesting twist - there's a combination of non-working internet and non-working angel in Bell right now, so we get to vote the old-fashioned way - by lining up and whispering our votes in our faculty advisor's ear. Yup, let's hear it for the quality services provided by good old SGU (not to mention SGA's most excellent problem-solving skills. And yes, that IS what the kids are calling them these days).

Anyway, this meeting keeps going on and on and on. It's the meeting that won't die, no matter how much I want it to. As it is, I'm tired and bored and am going to cut class tomorrow to sleep in. I deserve it, after being stuck here for 3 hours (so far, and more to come).

Immunology,
I hate you, but now you're done.
Until Path, at least.

I'm fairly (read - 99%) certain that our new physio prof is a vampire. Or at least from transylvania. Or maybe related to Cruella De'vil. Yes, she claims to be from South Africa, but I know my accents, and her's is most definitely not from SA. Possibly not even from this planet, but that's a bit more farfetched than I want to get right now. My proof? She's older than any legitimate human being should be, she got oddly dreamy shile discussing the role of the bloodstream in endocrinology, and she says the word "human" like I say "Northern Haiy-Nosed Wobat, ie, I'm familiar with the species, but have no relation to it and find it interesting only in abstract. Also, I've never seen her out in the sun.

5 words into the lecture, half the class broke out in somewhat hysterical giggles at the thought of 14 lectures of listening to this particular child of the night mangle her way through various hormone names and the other half began packing up their stuff (quietly, so as not to draw her attention) before she could get to the whole blood-sucking thing. I left somewhere after the 6h mention of the hyypo-thaaaaaahhlamoose and, well, here I am. No wonder Dr H was grinning so hard as he left Bell, the bastard.

I definitely needed a laugh and I suppose the universe has obliged me rather nicely, but I'm beginning to suspect I know where the campus dogs have been disappearing to. If I see her walking around in a new fur coat in the next few days, I'm investing in garlic and crucifixes.

I think I've hit my usual 3/4 slump.  I look at my calendar and see 35 days left, and any thought of studying completely flies out of my head. It's not a purposeful thing, just lack of motivation; really weird when you think of it - 4 week from finals is when you'd expect the most enthusiasm for this sort of thing.

But nope - as far as this weekend goes, I'm a med student failure.  The plan was to go to the orphan art sale friday, get to bed at a reasonable hour, study sat, study sun, and finish up the weekend with a delicious mac n' cheese dinner, reasonably confident in my abilities with respect to physio and neuro, immuno pending.  Instead, I went to the orphan art sale (got outbid on all my paintings!  Boo, but some people are willing to pay a ridiculous amount for paint smeared on canvus by an orphan.  I'm not one of them.), and drank far too much wine (they had a lot of varieties), then took my wine over to the dodgeball tournament, where I ran into M, S, S and A.  And of course, you can't just up and leave in the middle of something as entertaining as a dodgeball tournament, so we all stayed until the end.

Then, of course, M recalled that we were overdue on our promised Obama shots, so we all trooped over to his place where we dutifully created and then comsumed a number of Obama-shots (triple sec, gin, and orange juice.  Delicious, in honour of his taking florida).  And, well, one thing led to another and the next thing I knew, it was 1:30am (hey, that's late for me! I get up early) and A had arrived, looking for advice for his girl troubles and I had no buses available to take me home.  So A (other A) and S gallantly agreed to walk me home and fight off any potential rapists (there weren't any, but there could have been).

And then I slept till noon and woke up painfully hungover.  Needless to say, not much got accomplished on saturday, though i did get out to a delicious dinner at True Blue Inn - grilled marlin, milkshake and live music really does do a body good. 

At least today I did manage to get up early and study on campus, so the weekend wasn't entirely a catastrophe.  I now feel moderately knowledgeable about neuro (even if I still don't know what's going on in the cerebellum), fairly ok with immuno, and decent with physio provided no one asks me anything about any of the graphs.  Delicious mac n' cheese is still on the menu when i gt back from my run.

Last day at the hospital, and it's been fun. On monday we spent a bit of time in the OR (general surgery, nothing terribly exciting but we did get to poke at a lypoma when it was taken out (felt like a very small sack of pudding), and then moved down to the wards to practice our venipuncture on the poor, hapless patients.

( Cut for blood and gore and needles )

And that's the end of my hospital time. I've learned that I'd gnaw off my own foot before going into obgyn, but I still like surgery. Dammit. In other news, 35 days till I get to come home!

Okay, dinner was turkey-riffic and the cleaner came by today so our house is spotless, so I can continue with my story. When we last saw our heroes, they had arrived back at the hotel around 12:30am to find the room taken over by an army of cucarochas...

( c'mon. you know you want to know what happened next )

Oh, and I was a dumb-ass and drank the water there. Still regretting that clever little move, but in my defense, I've never had any problem doing so traveling anywhere else.

Back! It was fun, I'm exhausted but happy (and poor). Here's the recap:

Go in early afternoon. Most of the plane was students, so we tagged along after them to their hotel in Porlamar and got a room. First impression of the island was nothing special, pretty typical SA. Hotel was pretty, a short walk from a major thoroughfare. Getting changed, spotted a cockroach in the bathroom but hey, it's not the most expensive place and one bug isn't that terrible so M killed it and we headed out to find some food. Should have realized it was an omen.

Found a great big mall that was pretty cool, more like a labyrinth than anything else, but half of the stores were empty (as in, no shop), and the place was completely dead. We figured it was siesta time and went to a fabulous little Greek restaurant for some fantastic steak (I've been missing red meat) and a bottle of wine then went hunting for a money exchange place, only to find that they were all closed so we stopped at an ATM to grab some cash, only to be stumped when it asked me for my ID number (no, not my pin - it already asked for that). Tried my driver's license and random entries but no dice. Shrugged it off and hopped in a cab to find some of the famous "fabulous shopping" we'd been told about, ended up at a more normal mall. And it had shopping, though I won't say it was "fabulous." Just normal. We got churros and wandered around until closing, saving our limited US dollars and paying with my mastercard. Incidentally, Venezuela demands your passport number when you pay with a credit card. Since I'm not stupid enough to carry my passport around when I leave the hotel, I stole a page from Ishie's book and handed over my PADI card and held as straight a face as I could manage while they carefully copied down my dive certification number. Hey, if the little diving emblem and pictures of fish aren't enough of a clue, who am I to correct their error?

When the mall closed, we tried the bar thing for a bit but couldn't find the hotel bar we were hunting (business men are more fun to schmooze with than drunk tourists) and headed back to our hotel around midnightish...

...where we discovered that in our absence, our room had been invaded by an army of cockroaches, the likes of which I have never seen before.

Anyway, I've got a turkey in the oven and people staying over, so stay tuned for the next installment, "In which M does a lot of shouting in Spanish and uses the word "cucarocha" a lot."

here's all the pictures I haven't had time to post over the past month or so.

Well, they're done, and the view from this side of things is a lot greener. Immuno was a gift (100 first order questions of the "which antibody crosses the placenta" variety) and neuro would have been easy if it hadn't been so poorly-written. If ever I've suspected a question-writer of being ESL, now is it. But anyway, I rocked physio (entirely unexpectedly, I assure you. I keep checking to see if they put up someone else's mark by mistake but no, I did well), kicked immuno's ass (the last time I did this well on a midterm was grade ten foods course, where the test involved making vegetable soup!), and did well enough on neuro that I can probably drag it up to an A on the final. Needless to say, I'm very pleased.

Friday after the exam J and I went out for lunch and re-stocked our cupboards buy way of IGA. Spent the afternoon eating brownies and ice cream and watching House and then I headed out to help set up for Sandblast. Ended up at the Talent show (much better than the last one I saw!), where I ate a fantastic burger and drank terrible beer.

Saturday involved getting up early (groan) to cook breakfast for the sandblast crew. Finished up with a swim and got home with just enough time to shower and change for the hash run. Wow! It was in St David, near la Sagesse, and was absolutely beautiful. And steep - I swear we made it to the highest point on the island at some point, but it was well-worth the view.

Today I finally managed to sleep in before we headed to Groom's beach for some snorkeling at the mostly-deserted beach. Besides the group of locals that kept staring at us, it as fu. there's a little reef there that's home to about a million sea urchins of various types and a whole lot of pretty fish - definitely worth it for a free, relaxing afternoon. And now I'm home and tired and about to open up neuro for round two. No rest for the wicked, as ever.

That was a long and difficult test. Disgustingly difficult, you might even say. Really, every last drop of knowledge has been pulled out of my brain, ran through the strainer, and wrung out. I'm mentally tired and physically jittery (though that may be from the extra-strong coffee I had for breakfast because we are out of cereal).

Of course, I'm talking about physio. 2nd, 3rd, and 50th order questions designed to make you remember every last thing you ever learned or suspected about cardiovascular biology in hopes of finding the right answer. Bizarrely tricky ones where the answers were all correct...except for a single word (and, no, it wasn't "alwasys." Those ones are easy). And then there were some where I wasn't sure what he was asking, even after I looked at the answers. There weren't any that I outright guessed on, but there were a few where I couldn't narrow it down below 3 possibilities, and one where I'm still certain the correct answer was supposed to be "all of the above" (it was missing E, but the proctor said it was okay. Who knows?).

Long story short, the test was everything I'd been warned it would be. Dammit. At least it's over now.

Not mine, but nearby. Without a doubt, my least favourite day of any given term is the day before exams begin. If you already know what you're about, the hours drag by as you hunt through your notes for some fact that you haven't already studied, reading and rereading until it's all just a meaningless jumble too time-consuming to sort out. It's too late to learn anything new, so you focus on memorizing last-minute picky little details and reading the answers to practice questions in the hopes of squeezing one last point out of the test.

If you are behind, the day is the opposite, hours flying by as you struggle to learn a concept that's been eluding you for weeks. As you run out of time, you sacrifice thoroughness for speed, panic building as you leave each section behind only half-learned. Studying becomes a gamble of "what will be on the test" instead of actually learning your stuff, and practice questions are wishful thinking, at best.

My on-campus studying today saw a mixture of the two. For every person idly watching sonic foundry lectures and cleaning their nails, the was someone taking up half the row of desks with studying debris, frantically eying the clock and leaving only to shout tearfully at their boyfriend/roommate/mechanic on their cellphones and buy another energy drink before retiring to cry in the bathroom.

Last term at this time I suspect I was more of the latter. Today, I think I'm the former. I'm not sure which is better.

I've been a terrible LJ-updater this term. But i have good reasons, I swear! I've been doing important medical-studenty things. Like the surgery selective. That's been fun so far, despite the fact that poor-planning has intersected with weight loss and leaves me looking rumpled at best in my too-big, heat-wrinkled "professional" clothes. One day I'll learn to bring more than one set of dress clothes when I come here! Basically, I'm in the hospital twice a week for a few hours each, learning basic procedures and scrubbing in when there's surgeries going on. Since it just started a couple of weeks ago and half of that has been spent in lectures, I haven't done much - mostly patient interviews and learning suturing techniques (not on real people yet, through that'll come in time). I got to scrub in yesterday on a surgery for a Brodie's Abcess. Lots of chiseling and boring involved, and far more blood than expected, even with the limb tourniqueted. And I even remembered enough of my lower-limb anatomy to not make a complete fool of myself! (By the way, if you ever spend 20 minutes cleaning and wrestling with a leg before wrapping it to drain the blood away from the foot, only to realize that you've put the tourniquet 6 inches too low, don't worry! Just grab a spare latex glove and tie it on real tight - it's just as good as doing it the so-called "right" way.)

Midterms are a week away and neuro has wrapped up (next week is scheduled for clinical case discussions, ie review) so I'm free to turn my attention to physio, where the GI tract is heating up (as much as a topic that is 60% vomit and diarrhea can, at least) and immuno, where my sanity (and likely my GPA) has been saved by a hero in the unlikely form of a 4th term DES tutor. Bret, you're the best - 2nd term collectively thanks you!

Lastly, I'm fighting off a weird cold that's combining a sore throat and what feels like perpetual eyestrain. I'm hoping it comes and goes quickly, so that I can stop spending my loan money on lozenges and painkillers and put it to better use, like ice cream. Sadly, I suspect it'll hit it's peak on friday, because that just how the universe seems to roll these days.

I didn't think it would happen this soon, but I've found a prof that I dislike even more than Dr T from biochem. Even Dr H in anatomy wasn't this bad, and I gave him a terrible review come end of term! (Not them personally, of course, just their lecture-style and teaching methods). Who is it? Dr S of immunology fame! The lectures are quite literally the worst I've ever attended. Disorganized, confusing, self-contradictory and not even remotely following the handouts we were given (because, she says, she had the printers print them in june, and then decided to spend all summer revamping them. Thus, we're missing the most relevant slides and the rest are out of order. She's mentioned that she knows how much this pisses us off, but hasn't apologised or done anything to make it easier on us). Add in random confused-looking pauses and a lazer pointer that doesn't seem to be in sync with what's coming out of her mouth and you end up with something rather unfortunate, and hair-pullingly frustrating 3 weeks from midterms.

The material isn't really any better. No one has any idea what it is we're supposed to be taking away from each lecture, besides "everything." Except that she's constantly referring to future lectures and items that we haven't even heard of yet, and then she'll mention something that she claims we've already covered (even though none of us remember it, if we did).

On the first day she had a whole spiel prepared about how it's so difficult to teach immuno coherently because everything works together and so she has no choice but to jump around like she does, but the textbook (any or all of the 8 that were recommended, only one of which is ever referenced in class and none of which is the one she wrote but from which she derives all of our lectures) does it without any problems, so I'm forced to blame her for this nonsense. I suspect her declaration was more so she'd have an excuse to point out what a great prof she is every time we run into something that she mentioned the day before (usually without any details and guaranteeing to have a least one person screaming by the end of things), adding "Since we went over this yesterday, you already know what I'm talking about. Isn't immunology great?"

No. No it isn't. Seriously - I'm going batty. Already decided to give up on attending until the midterm happens - I can better use that time to learn it on my own - but the handouts we have are even worse without her "teaching," so I'm not completely sure how to go about teaching myself this mess.