Ode to Joie

Bwa ha ha ha.

I'm understanding biochem!!

After a wildly engrossing two hours of histo I managed to stay awake for (barely), it was biochem time, moving into enzyme kinetics and I was *so* lost, despite having a really good lecturer, and since the lecture slides are directly handed to us, I resolved to spend the second hour trying desperately to learn the fundamentals so that lecture might actually be useful rather than going DIRECTLY over my head.

So after about two hours of reading Lippencott and the lecture notes, I was getting a hazy vision of the big picture, but still feeling well behind. There was a knock at the door and who should be there but Joie, who hadn't seen me in lecture and was likely making sure I hadn't hanged myself from the clock tower in Bourne Hall.

Since my roommate was asleep, she stood at the door explaining biochem concepts to me and surprising me by releasing dormant biochem inside my head. Imagine my surprise when I knew the relationship between steroids and cholesterol. Where'd that come from and what else is occupying the dark rarely-seen areas of my brain other than circa 1991 Paula Abdul lyrics (Rush rush, ooh baby...)?

So she clarified the pathways of insulin and glycogon, which had been *heavily* discussed in lecture, and which I had completely not understood, and now I do! Hooray! So in about a half hour, she saved me approximately 4 hours of studying, at least, and a lot of frustration. Hence the title of the post.

What else? We're starting a series in anatomy where they punctuate general anatomy and embryology lectures with something called "Living Anatomy" where they give clinical correlations to the areas that we're studying which is actually pretty cool. Specifically cool was the "Hangman's Fracture", which, due to a low incidence of hangings is now the primary cause of death for traumatic hyperextension due to an unrestrained passenger hitting the dashboard in a front end collision. Wear your seatbelts, kids.

Following the mysteries of the spinal cord and the flexor forearm compartment, we had our most insipid ethics lecture to date in which we mangled the philosophies of Aristotle, Plato, and Mills. For the record, applying a utilitarian ethical outlook does NOT mean one would support *mandatory* HIV testing for pregnant women. READ the book, guys! It's not even that long! The application of the principles needs to be extended a bit above the 5th grade level.

The class is primarily patronizing. We also watched a video on the most oversimplified view of informed consent I've ever seen. I quite literally learned more about informed consent watching House. Seriously. They had a segment on it where the practice of giving informed consent was actively difficult versus a very clear segment on weighing options to a patient who very clearly understood the science.

Grrrr to ethics. Grrr! What was nice was that my roommate was as pissed off as I was, and we came back to our room and she exploded before I did, something like "What in hell does Aristotle have to do with the practice I'll be setting up???" Good question. She also pegged me by asking "Were you the one, who when she said you couldn't argue with the act of virtue being to strive to do good said 'Yes you can!!'?" Busted. She knows me too well. Mangling Aristotelian ethical philosophy is a pet peeve of mine, and I think I just again exemplified what a geek I am.

So I'll talk about rugby. I wanna play sports!!! Joie will shoot hoops with me, which is awesome, because I can't play proper basketball yet, nor soccer. I have no idea how to play rugby, but I'd really like to learn, and Sej (aka party girl aka stop studying and START partying again, party girl; that Aquarium party was dead without you! girl) is putting together rugby sessions for people that want to play but do NOT want to get all their teeth knocked out. But I'm concerned about the ankle. Sej is also running for student government (with others I'm voting for) and the key reason I'm voting for her is I watched her intimidate Dr. Curry who made the grave error of associating hangman's fractures (see above) with rugby, and then had to address the class with an apology for maligning rugby and to exonerate himself by talking about his years of rugby play.

I figure when you can get a full prof to say "I'm sorry" to 360 people in the first two weeks of class, you can represent me, baby!

So that's the score. The sorta veggie thing is working out quite nicely (sorry Texas Beef industry) and I'm getting into cooking more. Now if I can stay away from the white chocolate magnum ice cream bars (otherwise known as Caribbean crack), I should be fine.