Better Start

Though wrong class.

Clinical Skills is canceling our lab sessions during finals week AND canceling one of the case reviews so we can instead review physical diagnosis. This is not only helpful for the OSCE, but also helpful in my *not* ineptly manhandling the knee of a guy with a meniscus tear who I doubt was appreciating the fumbling.

In the other classes, so far, notes are not only on time... they're EARLY. I'm getting the vapors just thinking about it.

We had the mega-meeting, and holy crap, was it ever a mega meeting. The course directors from ALL the courses were there, as were the deans, as were about 150 people, two mics in the aisle for us, and from the line of students talking at the mic, we went 30-40 minutes over what was planned.

WHOA.

Way way beyond what I could have ever hoped for, so I'm being optimistic, because it seems like some good people are listening, and also, so far, no one's threatened to kick me out of school and set me adrift on a flaming rowboat saturated in shark pheromones, so that's good news.

Will things be made perfect? Absolutely not. Will this term end in such a way that we can't all look back and say "that would have been made easier by _________". Will the first floor library computers ever boot up in under an hour, cease to crash, remove the necessity to reinstall the network printer and office ever time you try to print an objective sheet? I fear not. BUT, as I've said before, I think there's a change for the positive, and I'm also really really proud of my class and our response. I think the meeting went well; people expressed themselves professionally, and it didn't devolve into the sort of heated yelling match that occurs in... well, most houses of government, but you get my drift.

In the meantime? 600th hash!! Pictures pending. It celebrated the occasion by raining for the better part of the day and stopped right before the hash, which made the trail a mudbath. I have honestly scrubbed my socks in the sink three times with detergent (putting those in a communal washing machine would be ruder than I could possibly be) and you can only just tell they're white. When I got back from the hash, I tiptoed across my foyer shedding as little nastiness as possible to keep my housekeeper from killing me, and stepped directly into the shower with all my clothes on, including my shoes.

Yeah, have you ever been *that* muddy? It also reached the stage where I stopped trying not to fall because I wasn't going to get any muddier, which makes the passage easier.

We were also the last group getting in, so everyone was worried about us, which was sweet, and we had a guy in back coming behind us to make sure no one got lost along the way, and by the time we got back, there were two guys with flashlights coming in from the back, so it's great that they really watch for people so no one gets stuck in the rainforest overnight.

In two stunning displays of brilliance on my part, I both took the false trail AND had such tunnel vision that I missed the 'turnaround X' on the false trail and had to be chased down before I wandered off a cliff at dusk, AND at one point, somehow mistook white flowers for shredded paper, missed an extremely obvious turn in the trail, and strode directly into razor grass, which is aptly named.

The thing about razor grass is that not only does it cut you, it sticks to you, which means that attempting to pull it off then cuts up your hands, so you're forced to make the decision "do I want to just leave this thing draped on my shoulders while it continues to saw into me, or do I want to grab it with my fingers, which have tons more nerve endings?" Decisions decisions.

That one got met with our patient guide asking me, genuinely mystified, "Why did you do that?" My response was "because I'm kind of an idiot." He refrained from saying "only kind of"?

There were some steep slippery portions of the trail that required a rope to get up or down. I thought with my underdeveloped chicken biceps that it would consist of me getting down two steps and then falling forty feet backwards into a tree, but it wasn't half as hard as it looked (the rest of the trail was) and about three times as fun.

The hash did mean getting to devirginate Lori, Krash, and David. Woo hoo! But we got back too late to drench them in beer and give them a certificate, so next time.

Well, bedtime. I need to ingest a lot of GI tomorrow so I can figure exactly what I'm contracting from my water supply. The paranoia I've held onto since parasitology not-so-coincidentally evaporated when I ran out of filters, but I'm not dead yet, and so far nothing I've experienced physiologically this term could be described as "explosive", so I'm putting it in the "win" column.