Finally!

Finished my first pass at biochem!



As many of you may know, biochem has been the beast that's haunted me since I got into medical school and snapped on my alpha 1 receptors so completely that I thought I was going to have a stroke. After sacrificing all of embryo and half of anatomy to it in first term, plus the entirety of my first summer, I figured it'd just be a few days to get it all back into my head since I'd gone over it so thoroughly, leaving me more time for pharm, which I didn't bother to be too freaked out about since it was last term and I had senioritis, which translates to me knowing way less about drugs than a run-of-the-mill crackhead

So twelve days later...

In my defense, we had that whole country-changing, finally got an articulate man in office, tear-up, comin' back to America, history-making presidential thing, so after promising myself I'd only watch the meat of it as a compromise (similar to what I promised myself on election night with similar consequences) and instead stayed glued to the tv for two days and made up for my truancy by doing about twenty-five minutes of videos.

Wedged around that though, I've actually been studying my ass off, glued to my desk, recreation consisting of an episode of Scrubs in the evening to help me as I go to sleep, a once-a-week House episode (both count as studying) and occasional Daily Shows when I'm willing to watch them while on a fitness glider thing.

All this productivity makes me feel ill... no beach, no sangria, no boyfriend, no walks to the point.

Oh, though it freaking snowed on inauguration day. Which is completely awesome, particularly since I'm in an area that never gets snow.

In celebration of the end of biochem, and a gradual discomfort that I was avoiding taking the first NBME practice exam because I was worried about my study methods so far, since I'm kind of piecing together study techniques out of spare parts, I coughed up 45$ of money I don't have to take the NMBE, which bought me four hours of realizing I really need to learn what theophylline does (four questions! Something to do with asthma), and that for the time being, it projects me as being okay.

And I apparently overkilled in biochem. I got an asterisk and no bar in that one, which put me off the charts, yet dipped down to borderline in nutrition, a class I generally write off, don't study, and then predictably do badly in, yet remain surprised every time it happens. Probably because I still think arachidonic acid is a horror movie about spiders. That shoot acid out of their... uh... I'm not too up on spider anatomy either. Eyes. Let's go with eyes.

So now I'm onto embryo (after a post-NBME celebratory Warcraft hit; since I don't know anyone in New Bern, I drown my sorrows by murdering helpless cartoon animals), complete with finally breaking out the colored pencils and markers and doing a full scale mock up of the damned fetal circulation because I never really bothered to learn it and just decided to keep getting ductus venosus questions wrong since I figured no one in their right mind would ever trust me with a baby anyway. But now I know what a ductus venosus does!