Too true

Hello all, I'm in USMLE study hell again though I'm taking a little bit of a turn from last year's Step 1 hell and making my current experience less hell and more "I don't have to be at the hospital! PARTY!!!!" Weirdly, it seems to be working pretty well though the actual exam will tell, but stress has always been my big killer on exams and enjoying life is making the gears run smoother. Plus I spent a great deal of this last year transferring a number of hospital lunch breaks into UWorld time at the library because sometimes that cafeteria pizza is just so gnarly that it's better to cram a granola bar and surf a computer.

Due to that tendency, I actually completed all 2200+ questions on USMLE World last night after a year long subscription to that brain-ripping, ego-destroying program, which felt a bit like this:



Of course, the actual test still comes at the end of this, which is sort of like defeating Mario Brothers only to discover that King Koopa is real and lives in your bathroom.

Speaking of random youtube videos, I chased this link thinking it was an actual tutorial on heart sounds because I suck at them and the brand new audio feature I experienced on Step 1 emphasized that to me. I admit, I loled.



And yeah, that's pretty much what I did on Step 1.

Anything else? NYC (as well as a great deal of the rest of the country) spent the last couple weeks being miserably unbearably hot. Like a good medical student, I chose to attempt to run Prospect Park on a day where the heat index was 105, which fortunately, at a mile and a half, my body saved me the hospital trip by crapping out on me entirely and made it difficult to even walk home. If my life were a USMLE World question stem, it would have read:

"A 29-year-old female with no documented medical problems is brought into the Emergency Department unresponsive, seizing, and with a body temperature of 109. She had previously been running in an unshaded section of the park despite an actual weather alert advising against doing exactly that. Despite aggressive management, she codes. What is the physiological mechanism behind her cause of death?"

If you picked anything regarding temperature regulation mechanisms or denaturing proteins, you're wrong. The answer is "mind-blowing stupidity". It's actually a more common cause of death than the usual statistics indicate.

So I consoled myself at my favorite bar with True Blood because damn, I'm hooked on that show and I don't get HBO at home because I'm cheap. Sookie.