Back to it

Yes, killing a week for post-exam recovery does have consequences; who knew?

Nutrition's started, which is a quickie two unit course that has replaced microbiology in the tight schedule that is our lives, which you wouldn't know from reading this stuff since I typically only write down what I recreate since "Hour 6 of Female Genital Pathology: Contemplated chewing off own face" gets boring.

So far my impression of nutrition has been that it's easier than micro, which naturally gives it huge bonus points for me, and allows me to focus in more on path for the final stretch.

What does end up typically getting neglected, is Physical Diagnosis, which is a shame. One, the lectures are at an awful time, and I'm a terminal truant anyway, and they aren't on sonic, which combined with getting utterly eclipsed by path, and to a lesser extent up until last Friday, micro, means I don't tend to devote the same time to it.

Problem being that Advanced Clinical Skills/Physical Diagnosis (probably combined with path) is one of the most important classes in med school, and includes labs that are generally fun and involve real doctoring, though I still cannot successfully percuss to save my life. Need more wrist action and better aim.

So I'm trying to bring myself to care more about it on principle, since I no longer have trying to maintain micro as an excuse, and for nutrition, they (I hope) are realizing it.

In other news, they seem to have canceled path lab today without any real notice that I saw, which on the one hand is annoying, and on the other hand, justified taking a study break, and prolongs my slides and concept maps another day that I can use to try and get fully caught up for the week so I can start fresh. I'm not sure the likelihood of that happening, but you know.

Oddly, with the advent of yet more classes, I'm beginning at last to feel refreshed enough to dive in, where I haven't been able to focus this last week, and was concerned that the perpetual burnout would trip me until exams, but I think I'm finally getting my groove back.

Perhaps more clarification is in order

Heh, but man oh man, a week of exams is exhausting!

So a bit of a breakdown...

Last Monday was the path exam, as mentioned, and it absolutely lived up to its expectations of being grisly, long, and taking students' hearts/minds with it, which makes it an absolutely perfect way to start off the week, because nothing encourages people to continue cramming for the relentless mental stress of three more exams like gut-punching them with the first one.

On the plus side, thanks to a lot of awesome lab groupness keeping from being the Jill McProcrastinatey that I *normally* am, I managed to drag through path with enough of a safety net that I have some wiggle room with finals.

Some unfortunates got the unique pleasure of having their Physical Diagnosis lab exam on the same DAY as the path exam, which approaches a level of evil that can't be contemplated because mainly everyone wants to go home, sleep, study, or cry. Fortunately that day, from rumor, the graders were kind, because come on... it's hard to question and test a patient when the morning's activities left you questioning whether you want to continue on at all.

I got the 9 am lab exam the next day, and scored vitals and rapport before drawing a complete blank on my archnemesis, the eye, and ended up standing there trying not to fall asleep in exhaustion and frustration or just cry that I wanted a nap (I hate 9 am; I do) as I got barraged with questions and my patient defended me (I did ask him if he usually needed corrective lenses, dang!). I also want bonus credit for noticing the patient's eyes were a little icteric despite having no known pre-existing condition which, after getting drilled on what I meant by "sclera appears yellow but not necessarily beyond the limits of normal findings" (nothing sucks more than being inexperienced and getting a borderline symptom, since you want to get a diagnosis if there is one, but don't have enough experience to defend your diagnosis, and if you make one, you're going to have to), led to the patient getting genuinely asked if he was feeling all right.

I think finding pathologies in patients not known to have any should get extra credit, right? Fortunately, the grading was still kind, and I shuffled home to spend the next day and a half cramming micro flashcards into my gullet until I spewed ETEC, EHEC, EIEC, and EIEIO from every orifice. Gods, I hate E. coli and its multiple-variant diarrhea-ness. It's not inflammatory! It's inflammatory! There's no blood! There's blood! There's no blood and then there's blood! It's self-limiting! It's fatal! It's everything that makes you appreciate why there are so many species of microorganisms because learning 5000 species is easier than learning 5000 variants of shifting pathologies on a single species that is the same species as stuff that's *normally* found in your colon. Gah.

I felt pretty decent going into micro. I did a lot of work on it despite being bludgeoned by path study, and knew full well that almost everyone in fourth term was in exactly the same position of path overkill with micro dearth and they can't fail everyone.

Secondly, thanks to the initiation of the much-reviled TBL sessions based on our need for diversity (riiiiight), we got the 5% that's part of our grade no it's bonus no it's part of our grade. The TBL is to the course curriculum what E. coli is to the course material in that it's something with a shifting presentation that is nearly impossible to pin down without specific training.

Since we couldn't get a solid answer on what the TBL was worth (though the quizzes were always bonus), I treated them as a part of my grade and actually read the 20 page articles so I could take the IRAT (individual quizzes) and TRAT (same quiz, done as your group), and do decently well on them, because I figured if I didn't, they were DEFINITELY going to be part of our grade, and I was going to miss it by a point because of them.

Well, due to the announcement screwups and the general ire of the class at having the whole point of the IRAT/TRAT to teach us that we do better on exams when we collaborate on them with five other people (duh), and taught us to conspire against the department on peer evaluations, they got made bonus points! Which means micro became a gimme.

Even with this announcement prior to the final, I was first of all, afraid they were going to still yank it back, and second, afraid they were going to take out *their* ire on us by making an exam entirely consistent of drawing the specific genome of all 900 types of E. coli.

Exam was fair AND we got the TBL and quizzes as bonus points, bringing the class average to a spanktastic 86% and me to a very happy Ishie indeed. Well, it did today, when we got the results. Friday I mainly felt tired. As did everyone else. Though the responses coming out of the exam were markedly different. Coming out Monday I thought "Well, I was prepared as I was gonna get but DAYAM" with people's reactions being pretty grim, while on Friday, the reactions coming out of the micro exam were pretty much "Well, that was not half as bad as it could have been."

Friday also marked the day every person on campus that wasn't in fourth term got to go to their respective homes, filling the campus and streets with partiers, people carrying suitcases, and grim fourth termers. We slated Friday night for partying, which largely consisted of me lying down on the dock at Prickly Bay so I wouldn't fall off the earth before crawling through a pizza someone had placed on the ground while managing to not get a SINGLE drop of sauce on my clothes. Pure talent, folks. Jay celebrated his victory by playing Pretty Woman on his trombone while standing on the top of his apartment complex. Some of you may have noticed that...

Saturday, I spent the day in St. George's with David helping him shop (or bumming around town; take your pick), ate at Creole Shack and enjoyed the whole bittersweet "this is fun, but you leave tomorrow" thing.

Sunday, Dave left, so I spent the day doing my path slides for Monday, sulking, and frustratingly trying to study for the PD WRITTEN midterm bright and early Monday morning. Oh, the evil. Nothing screws up your weekend like having an exam hanging over it while 50% of the people you know take off.

BUT, the PD exam was way more fair than I thought it was going to be with little on there that wasn't in the notes except for hyper/hypothyroidism stuff which we'd been repeatedly told was going to be on the test, and again, left me a happy Ishie, so for getting completely bear-smacked by this last week, I made out like a bandit.

The thing is on Monday, they had path lecture immediately scheduled after the PD exam. Two of them, in fact. I'd tell you how poorly attended they were, but per usual, I certainly wasn't there. I was in a sleep deprived daze, that I was trying to clear back before the path lab ALSO scheduled that day.

Yeah, so for those keeping track the schedule was exam Monday, exam Tuesday, exam Friday, exam Monday, path lab Monday, slides due Monday.

)*(*)(*)(*@)(*@)(*!!!!!!!

Adding to the excitement was that they picked that day to switch the lab times around on path, so those attending path at 3 would now be attending at 1. Those attending at 1 would be attending at 3. They announced at the beginning of the term that this would be done *sometime* during the term, and it would be announced as to when.

It wasn't.

Anticipating this, a friend and I went down to the path office to specifically ask if the lab times were being switched for Monday's lab, because if so, I needed to print my slides and lose a nap. If not, I could go to the mall, get a smoothie, take a nap, and head back for lab.

"No", we were told. "That's up to the C/S department and they'll announce it when the change is made."

So, I went home and collapsed down onto my sweet sweet comforter. Only to find out at 1:15 or so (ie 15 minutes after my new lab time started) when my friend frantically knocked on my door, that the lab time had indeed been switched, a fact that had been announced on Angel in the preceding hour.

Yeah, that zoo of lost people must have been exciting. Not that I'd know since I figured the time it would take me to stagger into my clothes, run for the bus, catch one, get to the library, print the slides, and make it to lab would probably eclipse the time allotted. D'oh.

Not not not cool.

So now most fourth termers are wandering around in a stressed out, no real break, too much work, too much mischeduling grim daze with any other-termer friends absent daze that does not preclude people to being on top of things. As a result, I am well aware that I am not the only one that has being at least six lectures behind ALREADY to celebrate. Yeesh.

BUT, NO MORE MICRO!!!!

And since I'd missed my lab time already, my nap was sufficient that I primarily needed to wake up to go see the turtles, as noted. And, as noted, it was an amazing experience that cannot be suitably be put into words except to say, you guys have from April until June, and do it do it do it do it!

So what now? Well, I need to find initiative and get caught up just in time to blow it on Saturday where I'm torn between scuba diving, the hash (thanks Dr. Bob!) or both. I'm leaning towards 'both'.

CMV, why do you hate me?

Nope, definitely not a fan of the CMV. I mean, being immunocompetent and everything, it definitely beats out lots and lots of other things for diseases in the category of "stuff I'd rather have than staph aureus in my brain", but as far as learning about it, it's one of those sneaky bastards that causes everything, and when you're studying it in immunocompromised, like everything else in immunocompromised, pretty much everything is attributable to it. It's the sarcoidosis of micro.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have those pathogens which I've long lamented that only have one or two symptoms, but happen to share that feature with 5000 other things exactly like them that some scientist at some point was interested in enough to go "Hey, these two things that cause self-limiting coughs have different molecular structures. Let us create new viral families, genera, and species for them so that students' lives may be made more difficult for it."

Then, there's those horrendous organisms that cause terrible things but I love them, because they have incredibly specific risk factors and symptoms: 'a guy into home canning develops paralys.." "Botulism! Next question!"

I did get a big form of entertainment on the bioterrorism lecture, which really should have been subtitled "The Murderous Jackass Blooper Reel of Foiled Misbegotten Plots to Bring about Armageddon."

The weird part is there's all this stuff people are TRYING so desperately to do to each other, yet the most deadly outbreaks tend to be associated with the abject stupidity of people that weren't doing it deliberately to begin with. You know "Oops, I had the sewage from the Happy Acres Mad Cow Dairy Farm draining directly into the city water supply. Was that wrong? I checked like three times in 'How Not to Kill off Children and the Elderly for Dummies' and it wasn't listed."

But, gotta know all of it for tomorrow's micro final, which has been blissfully schedule for 1:30 PM at my good hour, which means I actually have a good chance of being half with it when I take it.

This also contrasts sharply to my clinical skills first lab midterm, which is one of the easiest "gimme" points on the planet, to which I did all the vitals and questioning perfectly, drew a complete blank on the rest, and then spent a lot of time gaping blankly, hemming and hawing, and being frustrated. Doh. Fortunately, their grading is on the kind side.

Path... everyone wants to know about path... the dreaded second exam, bane of medical school existence. Did it suck? Absolutely. Was it extremely long and difficult with TONS of irrelevant information that you had to discard, come up with a diagnosis, and then come up with features that clarified that diagnosis so you could pick the right one out of a list of answers that ALL had elements of being correct, but one was 'more' correct than others? Yup.

So why am I not more freaked out, nor was I too bad going in? Reputation. I have heard since the first week of first term how unquestionably terrible the second path exam is, have gotten tons of tips from wonderful people that have taken the class, thus when it came up and was terrible and long, it was just about as terrible and long as I was expecting, and now it's over.

This doesn't mean I did *well* or anything; I honestly have absolutely no idea, since I knew vaguely what virtually every question was talking about, which may be the epitome of "giving me just enough rope to hang myself with", because it allows me to be very easily misled, particularly on an exam where time is such a factor.

And it was too, goodness. I knew that going in, and I was STILL racing the clock. I knew it was going to be a close one when for the first path exam, I was looking at the slides for two seconds before putting my head on my desk to await the next changeover, since I was feeling kind of stress-crappy, and on this one, I was still logicking my way through the question and answer choices when I heard the "next slide" click.

Not that it mattered much. Those slides were... whoa. I'd heard different slides, but same diagnostic features; it just may be a different view of the same sort of specimen. On the first exam, I'd look up, go "Oh, that's nutmeg liver", read the question and go "Uh oh." On the second exam, I'd look up, go "What in hell is that mangled mass of tissue? Was this an incidental finding at a murder scene where the victim got put into a wood chipper?", read the question and go "Oh. That is easily the most undiagnostic least representative view of an aortic dissection I've ever seen. Fortunately, this patient is presenting the way he would if he'd waltzed out of the textbook", and then of course, read the answer choices and go "Uh oh".

Oh, and I owe Kwesi like three beers for LAP scores and I get NONE for pseudomonas. Hmph. Makes me almost think there's something wrong with playing path exam drinking games. Nah...

So who knows and c'est la vie. Now all that's left is to focus on micro and then TRY to pull my aching brain together sufficiently to actually study for the Clinical Skills written exam on Monday.

And then? Turtle watching! Wahoo!!

And an additional good luck to all you anatomy and BSCE takers out there, as well as my microbiology-afflicted brothers and sisters. I'd wish you 6th termers good luck, but I have no idea what your exam schedule is, so I'll just wish you a nonspecific good luck and congratulations.

Procrastination compensation

Making flashcards for 40 pages of path cardio notes goes down about as easily as drinking ground glass.

The problem with a packet that has 60 pages of notes is there is no natural "AHHHH" stopping point as a rule, thus you're forced to enforce arbitrarily time deadlines to keep your brain from giving up and checking the internet for new stuff every five minutes, or, in last night's case, flipping channels aimlessly until you pause at the Jack Black production of King Kong only to realize the entire first half of the movie has been cribbed almost directly from Jurassic Park and Congo, so you give up. Sorry, Peter Jackson. LotR was awesome though...

Speaking of things with large sharp teeth, tomorrow is going to be micro day, and the closing arguments of identifying respiratory infections by whether the invading virus has positive or negative sense strand RNA is the ONLY thing that could path look wonderful in comparison.

Oh, also Nina's b-day. Happy birthday. I cannot imagine the horror of having my birthday fall anywhere near fourth term. Ick. We'll be hitting La Belle Creole tomorrow for that couple hours between studying and studying.

I'd blog further and add in more trip and ship details, but if I don't get these congenital heart defects polished off tonight, I'm never going to. Why, oh WHY did I refuse to learn any embryology whatsoever during first term???

Oh right, they combined it into anatomy so you could conceivably ignore it and still pass. Hooray!

Still, philosophically not as bad as making behavioral science, ethics, jurisprudence, statistics and epidemiology one class though. "Hey! These subjects have nearly nothing in common. Let's conglomerate it and give it some weird PC jargon name so when these students are going for residencies, they have no sign of having taken any of them on their transcripts."

Microbiologists are out to get you

So there's rubella, rubeola, and now, rubula.

They also featured typhoid fever and typhus, two disorders related in having absolutely nothing to do with each other.

My question is, since unlike fields like philosophy, and my original love, physical anthropology, microbiologists actually work in an employable field, why the hate, guys?

Gerblah

I'm running out of titles that are synonymous with "AHHHHHH!!!!!!!" so I'm just starting to make up words, much in the same way that the micro department is making up drug names.

Okay, they're not but man oh man if I ever make it to pharm, it's going to KILL me.

So in the final countdown before the exam, I'm just trying to make up impromptu mnemonic devices (the three inhibitors of the 50S ribosomal subunit are Macrolides, Lincosamides, and Streptogramins, which Murder Large Subunits" to attempt to carry my worn out, overtaxed short term memory through the exam.

Incidentally, this tactic is also how I once got an "A" in college German and two weeks after it ended, couldn't say anything but "Welcome to Germany!" which has somewhat limited usefulness. If it does pull me through micro even though I burned out half the circuits in immuno, having to relearn it from scratch for the boards should be a peach.

On the plus side, I managed to get through all my week one flashcards while watching the sunset off the point and alternately feeding my half cooked chicken roti to the crabs. Salmonella reduces exam performance, particularly since these guys are pretty harsh on the bathroom breaks, the course directors, not the crabs; I don't think the crabs care.

I'm also loving the making of flashcards. Why? Because "Weeks 1-3" Ishie was INFINITELY more responsible than "Weeks 4-5 Ishie", which means "Weeks 1-3" Ishie made a buttload of flashcards for "Last Minute Panic" Ishie to be able to go through rather than trying to reread all the lecture notes.

Well, back to it. 8 hour countdown...

There was the play, then the work...

Easter Weekend, so Thursday and Saturday were my "enjoy the last fun you'll ever have" days, and now, with a week to go until my first path exam, the heat's on.

Saturday was Sandblast. Or more accurately, Sandblast, rejection of Karma for the Snooty Principle, Creole Shack, and Banana's. Hardcore, eh?

Sandblast was fun, though I got there late because I'm too lazy to even party on time.





But there were a ton of people all having fun, so that was great. Lost at a little beer pong, took some pictures, crawled into the opening to the security dog cages so I could get a picture on my hands and knees barking... You know, the usual stuff...



BUNCH of cruise ships out too. I was thinking of the poor people on board and how they probably just wanted to relax on a relatively secluded beach, only to stumble into the middle of Spring Break at a medical school they probably didn't even know was here.

Waves were crazy high too, almost up to the edge of the ladies, and a friend said there was a bunch of coral and rock debris thrown up the next day. Wonder what was up with the tides.

There was an afterparty at Club Karma, but I was with my friend Jay. We'd thought there was no dress code that night because everyone said there wasn't, but instead this one was very pointedly looked at him, said he couldn't go in and that by "Dressing down", it meant he didn't have to wear a nice shirt like the guy was wearing (wasn't that nice, dude), but no long shorts or whatever, and THEN there were student ID issues, and altogether, way too much "We're a New York nightclub" image-obsessed feeling, so wasn't worth it, and was glad to save the 20 bucks.

It's some people's thing, but I'm rarely dressed up anywhere, so I don't like clubs where the goal is to "be seen". So not a fan of Karma, I'm afraid. I'll take Victory Bar anyday.

Headed down to Creole Shack instead, because I wanted to stay on the Carenage for a while, since I really like it. Great place! I've been meaning to go there for about a year, but the people were really nice, they had some karaoke going on and the food was great and cheap. We started to walk back, and saw a youth basketball game going on where everyone was having a lot of fun and getting rowdy, and cheering their teams. We got invested, and even though they lost, GO BLACK AND YELLOW! Southern Pros!!

Afterparty, as always, at Banana's, but they'd converted their new awesome game room back into the "Club Banana's", which sucked because I really wanted to play darts. Ahh well. Still found good company and a good time, and everyone was out.



But now, path and micro own me for the foreseeable future. On the plus side, I like the classes. On the minus side, there's SO much studying. I know it sounds like all I do is go out, but honestly, the rest of the time it's just STUDY. Study for group, do the quizzes, do my slide presentations, do my concept maps, do the lectures, review the slides, review the staining techniques, check the book, go running with the Goljan lectures so that no time is wasted. Exhausting!!!

Let's just hope it pays off.

Er, Micro Dept?

I know you guys are having administrative difficulties and such, but muttering stuff that's not in the notes, saying we've been taught stuff that isn't covered in lecture OR notes, or instructing us to read the notes when the info isn't in the notes and saying "Know this, I ask questions on this" is completely uncool.

Not in lecture + not expanded in notes + not in lab + unclear slides + heading misspelled in lecture notes making even googling it difficult = SHOULDN'T BE TESTABLE!

Penicillin is pretty

Sorry, not feeling too creative tonight; I've gotta lazy brain, made lazier by micro...

But! Had my last wet lab in micro today (awwww), but penicillin under a microscope is quite pretty, versus Candida (think yeast infections), which is blah. Guess that's why penicillin is the good guy. Also, from cultures last week, discovered that my throat, though covered in stuff that grows disgusting looking stuff on blood agar (though not half as disgusting as the stuff isolated from black sand beach), doesn't have anything too destructive in it, which considering that I'm a slob, is amazing.

In other micro news, Dr. Cool-Guest-Lecturer-from-Immuno is back! Bringing in the pain with a cool story about the founder of microbiology...

Apparently, the revered Dr. Koch, in an effort to demonstrate that cholera causes... well, cholera, attempted to showmanship this idea in front of his rival, whose hypothesis was that cholera came from "bad air". Dr. Koch had a jug of isolated cholera, which his rival, to prove him wrong, drank.

And didn't get cholera. Oh schnap.

This was supposed to be a demonstration of how the host's immune system always plays a role in infectious disease, and we should keep that in mind when we study it. I, naturally, took the more selfish lesson that considering I've been disgusting since infancy, I have an immune system that by now has probably made me impervious to fungi, bacteria, and bullets, and can continue eating street meat in Grenada, tacos from beaten up shacks in Ensenada, and fish cheeks in the Philippines with impunity.

Though the fact that Dr. McP from parasit got malaria not once or twice, but five times, might be sufficient to give me pause. Or not... Maybe it just means I have to be careful of mosquitoes, but not feces-infused drinking water.

Another notable microbio fact is that 80% of SGU students as of a couple years ago, show antibodies for dengue. I haven't learned yet whether this means my immune system is stronger or if it means that if I get bitten by a mosquito carrying a different strain of dengue, I'll start bleeding out of my eyes. We haven't gotten to that lecture yet.

It was also a relief not to hear about Jenner for the fifteenth time. Jenner, for those who don't know, discovered the smallpox vaccine... by injecting it and smallpox into a small child. Whatta hero. I think I like Salk and Fleming better.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Okay, okay, it's not a very traditional cake, but it is drooltastic, I think anyone could agree, particularly when one has no access to such a thing. And 'baking it myself' isn't an option, because honestly, I'm a person that's challenged by Betty Crocker premix. Add that to a gas stove, and you have a disaster.

So what's new over at Casa de Rock? Path, path, path, and more path (and micro). Path has this odd combination of being both 13 units and, to date, extremely interesting, plus has the whole large group of people meeting nearly daily aspect to keep me from descending into my usual lazy slugism that keeps me perpetually behind. Not sufficient to make me go to lecture, though. It takes direct and persistent professor-pressure to do that.

What does that all mean? Ishie gonna fail micro. Yes, micro, the "little" five unit class that's difficult, has notoriously nasty exams, yet ends up getting back-burnered by so very many people because 5 seems so much smaller than 13.

And on that realization, what am I going to do now? Study more pathology, of course. Last night I was so buried in tuberculosis (mmmm... caseating necrosis), that when the power and internet went out in a fell swoop, I barely noticed.

As far as power outages in Grenada go, by the way, I believe this makes two, possibly three in total I've experienced since I got here. On the plus side, I got to use my new "emergency flashlight". On the minus side, Grenada still hasn't even come close to sucking at power provision the way California-under-Gray-Davis did. Though you pay for the privilege!

Important med school tips

Brought to you by the microbiology department.

This week's subject: Black Sand Beach

Micro lab is ridiculously fun. This is largely because IT'S ACTUALLY A LAB. Most "labs" in med school constitute of sitting around a table with other people and either panicking each other with the minutia they don't know, or discussing the previous night's episode of House, Grey's Anatomy, or Lost, depending on your preference, until the clinical tutor yells at you. Sometimes, like in physio, it consists of arguing with your clinical tutor over type 1 diabetes because your professor has given you conflicting (ie: correct) information that the tutor is insisting isn't true (not you, neuro dude. You still rock). So they're not so much labs, which implies that you're getting to manipulate stuff you don't want on your clothes (at least to me), as "group study sessions", which is all well and good unless, like me, when you study you're so solitary and territorial that you not only get a single apartment largely for that reason, but consider peeing in the corners of it to keep out wolves.

But I was talking about micro lab.

In micro lab, it consists of donning scrubs and/or a lab coat and finding just how disgusting the world around you is.

First of all, the lab air. I'm going to really hope our agar plate was that nasty because a fly landed in it last week and not because I'm actually regularly breathing that shit in because otherwise my lungs are going to look like rotting hamburger meat and I'm going to bring some gnarly pathogens back to the US if I live that long.

Second of all, last week, since I've been wondering about the level of nasty at Black Sand Beach since I got to this school, I sprinted down the hill and raced BACK up the stairs to the lab solely to get a good solid sample of black sand beach funkiness.

This week, the results were in. Ewwwwww... It's telling when after sampling one of your colonies, you call over one of the circulating professor/tutors to ask what on earth you're seeing, follow up with "Would you swim here?" and they look through the microscope and go "nooooo".

It's also telling that after my run to and fro last week, I was quite literally dripping with sweat so suggested one of my other group members take her swab from my armpit, to which she replied "Ewww!" before promptly shoving the swab up her nose. Details.

NOW she tells me

"Of course, at this stage I'm not going to ask you to classify the divisions, phyla, classes, or species of these bacteria, fungi, and viruses. You need to know things like 'the bacteria are prokaryotes'."

Surrounded by about 350 flashcards, I think "great".

Call it biology major syndrome (even though I was a physical anthropology major, it's the same principle but with more monkeys). I figure, since I've known bacteria were prokaryotes for so long I don't remember when I first learned it, NATURALLY I thought she wants me to spot memorize a thousand different illustrative examples of bacteria.

Given that, I do hope it stays this way, and I hope path follows. "What's this slide?" "Uh, broken kidney?" "Very good!"

Goooo Carib Cats!

And by Carib Cats, I mean us, not the catamaran of the same name.

We hit up the weekly trivia night at Prickly Bay Marina on Tuesday, were joined by two Scotsmen who nicely filled out our knowledge gaps (a "dray" is a squirrel's home???), and took home the gold! And by "Gold", I mean a bottle of rum and four cokes to split between 6 people, making the rum to coke ratio quite high for a school night. Glurgh. We got the name after the first ten quiz questions were on cats, and "Toxoplasmosis" (any parasitologists in the house who get that reference?) was rejected by the "geek" principle, so we went with "We're drinking Carib and these are cat questions. Carib Cats."

We also got the unique honor of writing the quiz questions this Tuesday. What horrendous impending start to pathology looming over me for Monday?

Speaking of fourth term, we've started microbiology, with Pathology (the 13 unit monster) starting on Monday. So far, I like microbiology, because my biology oriented heart goes pitter pat and I already inexplicably know a lot about bacterial wall structure.

But I'm paranoid. Fourth term is supposed to be by and large, by a runaway, the worst term in medical school, probably including rotations, and is notorious for taking away your time to socialize, sleep, eat, exercise, cry into your pillow, or use the bathroom. So I'm using this week of two lectures of micro a day and a single Friday lab to wave bye bye to Grenada as I know it, and say hello to making my family and friends think that I'm dead. See you in June!