Sonic, My Love...

That's Sonic Foundry, not Sonic the Hedgehog.

I'm not sure what other terms it applies to, or if it'll apply to immunology when it starts next week, but the school has started something for Neuro and Physio that I absolutely adore.

Now, I've mentioned that they're videotaping the lectures before, but it is only in the last couple of days that I've truly been making use of this feature, and OMG, how on earth did people become doctors before this? How did I pass last term???

With this feature, not only does it tape the lectures themselves, which could seem of limited usefulness because *watching* a professor talk doesn't tend to be all that more useful than simply listening to him/her on a tape recorder, a tactic students have been making use of since... oh, the late 1400s... give or take.

BUT, the lecture slides play next to the lecture video, which then rotate in time with what the lecturer is saying. All that's missing is the little red dot of the laser pointer. You can blow up the slides to be big while the prof is talking and they still change at the appropriate intervals, or you can click on the slide to start that particular slide over... over and over and over...

Ahhhh... maybe it's just that I'm addicted to television, but it rams things in my head so much better, and that's not just for lazy lecture-skipping, but I can pause it, get drinks, or, in the cases of difficult concepts, simply keep clicking one slide over and over again to make the virtual professor repeat himself so many times that I can recite that part of the lecture, much like I can recite old quotes from the X-Files (not proud).

Of course, I was just watching a neuron lecture with Dr. House where he threatened that if we misuse Sonic by like... giving away our Angel (the interactive website for all your classes) password and letting other people view it (because non-medical students like nothing better than to watch med school lectures, because having the 'interesting' bits summed up by family members isn't mindnumbing enough), they can take it away at any time...

Please... please never take away my Sonic Foundry. Though I've only known of how absolutely incredibly cool it is lately, having it withdrawn at this stage would probably cause me to go into the sort of downward spiral as Kermit in that "Hurt" video. I'd probably keep watching a blank screen in the hopes it would come back. I would camp for weeks outside the administration office begging for a fix. I love Sonic. I love it more than nutmeg ice cream and Carib.

It's also weird that it's so well put together because with the exception of Angel, which I think actually works pretty well except for its annoying tendency to log you out after 90 minutes of "inactivity", which often consists of going through power point lectures, a lot of the school's stuff tends to produce error messages and be difficult to use, but this thing is... well, it's just awesome. I'm wiping a tear away at the thought... have I oversold this enough?

So enough with gushing about that. I am a bit behind in my lectures, which I'm trying to catch up, not helped at all by the fact that I skipped lecture today to try and catch up the very gradual sleep deficit I was building, plus I was feeling increasingly kind of icky, temperature sensitive, off feed, and antisocial so I figured I was coming down with something and took the day to kind of watch Sonic and unwind/chill/heal, also figuring I might have gotten socially overloaded and needed to hole up for a day.

Apparently not. I don't know if I have a sinus infection or what that's been causing me to feel kind of wiggy, but around 5 I flipped out from the weird prickly isolation (and fell asleep during Dr. House's lecture, causing me to have really bizzare dreams about wandering around my apartment, and sort of subliminally buried the properties of neurons into my subconscious) and ran over to Nina's apartment to eat pumpkin daal, ice cream, and drink tea. She's gotta blog too.

So that's all good, and I'm about to head for bed... I have yet another final exam on Monday (damn these two week classes!) but it's for community health, which is really hard to be passionate about, because for the most part I've just been preached at to not smoke... which I don't, but after having it so completely shoved in my face for the past two weeks, I'm thinking about taking it up. Some of the profs have been okay, but in the meantime it seems more like... well, evangelizing political beliefs to a captive audience. Can't wait for that final. I suppose it's karma for bitching about ethics so much.

What's weird is that the best class I've had so far for community and preventative health was parasitology. While it could be a bit scattered, it was incredibly interesting (and disgusting), relevant, and without being preachy, showed a direct cause/effect relationship between community health improvement (even more than smoking, 9 out of 10 doctors recommend not defecating in your water supply) and the, in some cases, overwhelming positive effects certain control programs have had on certain communities. Parasitology actually got me excited about the huge numbers of people that could be helped through simple action. Community health gets me excited by the prospect that if I pass the exam on Monday, I don't have to deal with the class anymore.

It just has a tendency to piss me off (who me?). Oh, and in a crowning moment, while public health is apparently the only *real* medicine, most of us are going to specialize because of the money. Excuse me??? First of all, I believe the majority of SGU grads go into primary care. Correct me if I'm wrong. Second of all, what was that, QUARTER MILLION DOLLAR school? Money bad? Someone's doing something for money? Third, there are plenty of reasons to specialize besides money... like perhaps liking that field of medicine a lot and excelling at it. If you're good at cutting things and anatomy, and bad at statistics and financial planning, maybe public health *shouldn't* be in your future. But being in a graded class and being told essentially that we're all in it for the money? Not cool.

Oh, and don't smoke. Because smoking is bad. And I can't believe that there are students that smoke on campus that want to be doctors because smoking is bad, and doctors never do things that are bad for themselves, but especially not smoking... because smoking is bad, and should have extra taxes put on it, and people who smoke should be fixed so they don't pass on their deleterious broken smoking genes to other people. Okay, maybe I made that last part up.

But if you're knocked up and miss your obstetrics appointments, it's society's fault. Unless you're also a smoker. Then, you probably missed your obstetrics appointment to score cigarettes.

Did I mention I'm not a fan? Teach it like parasit, dammit! Or, I can't believe I'm saying this, bring back the patient interview part of clinical skills. That was actually useful.

Neuro and Physio are kind of running into each other which is cool, because it creates an inherent redundancy that gives me a "I've heard this before" feeling of deja vu for material that you've only recently covered, which really helps me enforce the material, a particularly good thing since the overlapping bits are the scary physics bits. It also means that I'm hoping it'll make me a little less "behind" in the material.

Neuro also has weekly small groups which to me are intrinsically more helpful than a lot of the other small groups were for me last term (which may have more to do with the fact they're in the afternoon rather than content), and we get to do case studies, which I like. Wernicke's aphasia (you can speak fluently but you talk gibberish so no one can understand you) sucks more than polar bear worms, though I don't have a cute graphic for it. We also play with the plastic brains, not only nice for visualizing three dimensional structures, but you get to play Hannibal Lecter with them. What?

Beach and wine!

The perfect combination!! This is another short entry because it's late and I have class tomorrow, and I've been busy all day pre-studying for the new classes beginning tomorrow, if "pre studying" consists of hanging out at the beach all day draped in Grenadian children, and then shedding said children and bumming out at the wine bar drinking Chenin Blanc.

Verdict: Parasit... rocked it... I am now an asswormologist. If you have explosive parasitic diarrhea, well, I can tell you how much it's going to suck. A useful skill, to be sure.

Genetics... we don't have the results yet, but I feel good about how the exam went. I had trouble sleeping (as always) but didn't feel panicky or horrible this time and it was only one night, I did the exam carefully, and thought that it was really fair and much less horrible than I expected.

What's weird and a little concerning is that most people either thought it was really pretty easy or insanely difficult. There isn't really a middle ground of "eh" people (at least that I saw), and that's a bit of a concern. I didn't think it was bad, but wondering if I missed some sinister effect. But hopefully, we'll see tomorrow.

For now, it's bedtime!

Finals already?

Eep! Parasit in the morning!

On the plus side, no more pictures of Ascaris worms in the near future!

More on polar bears...

Which of course, are the #1 threat in the Caribbean.

A bit of advice... and you can trust me on this, because when I'm in the States, now that I'm a medical student, people treat me like I'm a Real Doctor(tm)...

If you're ever in the Arctic and kill a polar bear, after Greenpeace gets done with you, do NOT, and I can't emphasize this enough, undercook, and then eat it. And don't think freezing it will help (which seems to be done by nature of it being a polar bear in the first place), because it won't. Trichinella nativa can survive freezing, so if you eat undercooked polar bear (or arctic fox), you'll still get larval cysts in your muscles... if the polar bear you eat happens to have been affected, which considering there's like 20 of them left, I'm not sure what the odds on that would be.

So consider this a public service announcement from me through my parasitology class. Please... please don't let your children eat undercooked polar bear.



You're welcome.

Bad Blogger

Yes, I'm still using the word "blog" despite the current chic hatred of it to describe things that are, by best definitions "blogs" since they lack better definitions.

So I haven't been updating all that much, at least not for all that's been going on, because well, all that's been going on!

Parasitology and genetics, as mentioned previously, are cool little two week classes that then deliver a final right in your third week. Pressure's on, baby! It's nice because you're only focusing on those two, so I'll tell you a little bit about them before bed.

Genetics is apparently highly variable, with some terms being really easy and interesting, and others having dull instructors and insanely difficult tests, so your mileage may vary. I don't want any angry emails.

Our instructor this term is a pretty cool guy from Newfoundland (that's an accent I haven't heard) who seems to do some solid genetics review without attacking anything too suicide-inducingly difficult. Now, the test may prove that wrong, but so far, I'm enjoying it well enough, particularly since the instructor likes to pepper his slideshow with oddities like Gattica movie posters and weird Radioactive Man style comics from the 50s where everyone has giant heads, like they've been infected by Toxoplasmosis as fetuses. Feti?

Which brings me to parasitology. Parasit is a bit scattered, and definitely high yield with a very lot of information crammed into a not very lot of time, but personally, I find it fascinating, perhaps even fascinating enough to investigate more thoroughly if I didn't think such an approach could land me dying near stagnant water by worms exploding out of my orifices, which is definitely on the top ten list of ways I don't want to go.

The instructor is cool, from Kenya, has done endless amounts of work in a bunch of countries, and fills his lectures full of interesting stories, like the 3-legged DDT carrying donkey that fell in a river and cured the village below of river blindness by wiping out the fly population (no word on what drinking DDT did to the villagers though), or the way in which the "Don't Feed Cysts to Dogs" song was passed on through 1000 miles of African villagers as a method of preventing cystic hydatid disease, which causes your liver to swell up with disgusting giant cysts until you look like you're pregnant with twin sets of quintuplets... if quintuplets were WORMS!!!

In the death and misery department, the little stuff seems to have the medal, but in the "holy crap, that's disgusting department", we've been studying nematodes for the past couple of days, thus reinforcing the list of countries I'd pretty much decided against ever visiting back in high school biology when I first got an inkling these awful creatures existed.

The only problem with parasitology (other than being high yield, thus high study time), is that it makes you intensely paranoid. I did perfectly well in Grenada for a term, but on day 2 of parasitology, sent the SOS email: DEAR MOM: SEND FILTERS WITH MESH OF FOUR MICRONS OR LESS... NOW!!!!

And no, Grenada doesn't have the really frightening exotic illnesses, but even a lecture on the complications of dysentery is enough to make anyone run for the nearest brita filter.

I'm still in "med student" mode though. Parasit is right before lunch, and after watching a series of slides in which giant Ascaris worms were shown both as "pooped" spaghetti, and, in horror movie fashion, crawling out of a sleeping/comatose girl's nose and mouth simultaneously, my response was: "So... lunch?"

To my credit, lunch did NOT consist of spaghetti.

if you google "Ascaris" you can find some appetizing pictures, though I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't have a strong stomach, and should be sufficient to scare most people off any field of medicine that comes within a 50 mile radius of those things... Unfortunately, they're relatively common... So just climb in your bubble, stop eating meat, uncooked vegetables, drinking water, playing in soil, or being bitten by bugs, and move to Alaska... but stay away from polar bears... they have parasites too (and big giant teeth and bad tempers, but it's the parasites that'll get you).

Biochem tomorrow

So I finally get to conquer my demons and be done with them.

I feel really really well prepared for this exam, and I think I can say with confidence (which seems like an oxymoron) that I feel like if I can't pass the exam with the amount of work that I've done, practically no one could... not because I'm any kind of genius, but just because I've worked SO hard, done so many flashcards, incorporated so many ideas, that I currently feel like if suddenly tests were put in front of me, I'd do a heck of a lot better in biochem than I would in anatomy, and hey, no embryo.

I still have the stomach jitters... no twitchy sleepless crying jag sorts of things but a general unwell, lightheaded nervous stomach that comes and goes, that I'm hoping gets knocked out permanently with the test tomorrow.

It's not simply a matter of whether I pass or fail or any of that; I simply don't LIKE feeling the stress sick. It's decidedly unpleasant regardless of the outcome, and I think by learning to get over it and deal with it, I'll be a lot happier in medical school and a lot happier in my future career as a doctor. But I think I'm okay, and I think I'll be okay. The fact that I've already slept the last two nights and have eaten perfectly regularly up to this point already puts me FAR ahead of the disastrous end to last term. I'm beating this bitch, one way or another.

I wasn't ballsy enough to do Carnival/Spicemas today because I needed flashcard review, but doing the Carnival parade yesterday (pictures pending) put me on much better terms with the island again, and I remembered that I actually do like this place quite a lot, and there's no other experience like it, and being terminally pissed off for the next year and a half, even when given fairly good reason, is a waste of energy. Anything can be either an amazing time, a learning experience, or a reason to appreciate what's ahead, or perhaps a combination of all of them, and though I know there's going to be times where I'm miserable, like I said above, I think I'm okay right now... I'll give more details on yesterday at a later date, because it's not really going with the flow of my thoughts right now, which are more in the direction of prostacyclin (keeps the blood cyclin'), due to the cards I've been studying.

I went to class this morning, registration restrictions be damned, and genetics doesn't seem like it'll be too bad (we did mitosis/meiosis today) and parasitology not only seems like a class that lends itself to flashcards, but seems fascinating, if disgusting. We do more in parasitology than most American medical schools, but considering I like weird things that do weird stuff, and am thinking in a Doctors without Borders direction, it seems highly relevant and pretty cool, so it doesn't bother me that we're taking it. I'm bummed that I have to miss tomorrow's classes to take the exam, since so far I like both instructors for the courses, but I've got friends backing me up, so it should be all good.

I'm going to pass the exam, and I'm going to finally be a *real* second termer, so that's saying something.