My last blog post ever...if the world is going to end on Saturday, that is.

GET EXCITED!
In case you are not one of the TWENTY FOUR people who liked my facebook status informing people of this, I will tell you.
I have decided to do a masters of biomedical science starting this August.
I got an email from them Wednesday night saying I they reached a decision. So of course the email took like 4 minutes longer than it should have to load. I read it and saw it was just telling me to go to the application website to find my decision. SOOOO I went there and saw where it said “application status: submitted” and I don’t know WHY but that made my heart skip a bead with dread. Maybe because it’s such an institutional sort of phrase it felt like a “no”? But then I realized that that phrase meant nothing to me, and scrolled down to the place where there was a link to find out your decision. I clicked on that and it loaded me a PDF letter saying “we are pleased to inform you….”. I did a small happy dance (very small...I didn’t even stand up) and then called my mom. I realized it was Thursday so she wouldn’t pick up her phone because she’d be at work. Then I realized it actually wasn’t Thursday and she would pick up her phone. Which she did, and she was excited. Then I called my Dad and he was excited too. So while I was on the phone with him I decided to just stop prolonging the inevitable and do the online acceptance of the acceptance.

Because for the past couple of days I’ve reeeeeeally been leaning towards this program because…
1. 45 minutes to my house makes weekends, laundry, home-cooked dinners, brother’s athletic events, family birthdays, etc. SO easy to get home for.
2. Trimesters give me the opportunity to get grades out a month earlier than a semester system would
3. Guaranteed on-campus housing for that program
4. You take 4 of the 6 1^st-year med school programs, and then get the opportunity to test out of them and TA them if you go to the med school next year
5. And some other things but those are the big decision-makers.
As you see, the first thing on my mind really was being close to home..enough that I could just be there whenever I wanted to. Because after living 7 time zones away for 6 months, I really love that idea.

So orientation is the end of the 1^st week in August, and we start classes early, right after that. I might end up missing orientation or part of it to go to a friend’s wedding in North Carolina, but I’m so excited for the wedding and seeing the original old Cornell gang again that I don’t really care. J

The clinic:
There was a guy who came in moaning in pain holding his eyes and stomping his feet from pain. I thought he had something IN his eye but it turns out he was welding, and looked at that REALLY BRIGHT light the welding machine or whatever it’s called makes…the one my dad has informed me 5000 times that I shouldn’t look at or I could burn my retina. Welcome to Kenya, where OSHA doesn’t care if you wear goggles or not while welding. Because some other guy came in the next day with some eye issues because he’d gotten shrapnel in his eye a few weeks ago, had it removed, but was still having problems with pain and watering. WEAR GOGGLES!
There was a baby who had a seizure in the clinic…which was common for the baby, who’d gotten meningitis and since then has had a seizure…but I was on the other side of the curtain at just the WRONG time and only heard it and didn’t see it. When I went back in the room one of his eyes was rolling around not like the other one.
There was another lady that day who had pneumonia, typhoid, AND an amoeba. She got a LOT of drugs.
Speaking of, I think they overprescribe antibiotics here. They make sure they tell people to finish the doses otherwise you can create resistance, but I really don’t think half the things they give antibiotics for need antibiotics. Sometimes just the allergy meds are enough, ya know!?
There was a 46 yr. old woman who had not gotten her period for 8 years and then all of a sudden it came back..with a vengeance…the day she came into the clinic
Then there were these people who came and sat on the bench outside the clinic. I stuck my head out and told them to come in, they said they were just gonna wait a minute. Naomi was like “they just want to rest a little before they come in, it’s ok” and I laughed because I cannot picture anyone in the US intentionally waiting longer than they had to for…anything, and certainly not to see a doctor.
So after a full HOUR they left, came back, and finally came in. While I was asking the woman her name and such, a woman came in and went to the lab in the back, Jonah came in and ushered the sick woman into the lab, and me and Rachel and Naomi out of the clinic. I’m like ummmm what is going on?
Apparently this woman is HIV+, her husband is a drunkard, and she had a baby that died. I don’t know if it was stillborn, or died shortly after birth from AIDS, or lived a while and then died, but this whole thing was an intervention to get her to talk to a counselor.
I don’t know under what premise they got her to the clinic, because she’d been refusing to get out of bed, but we all just wandered around the church compound for a while and when we got back they were gone, so I don’t know what happened there, but that’s a sad, tough situation. :-/

Yesterday I got the following information from Danny:
I am leaving Limuru next weekend, the 28^th-ish. I’ll go stay at their house for a couple of days until June 2^nd, when I will go stay with someone named Kathy for 2 weeks while I work at the new clinic that’s being built. The 2^nd week of that stay there’s going to be a team from Chicago coming to do a week-long free clinic at the new site, so I’ll be involved in that. Then that weekend (June 19^th-ish) We are all going on a Safari! WOO HOO! And then I will come back and I think work at the other clinic in Nairobi for a couple of weeks before a team from Australia comes and we go camping in the REMOTE bush in the middle of nowhere in the desert of northern Kenya. I’ve been told by another Kenyan “the people up there are so primitive they don’t even wear clothes” should be an interesting “last hurrah” experience, because a week after that I LEAVE to come back HOME.
now…it’s still 2 months away, but the fact/realization that I can break up the rest of my time here into a few short chunks of time (2 weeks here, 2 weeks there, la de da) makes it seem SO close!
This is one of those times of life where I have to concentrate on the right now because there are still SO MANY more awesome experiences to have each day before I get to the big things like the safari and camping in the bush and coming home.
Also, apparently Kathy is a missions administrator…I don’t know if she’s a missionary or Kenyan…I’ve not heard the name Kathy here so I think she’s American but I don’t know. I’ll let you all know when I find out. :-P

Yesterday and today when the light got turned on at 6am when the kids woke up, I had the same thought: “I am facing up. Why am I facing up?” (wed) or “See!? (I don’t know WHO I was telling to “see…)I’m facing up again. Why am I on my back?”(today). I don’t know 1. Why I keep winding up on my back when I cannot ever remember waking up on my back before…especially when I can never fall asleep while lying on my back no matter how tired I am and 2. How I actually have the presence of mind to notice and wonder about these things in such a state. Although maybe my “such a state” is why I wonder about these things. I am so strange…

If the world ends on Saturday this will probably have been my last blog post, so I hope you enjoyed it. If not, I might just make another post on Saturday night, depending on how eventful the day is.
Today I was told “you white people say crazy things” because the guy who was on the news trying to convince the world that we were going to end was white. I didn’t disagree with her, because I have heard some crazy things come out of white people’s mouths. :-p