Arrived!

So after a potential catastrophe (in which I had not gotten any emails from Delta about my flight, so I called the military's travel agency who had "booked" my flight, and found out that somehow they had not finalized my flight, so the airline cancelled the reservation after 72 hours.....and then thankfully they re-booked it and all was well) I got on a plane and off I went to Atlanta, caught a connection to Montgomery. I almost dind't make that flight because we were delayed a bit because of too much traffic around Atlanta. I was terrified I was going to have to sprint across terminals to get to my next flight. I asked the flight attendant if she knew what the liklihood of my connection being in the same terminal was, and she checked the delta app on her phone and told me it was like 2 gates over. Thank. You. God. So I made that flight.

I found someone from our COT class facebook group on my flight, and we met another girl in the airport, and took a cab over to base, then met again in the lobby of our on-base hotel to see if we could find some FOOD because it was almost 9 by then. A large group of people from the facebook group had already been out to dinner but that was hours ago. We were asking the lady at the front desk where we might eat, and a woman overheard us and offered to drive us over to the Subway that was just off base. It wasn't that far but apparently Montgomery is NOT a safe place to walk by yourself...pretty much ever, and especially at night. So we were like umm....wow, thanks! So we find out she is an E9 (E = enlisted, 9 = the number that comes after 8, and 7, and 6..) which means she is the highest enlisted rank in the Air Force. And she's picking up a bunch of absolute nobodies and bringing us to McDonalds (Subway was closed). Clearly, we are not in New York. This be the south.

On that note, I am having a major language barrier issue here. I couldn't understand half of what our cab driver was saying, or 90% of what the girl at McDonald's was saying, and half of what the front desk hotel people were saying. It's really bad. I have to say "I'm sorry?" a million times per conversation. I feel really bad...but i really just have no idea what you are saying, could you please repeat yourself 50 times? Welcome to the deep south. Thanks.

Anyway. So we got our food and brought it back to the hotel and ate in the lobby waiting for our other facebook friends to arrive, which a few did, and 7 of us sat around and hung out for a while. Good times.


Tomorrow morning we're going to to go Waffle House at 10 and plan to report in at 12 (we are supposed to go between 9 and 3. We don't want to be overachievers or slackers, so we are going at the exact middle).
So that's it! I'm off to sleep my last sleep that doesn't end with someone kicking on my door at 4:30 for a while. Good night!

Going to USAF COT

As if the med school acronyms weren't enough, I now get to deal with all the military ones. There might even be more military acronyms than med school ones.

So obviously I've been slacking the med school blogging...suffice it to say that I finished first year and I was very happy with my grades and wahoo wahoo finally done.

Anyway.
On Sunday I'll be heading to Montgomery, Alabama, to Maxwell Air Force Base to go through 4 weeks of Commissioned Officer Training.  Did I mention that it's going to be 100000 degrees and 99% humidity like the entire time? This is made worse only by the fact that I will be wearing long pants, combat boots, and a long-sleeved "blouse" ( = camo jacket) the entire time.

COT a lot of classroom stuff, where they teach us about the Air Force, a lot of leadership training, working in teams, problem solving, obstacle courses, sort of stuff, learning how to march and parade, and some PT (physical training).

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page http://www.afoats.af.mil/OTS/COT-RCOT/admin_items.asp
then you can see what a typical day's schedule looks like.

I'm going to try to blog through the whole thing, but as you can see we are up rather early in the morning and not so early to sleep as to make up for the 4:30 wakeup time. So I'll do my best but no guarantees.

I'm excited to finally start this Air Force journey and finally go and get a clue what on earth I'm doing!
I've already connected with several people who will be in my class, and it looks like it's going to be a fun group!

So right now I have printed out a million copies of all the paperwork an documentation I'll need, bought and had altered (about $200 worth of alterations...that's how short I am!) lots of uniform, obsessively read blogs and official documents about COT and the AF, memorized some random creeds/songs/lists of words, so hopefully I'm as ready as I can be. No matter what I do It'll be a culture-shock experience I'm sure. But I'm ready!

Completely Random, why is this bothering me?

Ignore this post, it's stupid and boring and irrelevant to everything you have ever seen, heard, thought about, or cared about.


Last Thursday I went to the gym.
I left my ID card there.
A friend of mine sent me a text saying I had left it there and it was at the security booth.
I was gone for the weekend so I left it there and just remembered to get it today, since yesterday was crazy.

I went to the booth and told the security guard that I'd left my ID in the gym and someone had brought it here.

When did you leave it?
me: Thursday.
him: Where?
me: in the gym.
him: no, that's not what happened.
me: confused look
him: you gave it to someone. you sholdn't give your ID to other people.
me: um...no I didn't.
him: yes you did. You gave it to that girl, who doesn't live on campus, so that she could use the fitness center.
me: no...I went to the gym and I left it there. my friend texted me that it was here, and she even lives on campus so she wouldn't need to do that
him: insists that this is not the case
me: maybe you've got me confused with one of the other ID cards you have?
him: (obnoxiously asks me if I am this other guy whose card he has)
me: no, I'm not a man.
him: well it was you. you shouldn't do that.
me: well I don't know what you're talking about...I assure you it wasn't me....
him: not convinced, says something patronizing and I walk away.

Now....this is weird.

Also...this shouldn't really bother me. Because I'm not in trouble. and this guy doesn't know me from a hole in the wall and has no reason to think I would or wouldn't be doing something I'm not supposed to be doing. why on earth should I care what the security guard thinks of me?
I shouldn't.
but for some reason, It's really frustrating that this guy thinks I did something I didn't do...even if it's not a big deal. I don't know why, but it really bothers me that this guy was reprimanding me for something I didn't do...maybe what bothers me more is that he refused to believe me when I said I had no clue what he was talking about.

I was seriously tempted to get out my phone and show him the text message that said "hey the security booth has your ID you left in the gym" on my way back from the gym, but I thought that would be weird so I didn't do it.

But it still bothers me.

This Block of Med School Brought to You By...NOTHING.

I'm not taking any classes this block. (basically.) I have FCM (foundations of clinical medicine) which includes biostatistics, ethics, community and preventative medicine, and "the integrated clinical encounter", in which we learn how to do doctor things like look in people's ears and eyes. But that's maximum of 1 day/week and relatively laid back.

So what have I been doing with myself while everyone else goes to class and has exams?
An excellent question. I'm not really sure.
I've transcribed a few lectures, gone home for some random things, signed up for online Top Chef University cooking classes (thanks groupon!), pretended to do some research for my literature review...but mostly just procrastinated and whittled away time reading about the air force or about surgery or about...I don't even know...on the internet.

Every now and then I go to class...partly because I get bored, partly because it's sometimes interesting, and partly because I have to take the biochem tests (but as a group with the other people doing the same thing as me)

The whole hurricane we didn't lose power...but randomly a week and a half later the whole campus lost power at 11-ish one night. So everyone went outside or stood on their balconies and it was the weirdest, most surreal thing ever. It's pitch black outside except for the flashlights...and basically everyone started drinking. People were wandering around the courtyard double fisting beer and just wandering around talking to people. We hung out on the balcony for a while and then went inside and played Uno and ate popcorn by candlelight. The next morning I went to class just to see what it would be like with only backup generators. It wasn't that exciting, we just used a non-mounted-on-the-ceiling projector...they brought in stand-alone speakers with extension cords and microphones and we had class pretty much as usual.

I think the most entertaining thing about all of that was how incredibly excited everyone was when the power went out. It was like we had an excuse not to do any work and we were all just going to hang out and have fun together and recreate all those childhood memories of sitting around in the dark house coming up with things to do besides watch TV.

AIR FORCE!

One day I randomly got a phone call from my Air Force recruiter saying they are having another board and am I still interested? I'm like ummmmm yes. I didn't know what that meant, because I was told I had a number, which made me think there was a ranked list and they would just pull people off of it as spots became available. but if that was the case, why would they need a board meeting? So I was just as information-less as before.

Then a couple of weeks later someone I had never heard from and have never since heard from left me a voice mail saying "The Air Force is prepared to offer you a scholarship". So I jumped on that one.

And then it was official! I was offered the HPSP scholarship! :-D

So happiness ensued. I went and signed some papers saying i still have never been arrested, still have not done any illegal drugs, and have not gotten any tattoos or been hospitalized for any deadly disease since last time I signed papers saying such. Then I got fingerprinted...in Applebees...and my stuff was sent off to the FBI so they could do a background check and make sure I haven't done anything bad ever. I haven't.

My recruiter told me that I should think of a cool/interesting place to get commissioned and he'd make it happen. Cool beans. After much thought and idea tossing out from myself and others, I decided to commission at Federal Hall, in Manhattan, where George Washington was inaugurated. It was gonna be cool

Unfortunately due to the hurricane, things got messed up, schedules got flipped around, and the powers that be decided everyone had to get commissioned by the end of the week. So I got a phone call on a Monday and my recruiter goes "Hey, wanna commission by Friday?" and I'm like, "I'm sorry, what?"
So We ended up pushing it back to the following Monday because it was not going to work getting my grandparents there on Friday.

So This past weekend I went to Boston-ish to visit some friends, and then sped back to NY to get to the office (short notice = couldn't finish the necessary official things that needed to be done to get Federal Hall) to commission.

Soooo yesterday, I was sworn in as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Air Force. Wahoo!
By a Navy officer. ha.
It was funny, because they didn't have any 2Lt bars to pin on me. My recruiter searched far and wide and made lots of phone calls but nobody had anything but 1Lt bars. So I got pinned silver bars instead of the gold "butter bars" as they call them, and we just pretended they were gold. ALSO, funnily, the certificate they printed out for me said 1st Lieutenant as well. Accidentally, again. Apparently someone somewhere thinks I should really be a 1st Lt. I can't say I would mind the upgrade.

And then we had ice cream cake at the office, and then we went out to dinner and stuffed ourselves further.

It's incredibly strange to me what is happening here. I have been in the AF for just over one day. I have literally no idea what I am doing. I don't even know how to salute. It was a highly entertaining little episode when my recruiter saluted me, and then had to teach me how to salute him back...and I'm supposedly "above" him. I outrank people who have been doing their jobs expertly for almost as long as I've been alive, in some cases. And I'm clueless.  It's very weird and despite the higher rank, quite humbling, actually. Like...it really is an honor to lead people who have spent their whole lives serving their country, especially when I compare what they've done to how green I am at this whole thing. I have a lot of respect for people who can give respect to and take orders from a person they know is relatively clueless. It kind of drives me to be better at whatever I'm doing, so that I'm actually coming closer to deserving the position. Probably one of the worst things I could do is get a false sense of superiority.

Except in one scenario.
My little brother is in the Army ROTC. On the occasion that both he and I are in uniform, he is technically supposed to salute me. And say "good morning ma'am" if we walk past each other. I cannot WAIT to pull rank on my brother.

But everyone else I still feel like I should be saluting them rather than vice versa.


So the plan from here is...finish the year of school. This summer I will head down to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, for a month of Commissioned Officer Training. Yep. 4 weeks in Alabama in July. Not looking forward to that.
I did survive in the desert of Africa.
But deserts are dry. Alabama is probably humid.
I'll get over it.
Right now all I am is excited and I can't wait to go get my uniform(s) and I am wasting(?) a lot of time on the internet trying to learn all the random tidbits I can via blogs and what not, about COT and the air Force and HPSP.

October?

It appears I haven't posted since the end of September. OOPS!

Let's recap the months.
October
We did limbs in anatomy. I LOVED that block. Most people hated it. The lowest averages for both the practical exam and the written were achieved for the extremities block, but I got my highest grades of the year for that block. Yey.

I have my google calendar opened so I can see what I did. ha.

I went on a CMDA retreat! The greater NYC area chapter of CMDA had a retreat up in the Adirondacks and they sent out a request for people to work in childcare while the parents went to the retreat. So I don't really have any great love for watching large numbers of children at once, but I figured it would be nice to get away and see the Adirondacks at the height of fall leaves changing and meet some doctors and help give them a break to have some relaxed adult time.

It was overall a really great experience. I drove up with 2 young doctors who were both 5 years out of residency. It was incredibly interesting listening to their stories and perspectives on things...I felt like I was a little kid listening in on my parents' adult conversation. I didn't have anything productive to add but I was like "ooh, so this is what real doctors' conversations sound like!" Ha. I ended up rooming with a girl who is a 3rd year medical student who was on her surgery rotation at the time. (everyone who found this out was incredulous that she managed to get away for the weekend, including her) So that was nice, because I got to pick her brain a little bit about what it was like.

I felt really bad for the kids because we had the 0-4 year olds, in a room that had skee ball and 2 air hockey and 2 foosball tables ...which would have been super fun for 10 year olds, but these kids couldn't even see over the air hockey table. So it was interesting trying to entertain them, but somehow we managed.

The speaker for the weekend is (was?) a missionary surgeon. Unfortunately since I was watching the kids I didn't get t hear him, but I went and bought a couple of the books he wrote...I have yet to read them though.

Other things happened...but either I can't remember them or I can't remember when they happened so I'm not going to write about it in the October post. :-P

Oh yeah, I have a blog

I legitimately forgot about this blog for a little bit until the other day.

So anatomy!
and histo!

I love them both.

We've had 2 anatomy exams so fa - the thorax, and then the abdominopelvic cavity. I liked the thorax. As we got through the abdominopelvic cavity, I LOVED the thorax. But as time went on I've learned to love the abdomen too. maybe not the pelvic cavity.

It's incredible to me how we're basically mapping out the body in 3d in our brains. like, everything that anatomists have bothered naming, we're establishing an awareness of it, where it is compared to everything else...I could close my eyes and layer-by-layer put the body together in my head. So awesome.

We had a small group session where radiologists came in and showed us slide shows normal and abnormal cat scan images and taught us how to figure out where we were and what we were looking at and diagnose some simple stuff. I thought to myself "this is pretty awesome, I could do radiology, it's fun!"
The next day in lecture we watched video clips of surgery and instantly I was like "nope. no radiology" I would never be able to look at those films, diagnose stuff, and let someone else go and fix it. I'd die.

maybe that excludes me from ER too. they do a lot of diagnosing and sending patients to the specialists for treatment. whatever. that's another ongoing debate.

Histo! I'm teaching it and I love it. That's pretty much it. I liked it the first time, I love remembering the things that confused me for a long time until I figured them out, and explaining them to other people at the beginning, and hoping that they get to be un-confused earlier than I was.

I've been watching that show New York Med for like...a day. I watched 5 episodes last night and i LOVED it. They blurred out a lot of the gore which was mildly disappointing, but they're showing you awesome cases and they spend a lot of time talking to the residents and nurses and patients. It's incredible getting inside their heads and seeing what they're going through from both sides. Parents about to send their kids in for major heart surgery, people going in for surgeries that they may or may not survive, watching them say bye to their families not knowing if they will make it off the table-it's an incredible thing to see.

It also petrifies me. That's a LOT of responsibility. To be the one who's taking that person who is praying that wasn't the last time they ever hug their spouse into an operating room and have the ability to save their life is incredible...but the idea that one small mistake, or even one small thing that couldn't have been prevented, could be the end. AAAAAAh

thankfully everything in medicine is done in baby steps.

Week Two? What?

Apparently this is the 2nd week. ONLY THE 2nd WEEK?? Craziness.

we have an exam Monday on 2 full weeks' worth of stuff. That's incredible that only 2 weeks gives you enough stuff to have 2 practicals and 2 written exams.

Anatomy:
We're starting in the thorax. We have dissected the muscles of the chest, opened it up and removed the heart and lungs, and looked at a boatload of nerves, vessels, membranes, etc. inside the thorax. It's pretty awesome. My cadaver is, we're pretty convinced, the best one. He was pretty old and incredibly skinny when he died, which has made the dissection much simpler than the other groups who have a lot more fat to remove and get in the way everywhere.  He had lung cancer, probably from smoking, judging by the blackness of his lungs. People really should NOT SMOKE. It gets really, really nasty inside your chest, and your lungs will start sticking to the walls of your chest and that is not what you want.
Anyway.

TAing histo lab was one of the most fun things I've done this week (and that's saying a LOT seeing how much I LOVE dissecting!) - I'm in a room of 24 students with a professor who knows a lot but doesn't talk much, so I pretty did whatever I wanted. A group of students had to present a powerpoint slide summarizing the lab, that they were given, and then everyone just has to go through the slides the lab manual tells them and find the structures they're supposed to find. I spent the whole time running around the room bouncing from person to person answering "BIG" questions that I remember having last year, that seem like nothing to me now. It was a lot of fun being able to teach people stuff I loved learning myself.

We put up black contact paper on a wall in our apartment, so now we have a giant chalkboard, basically, in our living room and we've been drawing stuff all over it to study. It's pretty much the 2nd most awesome thing ever to grace a wall. The first being this other painting I have that I absolutely love.

Also, I HATE embryology. I cannot wrap my brain around it. It doesn't make any sense to me. I CANNOT visualize what's going on...the process of this growing out of there, migrating up here and turning into the heart 8 months later...not sticking to my brain. ugh.

This week in med school

-failed attempts to hear a heart murmer on the roommate who knows she has a heart murmer
-failed attempts to all study anatomy together while TV is on
-failed attempt to use an opthalmoscope on each other.

this is gonna be great.

First Day of Medical School!!!

Wahoo!
Today was my first official real day of medical school!
The day that I've been waiting for basically my entire life.
I keep thinking how it compares to the olympics. I'm closely following the gymnastics and the girls keep talking about how they've been working their whole lives for this one moment and they have to go do their thing now that they've prepared for so many years for it. It's sort of like that except that this is not the end, this is not the glory part...but I have been thinking about/imagining/anticipating/working for this day my whole life. Instead of every 4 years, this is going to take a full 4 years. And at the end I will be awarded "doctor" but that still doesn't mean squat (in the medical field. Lay people will be impressed but to everyone else, I'll be the most clueless person around for another while)

We've been having orientation since Sunday, so I've met a bunch of people in my class, started being friends with some of them, hoping not to see too much of others...:-P (kidding. sort of.)

I have 3 new roommates and they are great and we are all getting along great and nobody is really weird or really dirty or anything like that. so it should be good. :-p
But I still miss Nitasha! It's WEIRD being here without her!

The feeling of "Oh no everything is new and I'm alone" that i had in college and last year here is not present this year...since many things are the same, and a couple people from my program last year are here as well. So it's been a much nicer transition than others I've had.

TODAY I MET MY CADAVER. The man who donated his body to the medical school so that I could learn anatomy, so that I can be a doctor, so that I could practice medicine, so that I could save people's lives. It was not as unsettling as I was afraid it might be to see the body for the first time. The face, hands, and feet are wrapped up partly to keep them from drying out, and partly to keep the situation a little more removed from the reality of the facts - next week we're going to open up a human body and take a look inside. Therefore, it's easy for the brain to just file it away as fake, I guess. I'm sure as time goes on it will sink in a bit more.  We didn't do any cutting today, just sort of got an intro to the lab, and then headed downstairs for lecture.

We got an intro to histology, which I'm (YEY!!!) TA-ing this year, and then an intro to anatomy, and then 2 anatomy lectures. The first one was mostly stuff that wasn't new to me...definitions of anterior/posterior, medial/lateral, and all that jazz, and then we started on the thorax - vertebrae, the names of all the different parts of the vertebrae, ribs, how the ribs are attached to the vertebrae and then the sternum, the muscles of the rib cage, the blood vessels and nerves supplying the rib cage...it was fun! I love that I have to learn this stuff now!

And then I came home and decided that since it's Friday I was going to veg out a little bit so one of my roommates and I watched White Collar. Because it's an awesome show.  I'm sure this won't last long.