Ok I got it now.

Here's what inspired the last post:
Book, Devotional Classics by Richard J. Foster and James Byron Smith. Chapter...i don't know. Excerpts from Frank Laubach (a missionary to the Philippines in the early 1900s)'s letters to (doesn't say)

he saaaays:
"Two years ago a profound dissatisfaction let me to begin trying to line up my actions with the will of God about every fifteen minutes or every half hour. Other people to whom I confessed this intention said it was impossible. I judge from what I have said that few people are trying even that. But this year I have started out trying to life all my waking moments in conscious listening to the inner voice, asking without ceasing, 'What, Father, do you desire said? What do you desire done this minute?'"

One week later
"For the past few days I have been experimenting in a more complete surrender tan ever before. I am taking by deliberate act of will, enough time from each hour to give God much thought. Yesterday and today I have made a new adventure, which is not easy to express. I am feeling God in each movement, by an act of will - willing that He shall direct these fingers that now strike this typewriter - willing that He shall pour through my steps as I walk - willing that He shall direct my words as I speak, and my very jaws as I eat!
You will object to this intense introspection. Do not try it, unless you feel unsatisfied with your own relationship with God, but at least allow me to realize all the leadership of God I can.  I am disgusted with the pettiness and futility of my un-led self. If the way out is not more perfect slavery to God, then what is the way out? I am trying to be utterly free from everybody, free from my own self, but completely enslaved to the will of God every moment of this day."

He goes on to talk about, over the next several days/weeks, how he seems to be simply floating along at the leading of God, the way a "violin responds to the bot of the master"

I have always wanted to do this - be like this - just stop doing all the other stuff in my life and hang out with God. There have absolutely been times in my life when I've been closer to that or farther away from it. Missions trips and retreats and random "really good" weeks, when I am really focused on God and really good about spending time with Him.

 Part of me has always wanted to just quit life and become a hermit, but even if I spent all my hermit time talking to and studying and thinking about God, I don't think that's what He'd want...I think He'd want me to do more restructuring my current life - strengthening my connections to Him and things of Him at the expense of other connections the way my brain stores information at the expense of other information.

I can really only do that to a certain extent if I want to at all pass my classes. But it's an interesting thing to think about, and good food for thought, and something to lean more towards than I have been, even if I cannot actually adopt this "spend a majority of every hour meditating on God" sort of thing. I do it more. I can strengthen that connection, until it becomes easier and less effort to recall that "information". Until, as Laubach said "Now I like God's presence so much that when for a half hour or so He slips out of mind - as he does many times a day - I feel as though I had deserted Him, and as though I had lost something very precious in my life", and "to (merely) see someone is to pray for them"

Meta-learning

Disclaimer: rambling philosophical never-getting-to-the-point lies ahead. Not my fault if you're confused at the end...this is how it goes in my head and it's not my responsibility on my blog to reorganize my thoughts so they make sense to you. Who do you think you are?? I'm the only one who reads this anyway. 

Ahem hem.

Learning about learning. Metalearning. We had a lecture about learning and memory last week...so I'm sitting there trying to cram information into my brain. Information about how the brain crams information into itself. 

Pretty awesome to think about. 

What happens is that information is stored as connections. Each neuron is receiving something like 30,000 inputs form other neurons, and putting out similar amounts. (or maybe more...or less...depending on the location it really could range from 1 up to anything. Not the point.) If you see something, information goes to the visual part of your brain. When you're remembering what you saw, you're activating the same connections that were used to see it the first time. The more often you think about seeing it, the stronger those connections get. The connections for the things you saw once and never thought about again slowly get weaker and go away. Use it or lose it. 

So the more you think about stuff, the easier it gets to think about that stuff. 

The less you think about something, the harder it gets to think about it in the future. 

Problem is you tend to strengthen connections at the expense of other connections.  The information is stored in the RELATIVE strengths of connections. 

So that saying "one thing drives out another" really is true....which kind of is not a good thing for medical school, whose goal is to put a MASSIVE amount of information into your brain and get you to be able to recall ALL of it with high accuracy and speed. But they taught us, in medical school ironically, that it's really hard to do that. 

DOES ANYONE ELSE SEE THE PROBLEM HERE??? 

I've kind of known this for a while, because everyone knows the more you keep reviewing something the less likely you are to forget it. A million times I've learned stuff that I knew I'd need in the future, but after a while forgotten it, and then thought "I should have kept reviewing it!" but there is SO MUCH information that by the time I review everything I have to remember once, it's been too long and I've lost the memories from the beginning of the review. 

Buuuut, you can add more connections so you can have more connections that are strong (and more that are weak...but the point is more that are strong)

I feel like my life is the same way. The more time I spend doing anything the more I want to do it. The more I sleep the more I want to sleep, the more I'm on facebook, the more I want to facebook. The more I'm home the more I want to be home. The more I study, the more I - wait, nope. The more I study the less I want to study. ;-)

Buuuuuuuuuut you can't add more time to the day the way you can make more neuron connections. We're constantly reshuffling our time within the day, within the week, within the month, or year. Everything you do is at the expense of something else. I don't like that! 

I've realized that this is basically a rant against time. I just became sick of thinking about this so I will conclude. 

Conclusion: I can't wait until I get to Heaven and there is no time constraint and probably no forgetting and never having to choose where to invest your time, because you can do everything. 

Brought to you by the letter P

Ahem.

It SEEMS TO ME

that having an exam within the next 3 days is the best way to get me to write a blog post. I am so not in love with Neuro night now. Pathways, pathways, pathways. Starts here, goes to there, inhibits there, which inhibits there, so inhibiting the inhibition leads to activation there, and then it travels here, crosses over there, then crosses back over, over there...stupid brain. Too smart for its own good. LITERALLY.  Anyway.

P is for procrastination.
This is seriously the worst bout of studying I've ever done in my life. I don't feel ANY stress to study. Worse than last time. But we have fewer lectures, so I'm less behind  starting out than I was before, so maybe that's why.

I'm seriously beginning to wonder if my brain somehow knows exactly how long it needs to study given the time I have and the information it needs to cram in...and then is exactly as productive as it needs to be to achieve that?

Because I ALWAYS hit a wall the night before a test. This is just earlier than usual. But it's sort of like the night before a test since tomorrow is mothers' day and I'll be spending the day NOT studying, with my mother and grandmothers. Who knows.


P is for Press handstand.
"What on earth is a press handstand?", you might ask. An excellent question. I will show you a video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEy5-dQVUk0

There you go.
It's REALLY DIFFICULT to do a press handstand. Like...REALLY. But I have AAAAAALWAYS wanted to be able to do one. Since...forever. And so I decided I am going to. I've been on this kick a few times before but it's never lasted for more than a couple of days. So I am going to set GOALS this time so maybe I'll actually stick to it. There's a bunch of different drills you can do to strengthen the various muscle groups needed at different points in the handstand so I'm gonna do those a million times a day until I can get myself up into that crazy handstand. So I know my goal is really unrealistic, but I don't really operate well unless I'm under some pressure, so I'm aiming for being able to do it by June 18 when my roommate goes back to California, so I can show her before she goes. As like, a going away present or something. :-P That's about a month, and as long as that sounds....the press handstand is really hard. especially when you start from sitting. So we shall see. ;-)

Oh yes and my HPSP (Air Force) application is IN and I should be hearing back within a couple of weeks. Can't WAIT!!

Still studying...

I decided to break a (non-Africa) record and post 2 days in a row.

Studying is going much better today...that's because my stress level has increased (how weird is it that that's exciting to me? What kind of warped reality am I living in??) and also because today's topics of study are much more interesting. I'm much more inclined to enjoy memorizing the anatomy of all the different minutia of the spinal cord than learn about sensory receptors. It's the anatomy thing.

Pathways are fun too. I'm going to memorize how information gets from your fingers to your brain. Not as simple as one would think it should be. But fun to know.

We had a lecture on the visual pathways yesterday and wednesday....this stuff is SO INCREDIBLY complicated they can't even teach us a fraction of what they know, which is only a fraction of what there is to know. How people think I'm stupid for believing that God designed this is beyond me. How can you think this incredible level of organization and complication and things crossing over and combining and separating and coming back together to give you all the different things we can see (the presence of an object, it's color, it's size, it's distance from your face, it's contrast, it's movement, it's direction of movement, it's orientation in space, whether a sound is coming from it or somewhere else...) happened by accident? If the most intelligent thing on earth - the human brain - cannot even comprehend how the visual pathways work, what makes you think that something that cannot reason (Chance) came up with it?

oh well. their loss.

anyway.

Here's an interesting tidbit: If you cut the spinal cord just a little bit, you will lose your sensation of pain and temperature on the opposite side of the body from where you cut. (for everything below the cut) But you will lose your sense of fine touch and awareness of where your limbs are in space, on the same side of the body as the cut.

IT IS SO GORGEOUS OUTSIDE i just want to go sit and nap in the sun like a cat, but I need to study and I can' t see my laptop if i sit outside plus there's no desk so it's really annoying because the SMELL of the breeze is coming in my window and making me crazy.

Ok back to the grind.

ACCEPTED!

Wahoo!! Got into medical school FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY THANK YOU JESUS!!

I was home for the weekend because, well I'm always home for the weekend, but my auntand cousins were in from Ohio and we had a surprise shower for one of them, and so I ha just gotten back from my long happy family weekend when I got an email. It was aaaaawesome! The only black mark on this whole thing is that I wish I could have told my Grandpa, in person, before he died. It was 2 months to the day after he died, and he wanted it so badly for me. I think he knows, but I wish I'd have been able to tell him myself and hear him laugh the way I know he would have when I told him.

So yeah.
I've accepted the acceptance and I am so excited and looking forward to FINALLY achieving one of my lifelong dreams - taking gross anatomy! (What a nerd!) And I'm excited about TA-ing histology, because I LOVED histo and I love the idea of teaching it...and a million other things. :)

I'm also moving forward with the Air Force, so I'm praying that there are still some scholarship spots left for this year, even though it's late, so I can get that going. It will be nice to have them paying me, I could use money. :-p

I'm supposed to be studying for my first Neuroscience exam of this block but find myself seriously lacking motivation. It's on Monday, and normally when there are so few days left I'm in super focused study mode but NOT SO this time. I don't think it has much to do with the med school acceptance because I felt this way at the beginning of the block...and it's not because I don't like it, because I didn't feel this way during biochem and I hated biochem. I don't really dislike it...but a lot of it i'm just like "meh"

We've done some development of the brain/spinal cord, brain/spinal cord anatomy and nuclei and tracts, olfaction, some visual pathways, the thalamus, ventricles and CSF, sensory perception, reflexes, propropception, and cerebral circulation.

That's a lot of stuff. I guess I have to just suck it up. but REGARDLESS I'm going to MED SCHOOL!

Interview!

Well I got my first-ever med school interview today!

Right here! WAHOO

Unfortuantely it's on a wednesday that happens to be the one day off in a week of finals on Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Fri.

The icing, scraped OFF the cake. :-P

But it's an interview! So I shouldn't complain.

Also my brain is FRIED with a capital F-R-I-E-D from the physio test I took this morning...which is making it exceedingly difficult to study for biochem...which is tomorrow. Which I really REALLY should be doing but my brain is seriously in a huge fog. I tried watching TV, doing nothing, napping...none of it seems to work, all I want to do is NOT study. baaaaaaaah.

Hence this blog post.

The stress is building up because I know there's still a lot I need to study, but my brain is behind a very thick heavy curtain and it is having the WORST time finding its way out.

ok. I'm going to go for attempt 5 to study biochem. *sigh*

Oh hi there.

Can we say "seriously slacking"? Why yes we can.

So last time I wrote it was the end of block one....

and now we're about halfway through block 2.

this block is physiology and biochemistry...and since I am now taking 2 classes, the full med-student load, I have more than doubled my class time since last block. I have lecture every day from 9am-12am, lunch 12-1, and lecture from 1-2 or 1-3 depending on the day. Once or twice a week we have a conference or a lab from 1-3...so by the time I get back to my room every day I'm exhausted but I have to get right to work to avoid falling behind.

Hence my not writing. Because I'm not a person who feels particularly less-stressed after "expressing myself through writing" and so this blog takes time with no release, the way facebook and catching up on TV feels like my brain has relaxed a little.

This block's been really interesting...we went through all the metabolism of carbohydrates, and now fats, vitamins, and we're starting proteins...it's interesting because I don't have to memorize it. In undergrad that's all we did. We'd have test questions that would be like "draw out the (10 step) pathway of glycolysis including the structure of each molecule and the name of the enzyme that catalyzes each reaction" and it was zero understanding necessary. But now the professors are like "don't memorize this structure- I want you to understand that the body is trying to make this into this, and lets think about what would make sense for us to do in order to get there"

BECAUSE THE BODY MAKES SO MUCH SENSE!!!

In physiology we talked about respiration for like 2 weeks. Learned all about the lungs and how you breathe and how you regular your breathing and what happens in different lung diseases and how the body tries to compensate...awesome stuff. And everything is so perfectly logical. This block is the cardiovascular system, which I was in love with before and it hasn't disappointed me.

It's beautiful.

Incredibly complicated, but beautiful. I feel like we have a lecture and we learn something, and instead of learning thing linearly, we're learning in circles, and we keep drawing bigger and bigger circles around what we know...so that we keep talking about the same things but slightly more in depth each day. Which is really hard to do in a short time before you've had time to process the inside circle. But when I read a lecture from a few days ago, having at least a basic understanding of all the stuff I've learned in between, it makes that old lecture make a looot more sense. So it all works out I guess.

we had our first set of tests right before Christmas break, and then we started again Jan 3rd. 2nd set of exams is February 2nd, and then March 16, and then this block is OVER and we're back to only having one class, which is going to feel like a piece of heaven.

I've never studied so much in my life. I've never felt like I had to. I've never been so far behind while also knowing that just about everyone else was farther behind than me or at the same level.

This block I'm definitely just trying to truck along. I think I am less stressed about being behind than I was for the first exam set...which might be bad because I'm less likely to focus in and be really efficient that way..but that's life.

For example today I accidentally slept until 2pm. I didn't even go to bed that late! It was like 2...which I frequently do when I have to get up at 8 the next morning. I guess my body decided it was going to catch up.

I feel like this has been all over the place, so I'm just going to stop here.

Block 1 grades and old home videos

Grades are back!

Grades are great!

Might actually get into medical school this time!

I got an A in both histo and biostats (there is no A+) and above the medical student mean on everything that was graded. We took a nationalized test that I got a 94% on...a 90% is the 97th percentile so I am quite pleased with myself. My dad said "When you apply schools are trying to guess how you are going to do in medical school but now they have proof that you can do well" so yey for that.

Also, I've been watching a LOT of old home videos over the past couple of days and it is SO interesting to me...watching my parents with their same personalities as they have now interacting with me when I had no CLUE what their personalities were...hearing all the random background conversations between my aunts and uncles...watching Emmy be the big sister and showing me how to do stuff....some gold nuggets:

5-year old Emmy running up to my mom who was pregnant with Thomas and saying "Mommy when the baby comes out of your belly I'm going to grab its head and dance with it!"

My first day of preschool I did NOT want to go, Mom says "well we are going" and I said to her "well I am going to punch you in the belly" (she was NOT pregnant!) haha. So many things I'd forgotten...so many toys I remember having years later...so many toys I thought were Emmy's because she TOLD ME THEY WERE but I watched myself open them for my first birthday...haha.

It's also awesome seeing the house as I don't remember it...when we first moved in and tere wasn't even a second story, and when the kitchen was this tiny little thing stuffed with an enormous amount of stuff...and then as I do remember it- with the upstairs playroom and that weird blue flowery linoleum on the kitchen floor. I can see elements of my current self in my 4-year old self, and same with Emmy. It's just a very interesting thing.

So now I'm on break until thanksgiving. I havent done anything I was planning on doing yet...things keep happening! Eventually I will get around to pre-studying some biochem and physio, but for now I have to go downstairs and stain a billion pieces of molding for the door frames upstairs. things that should have been done 10 years ago when we put the extension on the house...but we are nothing if not procrastinators in this family (except of course Mommy).

Finals Week and the NBME!

So Monday and Tuesday I have things that are sort of like finals.

Monday is my histology exam #3, which is "cumulative" in that it "builds on what you've learned already" but not actually cumulative in that I don't have to remember the detail-y details from earlier in the year.

(As a side note, I HATE when professors give that speech about everything being cumulative because it builds. When I ask if a test is cumulative or not, I want to know if there will be specific questions on already-tested material or not. Maybe they do it on purpose so nobody can come up and say "but you said this wouldn't be on the test!" when really basic things are required as background)

anyway. That's Monday. Morning: Go sit in the lab with my microscope, get 10 slides with "unknown" tissue on them. Identify (just for myself) what each slide is and then answer a bunch of multiple choice questions like "On which slide would you find Brunner's Glands?"

Then a professor comes in and gives everyone a piece of paper with (the same) three things on it, and we have to find it, stick the microscope pointer on it, and call him over to check if we got it right.

Afternoon we take a long multiple choice test.

THEN TUESDAY is the part I'm slightly concerned about...the NMBE Histology (National board of medical examiners, or something) It's a standardized test which means I have no idea what the questions are going to be like or IF I WILL HAVE BEEN TAUGHT WHAT IS ON IT!

we just sort of have to hope we know enough to do well on it.

I have this book that's supposed to be a review for it and I'm looking at these questions going "Ihave never heard of this before. I was never taught that. what are they talking about??" and then they give you questions that go on and on about this 14-month old having lower respiratory tract infections and diarrhea and his mom used to have that when she was little and here's the lab tests they did, here are the results, here are normal values, it's probably involved with this protein that bla bla bla interacts with the negative charge on the cell membrane. What is responsible for the negative charge on the cell membrane?

Which is an easy question but you have to sift through a NOVEL to get to the question.

So here I am sitting on my bed reading through this book fa-reaking out so I decided to go complain to one of my roommates and her friend, who are 2nd years. Best idea ever, because they told me that's a typical question, just skip to the end and read the last sentence, you will never have to know the other stuff... and this particular book I have is known to be harder than the actual test, just go through it and if you're able to eliminate some of the answers and get a couple right you will be okay because the actual test is much easier.

So now I am okay.

Plus they had chocolate that someone probably stole from a small child's Halloween stash (how else do you explain a 24 year old guy with a candy bag with "Skylar" written on it?? :-P) so that made me feel better too.

Then I made coffee (also good) and decided I'm going to order myself Thai food tonight (win again!) so this day just keeps getting better. Also it was SO nice and warm today I shut the heat off and opened all the windows. This is how I know Jesus loves me.

Surgery?

So...my original "kind of doctor" i was always going to be was a surgeon.

Then for a while I was like "no...emergency medicine"
Then I would just tell people "either emergency medicine or surgery"

lately I've been feeling almost COMPELLED towards surgery. I don't know why, I've just heard a lot about it recently, a bunch of little reasons I can't really enumerate just make me lean towards surgery.
I've decided that though residency may be longer and more difficult, post-residency lifestyle has a much greater potential to be more lifestyle-friendly.  I've decided I would never get sick of cutting people open but I might get sick of the really stupid things people sometimes come into the ER for. And the thing I like most about the ER is trauma...and if you want to do trauma, you have to be a surgeon.  Yesterday I found a new blog by a surgeon who has done several short trips to mission hospitals with doctors without borders (or "Medicens sans frontieres" as they're called in the rest of the world) and just had awesome stories about doing surgery there. You make an much more radical and much more instant change in someone's life when you operate.

So right now I'm on a surgery kick.
For this week at least.

It's a good thing I have a long time before I have to decide, and that I will get to spend a while pretending to be each during med school so I can make an educated decision. Reminding myself of that is the only way I can silence my "i need to know EVERYTHING" brain whenever it decides its time to hash out all the pros and cons.

The problem is I can't even decide whether some things are a pro or a con. I also can't decide which specialty has a better *insert any number of characteristics here*. I am fully capable of convincing myself of whichever one I want to be convinced of this week, only to dismiss all that and be gung-ho towards the other a few days later. Then next month I'm back where I was before.

I think my brain keeps doing that because it thinks it's fun. I honestly think it enjoys this back-and-forth...because this thought process inevitably sends me to the internet looking for blogs or articles or whatever, on surgery or EM and my brain LOVES reading that stuff.

And so I enable it. Because my brain is me, and so I love reading that stuff too.