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.

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.