school, break, school

I hope I haven't been removed from anybody's google reader because I haven't written anything for about a month. I blame it on finals. The best word I can think of to explain finals week in medical school is triage. Apparently, in the non-medical world it means prioritizing or sorting. To doctors it means find the part that's bleeding the worst and focus on it first. Finals week for me was an exercise in triage--finish taking care of the anatomy of the brain and move on to glycolysis. Then look at histology slides for a while before trying to make sense of potassium and action potentials. It was as much material as was on the MCAT, only we learned it in a little over three months. The good news is I survived.

And then I had the most amazing break ever. It was non-stop madness at my house as Grace and I both got kicked out of our rooms and into the attic. At first my mom suggested that we share the blow-up aerobed (a "queen" that's actually a double, at best) and she couldn't figure out why that was such a repulsive idea to us.

One day we decided to take three of my nieces and my one nephew up skiing. It was fun to see them start to learn how (none of them had really done it before), but it was the most exhausting thing I've ever done. My nephew could not figure it out and was more interested in making snow angels than skiing. One of the nieces (number 3) would get to the top of the hill and her whole body would go limp until she got to the bottom. It was like her muscles stopped working so I would practically have to carry her down the hill (skiing backwards, I might add) like a giant Gumbi on skis. I think I may add "teach to ski" to the list of things to let parents take care of along with "change diapers" and "put in time-out". After all, the best part about being an uncle and not a parent is you get to pick and choose.

Then school started up again with the new unit: Cells, Molecules, and Cancer. Today, after two weeks of hematology, I'm pretty sure I want to be a hematologist/oncologist. This stuff is so rad, and we're just scratching the surface. Is it more intense than the first semester? Yes. Have I done anything outside of school in the last two weeks? A couple of things (not much). Am I cool with it? Absolutely. Will I decide I want to be an infectious disease doctor sometime during our next unit, "Host and Defense"? Probably. It's nice to be working on stuff that I find so interesting.

And that's why I haven't had time to write on my blog.