almost forgot

this is just a sweet video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNCJTFhbzZY

half marathon

So I had the half this morning. It went pretty well. I ran a 1:47:41 (officially). Thats a 3:30 ish pr from my old best time. I was happy with it because I was plagued with shin splints and hip problems this season. The shins were fine for the duration of the run, but at about mile 7 my hip started acting up. It has happened before on a training run. Basically it's something in the capsule that is a shooting pain at every step. Last time it happened I had to stop and walk, and even that was difficult to do. This time I basically said I wasn't going to walk and adjusted my stride to keep going. The rest of the race was great. The weather was awesome, a little windy by the end, but nonetheless great. Then I spent about 2 hours on the couch afterwards trying to sleep, but was unsuccessful. Oh well, I can sleep when I'm dead. Now its basically study time for the next 3 weeks until finals are over. 

Our first final is in histology on monday. Histology is basically looking at stuff under the microscope. Generally it is extremely extremely boring. We even have 3 hour histo labs that basically consist of us looking under microscopes the entire time. Most of the stuff that we study is not interesting. However, in the exam coming up we have the ear and eye (among other things). The ear is absolutely amazing. The way it is able to turn sound into something that we can understand is nuts. I mean, I don’t think anyone could think up a system like this, but it works. And for 90% of the population or more it always works. It’s remarkable. Here’s a video that basically explains the ins and outs of the ear. If you have a few minutes I would really recommend watching it because it is pretty cool. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeTriGTENoc

Finally, I would like to thank those of you who were generous enough to send in money. I really appreciate it and I know that it will be put to good use. I'll be sure to take pictures of the equipment when we get it. 

talk to ya'll later

Ecuador

As many of you know I am going to Ecuador this summer on a medical style mission trip. It won't be as rural as my trips to Honduras, but will still be good to work in under served communities. It will also be great because half of the days we spend there will be in Spanish classes. Hopefully my Spanish will get even better to the point where I will be able to use it more proficiently in the hospital setting.

The trip should be great and being that I will be there for an entire month, I'm sure I will learn a lot that I can take with me in my future medical career.

One part of our job as the students going down is fundraising. The hospital that we will be working at does not have an EKG monitor. It is a standard item found in virtually any hospital in the US and is used to measure the activity of the heart. You all have seen them in use (they are the sticky patch things that they put on people's chest and then the machine shows their heart beat on the monitor). They're virtually crucial for the medical field and it's amazing to think that these people were able to go on without one. They cost about $5,000 and it is our job as the students to raise the money. Now, I absolutely hate asking for money from people because generally I don't like to give money to something that I cannot see implemented. I don't like just throwing money at a cause if I don't know if it is actually doing any good. I also hate asking for money when it is going towards something that I want to do or a trip I want to go on. However, in this case it is going directly to something tangible that these people need and that I will physically be able to show you we used. I am starting the funds "pot", I guess you could call it, with a $100 donation. I would like to, through various means including things we are doing here at school, like to raise about $350. Please please please do not feel obligated to donate any money. I am simply putting it out there that I would take donations if you would like to. I, in no way, will be mad at you for not donating or have any sort of ill will against you, don't worry. I'm just making you aware. If you do decide to donate some money (does not have to be a large amount at all) I will be in your debt. In fact, I would do whatever you wanted if you decide to donate: clean your gutters, mow your lawn, dig up some plants or do some other sort of yard work, test watch a new TV you just bought, paint some stuff you need painted, you get the jist. Anything. Just let me know if you want to donate. You can comment on here or email me at slotz2550@gmail.com if you would like to. Then next time I see you I can get the money or you can just send it to me. Anything works. That's all for now. Sorry its such a needy post

Scott

another mich weekend

This weekend saw more exciting St. Joe house stuff:

First real-ish dinner in her new house

Trust me I'm a doctor

Not so good with the hammer....

Basically what we were doing was ripping out the little dog house thing that they had for the dog in the back of the garage. It had outdoor access, so basically was so the dog could be inside if it wanted to.

So I had to put in the garage door opener code thing. Jenna was inside doing something so I was outside unsupervised. Therefore, I put the opener at a comfortable level for me. However, my eye level is not quite the same as Jenna's eye level. I did not notice this until she pointed it out to me. Oh well, that's why its free labor. 

The finished product. No more dog pen in the back. We were able to salvage wood from it to make a work bench in the place where the pen was. 

Completed work bench. Not the prettiest, but it'll do. 

Jenna is planning on putting a deck on the front of the house so she sent the specs of the house to her brother, who made this drawing of the house in CAD. It's exactly to scale. Now they can use it to basically stick different looking decks onto it to see what works best. Pretty cool. 

house pics

Like I said, the house is awesome.

Front

Living Room (it's an open floor plan so the living room, kitchen, and dining room is one room) Yes the TV is staying

Kitchen. Larger than my apartment now. 

Master Bathroom

Dining Room

Other Bathroom

One Bedroom

Another Bedroom 

Last Bedroom

Deck

Master Bedroom

Another Of the front

We visited the med school building that is .4 miles from the house. Its really nice. 

Main Area of the Med School Area

Like I said its all really nice. Pretty excited. 

free time??

Another round of exams done. Now we have a few weeks off from exams before finals start. They’re going pretty easy on us for now because we had only 1 class today, which I accidentally must have missed. Woops. It was anatomy (which we had a test on yesterday) and it was at 8:00 am. We also went out last night, so with those factors combined, class attendance would definitely be minimal.

After our afternoon anatomy practical exam we went up to Rockford to check out a house for next year. It’s a house owned by a retired prosecutioner and his wife who works as a warden at a juvenile detention center in Chicago. She recently got the job there so they are basically moving to Chicago and want to keep the house occupied. They said they will probably be coming back to Rockford a couple times a month at most and when they do they will stay in the basement which is basically completely separate from the rest of the house with its own kitchen, bathroom, etc. We would rent out the upstairs as our own. We thought it was kind of weird at first, but the guy, Tom, said it would be ours and they would not intrude. He mentioned partying until the wee hours of the morning and stuff like that, and made sure that they would not step on our toes at all. It would be our house and occasionally they would stay in the basement. Fine by me. Also, the house is only a couple blocks from school which is great. The best part is that rent is $1200 for 4 people. Then for it fully furnished its an extra $100 total. Amazing if you ask me. I’m paying almost twice that much in Champaign for a studio. One of my roommates took pictures of it that I’ll post when I get copies. We also found out that Rick Nielsen of the band Cheap Trick lives next door. For those who don’t know Cheap Trick, they sing the song that goes “I want you to want me, I need you to need me.” So that’s pretty cool. We think that were just gonna blast Cheap Trick sometime when its nice out and if he comes outside we’ll be like “oh man this is our favorite song, have you ever heard of Cheap Trick?” Then we’re in. Yep, that’ll be the life.

OMG this could potentially be our neighbor!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBQ9dm7zaQU

this is a doozy...

So I had my final CPP yesterday. For those who remember, our CPP program is the one where we go shadow a doctor in the Champaign-Urbana community four times over the course of the year. The experience was good and really helped me find out some stuff about the kind of doctor I want to be. For instance, my doctor really doesn’t look anyone in the eye when he is talking to them, including patients. For me that’s a sign that he is not confident and I think that a doctor should be very confident especially when his advice/decisions will affect the patients’ lives, good or bad. I also learned to be more personable with patients than my doctor was. There were two older husband/wife teams that came in today in which it was the husbands who were having problems (both carpal tunnel problems, I believe) and it was obvious that they had been together for a long time and often would joke around with my doc and myself. But my doc is always about business and never really shares in the laugh with the patients. He would simply just start talking about the patient’s problem again as if his time was too valuable to take part in their petty jokes. I’m hoping that it is just him and that not all doctors seem to become more distant from their patients as time goes by. I can’t see myself practicing like that regardless of the type of medicine I go into. Now, don’t get me wrong, he is a great doctor and I would definitely want him operating on me if I was in need, but I’m just not a fan of how he goes about doing his business. He also just seems negative about most things and a lot of the things he tells me are things about how stupid he thinks the ED docs are or how someone didn’t do their job right because the x-rays from the ED weren’t at the perfect angle or basically anything about the ED in general. One time he told me about how he had to come in on Friday afternoon at like 5 to surgically repair a little girl’s broken wrist. He was complaining that he had to go in on a Friday and do a surgery that he wasn’t technically getting paid for because it was past his salaried hours or something like that. The whole time I was thinking that I would love to get the opportunity to go in and fix a little kid’s arm. Yea I know he’s older and been at it for a while, but still, I think it would be cool and really rewarding to do and I hope I never lose that feeling. However, I think that’s just him because he says that if he could have it his way he would do surgery all day every day and just do carpal tunnel releases. How incredibly boring. I spent a lot of yesterday thinking about how cool I thought his work was at first and now how boring I think the majority of it is. I had the chance to go into surgery with him yesterday but all he had was two trigger finger releases and two carpal tunnel releases. I opted out because in only three other visits with him, only 2 of which I went into surgery with him, I have seen like 5 or so carpal tunnel releases and 3 trigger finger releases and let me tell you, they don’t get any more exciting the more you see them. I could probably do a carpal tunnel release right now, that’s how easy they are. It got me thinking about what kind of practice I would like to have and what kind of procedures I want to do and how I want to treat patients. Now I know that there are always the basic procedures that you build a practice around, but I’m just hoping that there isn’t a day that I say, “I wish I could just do X surgery all day every day.”

Along those lines, I was reading an article in the New York Times recently about how doctors want to work less and have more time with their families than in the past (surprising, I know). It basically talked about a 3^rd generation doctor who, unlike her father and grandfather, decided to work in a hospital, have set hours, and have time for her family to be (she was pregnant - also something that wouldn’t happen in the past). Anyway her grandfather started his own one-man practice like 60 years ago in a small town where he did everything, but also made himself available whenever (basically permanently on call). Then his son came along and joined the practice and continued on the same lifestyle. His daughter (the pregnant doctor) told about how he would either never be home for dinner or if he was his beeper would go off and he would leave. She decided that wasn’t the route for her and decided to work in a hospital with other doctors so she could have time off. Surprisingly more and more doctors are going this route. Strange… It made me think, again, about the kind of practice I want to have. I mean my CPP doc is there 8-5 Monday-Friday and is on call one weekend a month, I believe. That’s pretty nice. I would really like to have something like that. However, I’ve heard that for ortho, it’s rarely the case. I guess we’ll see when I get to surgical rounds and can figure more stuff out. I just can’t imagine working all the time and never having time for my family and just time outside of the hospital in general. Medicine is scary. You go in young and eager to learn all you can. You’re constantly impressed by the simplest things. Then you go through the system and all of a sudden you’re a middle aged doctor who would love to have a carpal tunnel assembly line. How does that happen? I can’t imagine doing something like that. Or the majority of medicine nowadays, “Sir, you’re obese. Here’s your cholesterol meds, your blood pressure meds, etc. Now you need to start exercising and eating a healthy diet, okay?” That’s not the kind of medicine I’m signed up for.

On a completely unrelated note, I was in anatomy lab last night and we’re on superficial head and neck. I was working on a body with 2 other people and we were find nerves and whatnot on the face. Then we had to lift up the head a bit to look on the side/back part for a nerve. The skin of the scalp was no longer attached and basically pulled up in my hand and the cranium (top round part of the skull) fell off and landed on the table. It was pretty gross and the girl we were with had to step away for a minute. Pretty sure she was going to puke.  We were much more careful after that. 

welp, see ya later

houses

Hello everyone,

April 1 was the closing day for Jenna’s house. However it was also the day of my formal for med school. Yes, we have a formal. It was at iHotel, a new-ish hotel on campus that is pretty nice for formal stuff like that. The problem was that because Jenna’s house closing was on that day too, we couldn’t go to formal. This sucked. Until last week. Her parents graciously went to the closing with the moving truck so that we could go to my formal. By the way that was our 9^th formal. That’s a lot of dancing. Anyhoo formal was a blast, but then we had to get up at like 5:30 on Saturday morning to get up to Michigan to start moving in/painting. It went well. We got everything in, including the treadmill that we had to take apart and snake down the stairs. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked kinda. Then over the course of Saturday and Sunday we painted the living room, upstairs bedroom, downstairs bathroom, dining room and the guest bedroom also known as the baby room because it USED to be a baby’s room. Then put together some furniture and it was time for me to leave because unlike Jenna’s school, I actually have class to go to.  The house is great though and will be a perfect place for people to come stay in a beachy place during the summer. And yes that is an invite for anyone. Don’t worry Jenna doesn’t mind. After I left, though, they continued on and got some rooms set up yesterday and I’m sure got more stuff done today. The upstairs bedroom wood floor got sanded down and is getting refinished today, so that should look nice. All in all it’s going to be pretty nice when it’s all good to go. Oh yea and while painting in those 2 days I somehow got a smiley face painted on my shirt. I wore that shirt all the way home and before going to my apartment I went to Meijer to get groceries. And yes I did wear my smiley face shirt. A small child laughed at me, but I like to think he was laughing with me. That is all for now. Catch ya later.

here's an action shot from this weekend....

What do I do now?

Our horrendous exam schedule is now over. We had 3 exams 2 Fridays ago, a final last Monday for our biochem class that was ending, then 2 exams each Wednesday and Friday. It was a rough week. I did fairly well on all of the exams. Slightly lower than what I expected in Neuroscience, but that's life. Tuesday and Thursday were reading days, so we had no class. However, both days I got to the library at 8 and both days I stayed until 11 pm or so with only a 30 min break or so for lunch and dinner. It was nice at first to not have class, labs, demos, small groups, etc. but that feeling quickly wore off. We basically spent the week hopped up on caffeine staring at our computer screens. It was definitely one of the hardest weeks to survive thus far, but it did go by remarkably fast, though. The good thing is that we don't have exams until mid April, I think, if not later. Also, with spring break in 2 weeks and not much to really have to do, it should be a nice relaxing time until break. It was funny, this past weekend I didn't really know what to do with my time. I kinda forgot what I used to do with spare time. Weird.

Oh yea and Friday was Unofficial St. Patrick's day. It was started by a bar owner on campus in the 90's because the real St. Patrick's day was usually during break and he wanted to make money off of it. So it is basically a day when the people that would never get up early to do anything, including go to class most of the time, get up usually before 6:00 am to drink all day long. Campus is nuts and there are police everywhere. Luckily, we were done with exams at around 9:30 Friday morning. We ended up going to Kam's, which is basically the dumpiest bar on campus. We went because one of the guys with us wanted to go and we were closest to Kam's, so we went, and yes it did smell like vomit inside. Well in line there was Jenna Pearson herself along with her grad school friends. So we had the pleasure of hanging out with her all day. It was a blast and exactly what we needed after virtually 2 weeks of straight studying. And no, we didn't go at 9:30 when we were done. I had time to workout, eat, and clean my disgusting apartment before. Below is a before and after picture. CAUTION: the picture you are about to view is graphic and may be disturbing to some younger viewers, so parents you may want to send your children to the next room before scrolling down....

I'd like to say I don't usually live like this, but oftentimes I do find myself stepping over clothes, papers, you name it. I would also attribute the added messiness to the fact that I was only home to eat and sleep for 2 weeks, so took no time to clean anything.

Well, friends, that's about all I have to say about that.

Oh yea heres some pictures of mark sleeping on Christmas. Forgot I had them.

K bye!!

There's a man downstairs wearing a bright blue suit and a pink tie

Hey guys it’s Scott, you remember me right? I’m the one in med school! I’m your son, nephew, boyfriend, uncle, daughter’s boyfriend, brother, cousin, that kid you see occasionally. I know it's been a while. I have been crazy busy over the past few weeks. Jenna has been hassling me because I haven’t seen her in a week now, but that’s the price you pay when you make the big bucks like me.

So dissection is over, I finished a week and a half ago. So that means that for the rest of my medical career I might not be personally dissecting any cadavers. Sad, I know, but I still have anatomy and still spend a lot of time in lab. Plus I may have a chance to get in and dissect some things come head and neck, so that’s something to look forward to. We also had exams last Monday that went well with not too much studying since I was a dissector I really didn’t have to study for anatomy. Were in a few week hiatus now between tests, but the next round is pretty much like finals week. We have 2 on the last Friday of February then 2 Monday Wednesday and Friday the following week with a reading day between each. That is going to be horrible, but after that we have 2 weeks then spring break with pretty much nothing to do. They asked us to please not leave for break early, but that may just happen, we’ll see.

I have been so busy lately because we had a snow day last Wednesday. On that day I had 9 hours of class that all had to be rescheduled. One of my classes was reschedule to Friday night so I was in a small group session until 7:00 on Friday night. Med school is awesome. However, afterward we had a mixer thing with the vet and law school at a bar off campus. It was really fun. You can tell that everyone is cooped up all day and then just wants to get out and have fun. Unfortunately that meant a late night and a late morning, so even though I was extremely productive, I still didn’t get as much done as I wanted. Then Sunday was half wasted because of the superbowl. Adding to the trouble that the snow caused was the fact that I had to dig my car out of my spot to go to Jenna’s after we got all the snow. It took about 30 min to dig it out and remove enough ice from the windows to see. I broke my ice scraper within the first few minutes of breaking ice off of the windshield. It was about 3 inches thick covering my windshield wipers because it had basically rained/sleeted/snowed that whole day. So I basically was just beating the ice with my broken stick of an ice scraper to get it off. Then I had to clear snow out behind the tires so that the car would even move at all. I had to rock it back and forth a bunch to get it finally out. Then when I came back later the plow had come by the lot that it’s on and pushed a big pile right in the entrance to my spot as it went by. So I had to dig 2 tire tracks with my feet so that I could even get my car back into my spot. It was an eventful journey for sure.

I have still had time to work out to my liking, though. I’m at the gym almost every morning before class and almost every night to run/bike/swim. Although for a few weeks I wasn’t able to run because of stupid shin splints in my right leg. For those of you who don’t really know what they are, it’s when muscles that help you basically push your foot down get inflamed. So the pain is in the posterior compartment of the leg toward the middle of the body. The “shinbone” is the big bone that you can feel in the front of the leg, and the pain is just medial (toward the midline) of that about 6-8 inches above the ankle. It’s pretty debilitating, which sucks. Every step that I took hurt when the pain first started, which eliminated running. So I switched to biking and swimming at night for a while, which is nice cause now my swimming has gotten waaay better. Ive been running for the past couple days, my longest being a mile and a half and my leg is pretty good. Still a long way to go to 100% though.

 P.S. everything prior to this was written about a week and a half ago, if not more. I wrote it in a word doc when I was in my apartment one day and just never uploaded it to this interweb thingy. 

Since then I have studied and stuff. I also strictified my diet more. For those of you who know, I have been very health conscious for quite some time. The more I have been reading about grains and processed foods, though, the more I found out that cutting them out gives me a better overall diet. So that was when I started eating paleo. That means protein (meat), fats, fruits and more veggies than you can shake a stick at. That went well, but then I found out more about the Zone diet. Basically what it is is getting proper proportions of carbs, fat and protein in the diet by weighing and measuring food. Note: I am in no way doing this to lose any sort of weight, I do not have body image issues, and I am definitely not starving myself in any way. If anything I am trying to put on a little weight to increase my workload capacity and get stronger. So after reading about the diet I decided to give it a 2 week trial period. I found out how many "blocks" I needed (a block is basically an elemental unit for measuring equal parts protein carbs and fat so you are always taking in 40% carbs, 30% protein, and 30% fat), and I set to work combining the paleo aspect (no processed foods, meat, veggies, fruits, nuts, etc.) with the proper portion sizes of zone. In order to get the proper amounts of carbs in each meal with veggies alone, you have to eat very large amounts of them. Some meals I will eat like 6 cups of broccoli, an apple or orange or something, a chicken breast and a half, and some almonds or peanut butter for fats. I was skeptical at first because of the sheer volume of food intake, but the calories from all those veggies is actually very small compared to what I thought it would be. After having done this for a week and a half now, I have already seen improvements in my workouts. I have pr'd (personal record) in my swim times each time I get in the water, and I pr'd by 30 pounds last week in my overhead squat weight. This is huge. I also just feel better during my workouts. Basically the diet is great (P.S. I hate the word diet because people associate it with starving yourself to lose weight, but this is quite the contrary.) I eat usually more than I think I can handle, haven't really gained any weight or lost any weight (fine with me), and have gotten stronger and faster. I am also never hungry because of the amount of food that I am able to take in. So think what you may (parents who think I should be eating pasta and bread and stuff), but seeing the results I have so far, I think I will be sticking with this. Also, if you don't take fish oils, take them. There's basically no substance that I can think of that has more health benefits than proper doses of fish oils. Regardless of diet, age, activity level, anything, just take them. You're better off. K I'm off my soap box. 

Gotta study. See ya'll later.

Oh and if you were wondering, yes I still ride my bike to class every day and have ridden it every single day since winter break ended, in the snow and all. 

still alive

Don't worry, I'm still alive. I don't really have time to post anything, so this is it for now. I am swamped partially from the snow day and partially because exams are coming up. I'll post sometime this weekend maybe. 

surgery is cool

Hello all,

Another week has gone by and it has honestly been one of the busiest weeks I've had except for maybe finals week last semester. Started out with my first CPP (clinical practice preceptorship) shadowing experience on Monday. Since it was MLK day and we had no school, I went to shadow my doc. He's an ortho hand specialist. We had clinical stuff all morning. We saw about 6 patients all morning, but he said it was a real slow day. His PA had only 2 patients all morning, so it must have been. There wasn't anything too interesting there, just a few broken bones and crazy people. There was one guy who wrote on his history that he was on too many medications to remember and the ones that he could remember were Valium and a few other heavy painkillers. My doc, Dr. Johnson, kept saying that he was a little suspicious of this guy, which is understandable. The guy was a little loopy. He had trigger finger in his thumb, which is where the tendons get stuck on the tendon sheaths that surround them so the fingers get stuck in position. He then told us that it didn't bother him and he didn't really know why he was there at all, meaning the office. So we said goodbye. Then we looked at an old lady's x-rays who had fallen and broken her hip and elbow. Dr. Johnson fixed the elbow and a few weeks prior so she was just in for a checkup. However, we were just looking at the work she had done. When looking at her hip x-rays, there was a large dark spot in the middle. Dr. Johnson informed me that it was simply some "poop and a prefart, nothing to worry about." Haha, it was hilarious. Really nice lady, though. Then at noon we went into surgery mode. He only had 2 surgeries in the afternoon, so it wasn't too busy. The first was removing a benign lump on the thumb metacarpal (thumb bone in the hand). We were literally in surgery for 15 min. He just cut it open, chiseled the bone lump off, sewed it up, and we were done. The second was a lady with a trigger on her thumb, middle and ring fingers. She was also having a carpal tunnel release, all in one procedure. It was pretty cool because the patient was basically laying down with her arm sticking out on a board, more or less. Then he was on one side of the arm and I was on the other. So I held the retractors and repositioned the hand when he needed it. It was cool because he was constantly asking me what tissues he was cutting through and what vessels and nerves he had to watch out for in the regions he was in. Good review of old anatomy for sure.

Then I went home and spent the next 4 hours of my afternoon/night in the anatomy lab cutting up the abdomen. This went on pretty much every day this week. I have spent a minimum of 3 hours in lab every day. Needless to say I have fallen a little behind in some of my classes, but that's what the weekend is for. Unfortunately it is Jenna's birthday this weekend so I have to squeeze in studying when I have time, I guess.

Other than lab and school, nothing really has been going on this week. It snowed about 3 inches before I went to class this morning, so I, of course, rode to class. Took a little longer than usual, but it's so much fun. I also ran a 10k on Tuesday when it had rained all day and then dropped below freezing so the sidewalks were very very slippery. On the last mile or so I was trying to speed up. I was trying as hard as I could to sprint, but my feet would just slip out behind me. Somehow, though, I did beat my old time for the same route by like 7 or so minutes. Last time was in the snow, but still, I was pleased.

That's all I've got for ya'll this week. See ya!

Take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrQpFy7grtY

dreams...

I was supposed to be at the gym this morning at 6:30 to workout with the guy I always work out with. I set my alarm last night without looking at the time it was set for b/c we had worked out yesterday and I assumed that it was the same time. However, it was set to go off at 6:30 instead of 6:00, so I was, of course, late. No biggie, I can workout on my own. Also, when my alarm went off I was awoken (is it awoken or awakened or awokened or woke up or woken up or waked up or... never mind) out of my peaceful slumber in which I was having quite an involved dream. Having spoken to Mr. Pearson a last week about how we have crazy dreams I decided to write it down so I could remember it in full later. So, for your reading pleasure, here is an insight into my sleeping brain. Side note, I did write this just as I woke up at 6:30 this morning and my brain was not fully functioning. Also, I have not edited it at all so it may be ugly in parts, I don't know. Here goes:


Started out I was in a 7 11 looking for plastic cups. Then this girl was saying something about orange soda so I decided to get some. However there was no sugar free orange soda. It was all either diet or regular or orange soda with iced tea in it. So I just took the cups and went to the register. Then the guy at the register wouldn't let me pay with my card cause he said he wouldn't take my id, which was a little fuzzy but you could still tell it was mine. So I stormed out pissed and put a nano iPod that was from the store into my pocket thinking it was mine cause it was already in my hand. I got just outside the door and forgot my coat, which they checked when I walked in, so I had to go back and get it. When I walked in the security beeper thing by the door went off cause of the iPod in my pocket. But I just grabbed my jacket and left. Then I went to jennas house which was this awesome mostly glass house that was just off a golf course. We were sitting inside and I could see her mom hitting golf balls out of the back courtyard into the golf course but she was yelling something at the golfers before she hit each one. Then a baseball broke through the window and hit me, but I don't remember where. Then Jenna and I tried to get rid of the security thing on the back of the iPod I swiped by just throwing it tin the garbage. After a bit I wasn't convinced no one would find it so I went back and got it and Jenna and I put it inside of a box and pit it back in the garbage. After a while I wasn't happy with that so I got it out again. This time I ripped the pieces of the box apart and put the security thing between them (it was just a paper clip with an orange plastic thing at one end). I still thought the police cold find this so I wandered around the other side of their house looking for somewhere to put it. The place was filled with all of jennas stuff for her new house. Mounds of stuff was everywhere. Eventually I just put it back between the box pieces and put it in the garbage. Then jenna and I were sitting in the floor with Jenna sort of on my lap and a golf ball broke through the window and hit me on the inside of my left upper thigh. I didn't react at first. It took like 2 seconds for the pain to hit and then I twitched. I told Jenna that i just got hit by a golf ball and she didn't believe me. So I showed her the spot on my leg and the hole in the glass. The ball also glanced off the coffee table and made a long dent that was for some reason filled with water then. Then Brian gave me some ice in a ziplock bag. He told me that he would have given me his nice ice pack but it was too close to my "junk" he called it. Jennas dad still didn't believe me that I got hit. I also had scrapes down both legs but I don't know what they were from. Then we watched I think it was Cory playing with his dog jersey in the courtyard in the back. But then jersey couldn't lift her butt up anymore to bring the stick back to Cory. It reminded me of sandy when she couldn't get up and I had to leave. A short time later a bunch of people came over for dinner. I was at the table because I couldn't walk because of the golf ball injury that I had to tell everyone about and show the damage to the house. Then I got up to go to the bathroom and had to walk to the opposite end of the house which was pretty big. When I got there both bathrooms were side by side and both taken. So I waited until my phone rang, but it was really my alarm going off so I woke up.


I have said before that I have crazy involved intricate dreams, and this is a perfect example. So there you go. 


Also, big news from the lady friend. First, and I think most important, Jenna did achieve her goal of a pullup!! Not only that, but she did so more than a week ahead of schedule. So congratulate her for that. Also, a minor side note, she did buy a house in St. Joseph, MI where she will be working next year, just as she had planned. 


 
















In regards to medical school. All is well. I spent a lot of time in dissection this week, but got a lot done and taught a lot of people a bunch of stuff, so all is well. I also found this week that you can download an Amazon Kindle app for your computer, mac, iProducts, etc that lets you download books to that device. I used it to download a few medical sciency nerd books including a sample question book for the Step 1 exam and a few just plain interesting books about life as a new doc and old surgery texts. Spent about an hour today reading stories from a young doc's memoirs ish. Pretty interesting stuff. Oh and by the way all of this was free. I mean the only reason I downloaded the books was b/c they were free. There's actually a good number of free books on there. Cool beans, cool beans.

Think thats all I have for you for now. Welp see ya later!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g1KcOw7zas
(watch me)

Back to it

Well the week is half over now and we're back into the swing of things. Normally it probably would have taken a few days to really get going again, but I am a dissector now so I am forced to get a lot of work done early. I am dissecting the abdomen and will demo the first portion of the dissection tomorrow to my classmates. So far all we have done is peel the skin off, remove the fatty layer and membranous portion attached to it, reflected back the different layers of muscle under that, and find a bunch of other things that go along with that. It seems like it would be a quick dissection, right? However, I have spent 8 ish hours in the lab in the past 3 days getting it done, so it has not been super quick. Also, after we demo the exterior structures tomorrow we have to dissect into the abdominal cavity and find another page and a half of structures so that we can demo it on Friday again. Basically we're thinking probably about 4-6 hours of dissection tomorrow. Luckily I am completely caught up with lecture reviews and that kind of stuff, so I'll only fall a day behind, or so, so no big deal.

Dissection actually has been pretty cool, though. I would much rather have done almost any area of the body (except pelvis and perineum), but it's not too bad. There's a lot of fat that we have to basically pick through to get to the muscles. Also, a lot of the muscles on our body have atrophied a bit, so they are very fragile, which makes the dissection more difficult. But the time spent in lab has forced me to get on top of my other stuff early, which is good. I have even had time to work out in the morning and afternoon all 3 days so far.

It snowed a blizzard on Monday night and through Tuesday. However, I decided to get up at 5:30 so I could run for an hour before class. It was a lot of fun. It wasn't too cold and only windy in one section. Luckily I have my Yacktrax down here so it made the run easier. It's pretty nice being on campus without all the stupid undergrads, too. I can basically go to the gym at any time without worrying about it being packed. Too bad they all come back next week. Stupid undergrads....

I kept thinking that I had a bunch to write about, but apparently I don't so I guess this is it. I hate goodbyes...

Scott

P.S. this guy's got the right idea...