Friday, January 22, 2010

Anatomy is craazy! Immunology is dramatic!

I'm on Head and Neck anatomy right now. It is all we have left to do, but I feel like I just started because it is so complicated! This block is 6 weeks long, but it is going at double-triple the rate of the whole fall semester.

Thank goodness for Visiblebody.com

That site is crazy. I LOVE IT.


Immunology has always had a special place in my heart. It was one of the big reasons why I am so in awe of the human body. I get the feeling military physicians might find immunology very familiar, because that is all it is. In a nutshell, our body is in an epic battle for survival. The high tech tools, strategies, and dirty tricks we use is mind blowing.

Your blood is strewn with mines, your skin is crawling with spies, sentries, and snipers. The calvary gets called in, mobile command centers migrate to field locations, and oh dear god the complex signaling involved is CRAZY! Things get cleaved, imploded, and exploded. Things gang up on each other, others commit suicide. Sometimes your body wins, lots of times it loses. Badly. Mothers will try to kill their babies, and men destroy their own sperm.

And I am less than half way through the course. And after that...there are two blocks of Infectious Disease. I can't wait!

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Sweet Dreams

Good stuff coming soon, I promise. Lots of ideas just bubbling around. Amazing what you can do when you start to have regular sleep.

Before: lived in a dorm for the past five years. Last three, on the corner of the medical center on one of the busiest streets in town. Last year, on first floor, woken up by ambulances every night.

-Last 2 years, drove an ambulance all hours of the night, roughly every 3rd night. For. Two. Years.

-Essentially, I have never had regular sleep since high school. Oh wait. That didn't count. Perhaps not since my days of recess thanks to a teenager's messed up hormones?




Now: 7-8 hours a night. Undisturbed, thanks to a nice cushy place with a great non-nocturnal roommate. My brain is aliiive again! I am even off of caffeine ever since I went cold-turkey this break.

It also really helps that I am on a nice workout/run schedule again. The link is definitely there: the better sleep you get, the more energy you have during the day to have fun and play; the more exercise you get, you enjoy better quality sleep. Win win! Yay.