I'm Late I'm Late I'm Late!

Well thats how I always feel. Late. Or behind. Or out of time. It is very stressful to have too much to do and not enough time. But complaining is lame, so here are some exciting things going on:

1.) I finished Med Foundations I - that means no mo molecules! I'm moving up in my medical knowledge to Gross things. Like Gross Anatomy (dissecting human cadavers), which starts tomorrow. I make the first slice at 10:15am. Or sometime around then. I was lucky enough to take Dissections / Gross before so I know the drill (or the scalpel), but it is such a challenging class that I am sure it won't be much of an advantage. I will need to study study study - and keep up with the dissection videos and tutorials so I know what to do in lab. Scary! At Tufts, the dental students dissect the top half of the body first, so the bodies we get are almost completely dissected. They hide the faces from us until we get a new body halfway through, and then we meet our new cadaver and actually get to humanize them by seeing their faces. I don't really like the idea of doing things this way, but I am appreciative in general of having the opportunity to do such an amazing thing again! The human body is so fantastic and interesting, and it is going to be an exciting next few months full of learning, exploration, and really hard exams!

2.) On our last exam, one of the questions was about the disease that was mocked in "Contagion," the Nippa virus (shout out to my Mom, who's obsessed with Contagion!). I can't quite remember the question, but the Nippa virus is apparently a single stranded anti-sense RNA virus with a helical nucleocapsid.

3.) I love my friends. Tonight we went out to dinner for a friend's birthday and on the walk back, the 5 of us sang Disney songs on the streets of Boston. It was amazing.

4.) Keeping in touch is really hard, so forgive me for being awful at it. I do think about my family and friends from Florida / Maryland / everywhere all of the time, but am so scatterbrained and have so little time and am always surrounded by friends that by the time I am ready to call someone it is 11:30 and they are probably in bed. I will continue to work on it, but because I just started Dissections, I can't imagine I'll be any better about phone calls. Email me about your lives and I promise I'll respond!!

5.) Today I sat in on an Ethics discussion about mandating parents of adopted / non-biological children to tell their children about their true background. The children have a right to know their own information, but it ended up being an argument about who's autonomy was more important - the parents' or the childrens'. Very interesting debate.

6.) After my exam on Thursday was "Stache Bash" - a fundraiser / party where the med students competed over Best / Creepiest Mustache. The boys in my class have been growing ridiculous Staches for weeks, and Aren, who came to visit, brought some epics Staches for us to wear. See the photo below! The event was so fun and funny, and everyone had a fabulously hairy time. I also had a lot of fun being touristy with Aren. We did the Freedom Trail, climbed the Bunker Hill Monument, and had a lot of fun hanging out all weekend!

 

Thats all I have for now - sorry for the sporadic posting, but I had a grade that I had to fix!