Finals period + craziness at work means I have my full range of stress symptoms back:

heartburn
GI trouble
heart palpitations
shortness of breath
hiccups
hives

I feel like my old boards-studying-self again!

As soon as I re-develop dermatographic urticaria, then it will be like being back in my clinical rotation. Oh, memories...

Stand back - you don't want to catch my CV.

The way I wrote, "because of my CV" in the last entry makes it sounds like some sort of chronic illness.

I think CV might be used more in the sciences, I'm not sure, but it stands for curriculum vitae, in case you didn't know. It's a résumé.

Wikipedia just taught me that curriculum vitae is Latin for "course of life" and résumé is French for "summary."
That makes CV sound pretty deep.

Notes from my "light" year...

My life is too crazy right now -- hence the lack of posts. I've started taking Tuesdays off to get school work done and today I spent all day preparing to lead discussion of an "article pack" with Glen, and of course class went too long and we don't get to go until next week. This class is constantly like this... we spend all weekend preparing 4 projects and the professor decides that's too many to go over so he makes one due the following week -- after we already prepared it to hand in!

My silver lining all day was that at least Tuesdays are our early day and I would get to come home and have some time to do the laundry and work on this project for work that was technically due today (even though I DON'T WORK TUESDAYS). But I had forgotten that this week our Thursday night class got moved to Tuesday night, so we had class from 3:30 to 9:10pm! BOTH classes handed out take-home tests.

To make up for my lack of blogging, I'm sharing some things I've been reading online.

I actually think crows are pretty cool... here's the latest evidence:
Discover Channel
Crows Bend Twigs Into Tools
Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press
Oct. 5, 2007 — Mounting tiny video cameras to the tail feathers of crows, researchers discovered that the birds use a variety of tools to seek food, and even make their own tools, plucking, smoothing and bending twigs and grass stems.

Squirrels are, of course awesome. I'm a little torn about the content of this article:

New York Times - Magazine

The Squirrel Wars

By D.T. MAX

Published: October 7, 2007

The red one is cute. The gray one is taking over. England is going nuts.

Regarding the following, we suck.

Op-Ed Contributor

Save the Gnostics

By NATHANIEL DEUTSCH

Published: October 6, 2007

If Iraqi Mandeans are allowed to enter the United States in significant numbers, it may just be enough to save them and their ancient culture from destruction.

Op-Ed Columnist

Conservatives Are Such Jokers

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 5, 2007

If you’re poor, if you don’t have health insurance, if you’re sick — well, today’s conservatives don’t think it’s a serious issue. In fact, they think it’s funny.

I haven't seen "Sicko" yet, but I believe that a main premise is that healthcare doesn't belong in private hands because, by law, publicly held companies are required to make as much money as possible for their stock-holders. In summary, Medicare Part D is terrible:
National

Medicare Audits Show Problems in Private Plans

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: October 7, 2007

Medicare recipients have been victimized by private insurers that run the drug benefit program, according to a review of federal audits.

I just found out that it's not actually illegal to drink alcohol in New York if you're under 21, just to buy it. You can even drink out at a restaurant as long as your parents pour it from the bottle into the glass. If you're not in public, it doesn't matter. http://alcoholpolicy.niaaa.nih.gov/stateprofiles/StateProfie.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age

Did you know that Dennis Kucinich is a vegan and recently married a red-haired girl from England who is 31 years younger than he? She's his third wife. I think he has a worse chance of getting elected President than Guiliani with his marital history.
http://vegnews.com/wedding_2006_ED.html

I'll end with on a funny note and then head to bed... or go work on my proposal for work. UGH!!!...

There's a digital billboard on our drive home from Widener on 95 -- basically a big TV screen. It automatically cycles through ads. I find it to be really distracting while driving. The last two night it's been especially distracting...

We looked up and there was a huge photo of a mean looking guy, with his name and WANTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER. As we stared, the billboard changed to: Philadelphia, Have a Pleasant Evening! Pretty funny.

The next night as we drove by, there was an even meaner looking guy with WANTED FOR MURDER. This promptly changed to: Philadelphia - The City of Brotherly Love. We almost crashed from laughing.

Sigh. I'm afraid the blog is going to die because whenever I have any free time I've been staying as far away from my computer as possible, because I feel like I'm on it the rest of the day. That plus I also haven't been hanging out on GTalk, where the link is posted, so I don't think anyone is reading it anymore anyway. I guess towards the end of last week I started sending in a lot of little one line posts via e-mail, whenever something hit me at work, so maybe it will survive in that way.

I have this really funny story about orientation, but I don't have the energy to retell it here... it might go the way of the story about me watching someone's butt catch on fire -- just never made it on to the blog.

I will briefly say that last week I was wikipedia-surfing and discovered that the IP address at my new work computer has been blocked from editing Wikipedia!! At first I wondered about the guy who had my cubicle before me, but then I made it to a page that said that my IP address is registered to Jefferson and may represent more than one computer. So I still wonder if it's like the University as a whole or just the Department of Health Policy. My IP address has been cited with many infractions, but here's one that was particularly funny -- these are the inappropriate additions "I" made to an article about a town in Pennsylvania:

• Zip code: 17545
• Area code: 717
• Most apt description: Cesspool
• Political leanings: So right they should start handing out brown shirts any day now
• Cultural activities: Whatever was popular in 1987
• Gratuitous wastes of money: The high school football team
• Most prominent figure who will never realize that high school football means nothing: Coach Mike Williams
• Most popular trends: Getting married at 19, never leaving, getting preggers real young

OK, time to give Glen a haircut and then cram in a few more articles of business school reading before bed. I miss you guys!

We're back in Philadelphia, and slowly settling into civilian life. First and foremost on the news front: my mom got a puppy!He's a lhasa apso and his name was most likely going to be Murphy until my grandmother got upset that we always celebrate our Irish heritage but ignore her Scandinavian roots... so now we're working on a compromise. Fritjof is currently in the lead.

Going back in time a little bit, we spent the last two weeks on vacation. First we were in Chincoteague, Virginia (where the wild ponies live) with my mom, my sister, and a small pirate kite named Kitey who ruled the skies like Blackbeard ruled the seven seas.We had two pirate-themed kites, a big one and small one, and spent the better part of an hour flying the kites at each other, trying to knock the other out of the sky (much to the chagrin of the people seated around us). The little kite (Kitey) always won... Glen will claim it was his skill as captain of Kitey, but I maintain it had something to do with the odd wind patterns.Us with wild pones.

Speaking of wild ponies,oh my!

The three of us above, and Amy looking lovely:
And, we also rented scooters!

Then we left for Disneyworld with Glen's mom for one week.
Me and Glen our first night, after the Epcot fireworks.

The three of us before the Magic Kingdom fireworks show our second-to-last (penultimate??) night (we saw a lot of fireworks). There is Mickey-shaped confetti sprinkled on the table. I had one stuck to the middle of my forehead for most of the rest of the night, but not in this picture, thankfully.

Me, with my Almost Just Married button getting a call from Mickey and Minnie congratulating us on our engagement while waiting on line for the safari in Animal Kingdom.

Glen chillin out in the Norway exhibit at Epcot with a troll.

Us trying our hardest to emulate the late, the great, Thomas Jefferson (this was take 18 or so).

And finally, the coolest attraction ever, the Honey I Shrunk the Kids playground! We both climbed through this when we each first visited Disney over 15 years ago when it had just opened (just after the movie came out) and were so excited that it's still there! Unfortunately it's recommended for kids ages 10 and below, so we had to enjoy its splendor from outside the eight foot fence. That SuperSoaker really squirts!!!

Well now it's time for me to get to bed because I have SCHOOL tomorrow! It's weird to be starting this whole year that we've been talking about so long. I can't believe it's here. I don't start work until Monday so I have a little more time to adjust to that idea.
We'd love to get to Quizzo tomorrow, but we probably won't be back to the city until closer to 10pm, missing the first round or so :( But at least this week, we don't have anything to wake up for the next morning. I don't know if we'll be able to go every week, but I hope we can start having people over Friday nights to relax, because that's our early day -- get home after work at 5 instead of after class at 10 :)

Hasta manana!

Whew. Done with the pediatrics rotation. It's very weird now that we've been in the clinic that we won't be donning our white coats and poking people while they sit naked in a paper robe for an entire year.

As an aside, when the doctor asks you to open your mouth, stick out your tongue, and say AAHH, please do ALL THREE of those things. It's not just a cutesy expression to get you to open your mouth wide like 90% of the kids seem to think. We need to see your tonsils and the back of your throat and sticking your tongue out gets it out of the way, and saying AHH lifts your soft palate and uvula to widen the view. All of the kids, 4-year-olds to 17-year-olds would just open their mouths. Then again I would ask, please say AHH, and they would just sit there. "Say AHH" doesn't mean, "open your mouth;" it means actually say AHH.
OK, I'm done ranting, until next year.

Glen, my mom, my sister and I are all on vacation in Chincoteague, VA right now, enjoying a crazy thunderstorm from our hotel rooms. I want to post some photos, but I haven't used my own camera yet.

Glen, Amy and I just finished another rousing game of Apples To Apples, a new favorite. We always end up making up rules to mix it up a little. This time we also discovered that the combination of cards thrown out can give you great inspiration for a screenplay or other such endeavor. We are going to start drafting the script for Spicy: John Travolta Goes to Bollywood; it's going to end in a dance-off, of course.

It's obviously time for me to head to bed. I'm exhausted from fighting the waves today, and we're waking up early so we can all rent scooters before lunch.

One more thing -- Glen and I finished Harry Potter 7 today! Everyone can start speaking freely to us again; I won't have to give the disclaimer that I haven't finished at the beginning of every conversation.

I just had to look up the definition of the Anal Wink Reflex.

Sometimes I don't love medicine.

Sing to me!

I just saw a patient named Shakira and a patient named Aaliyah. I can't wait to see what other Pop stars come into the clinic today.

I also pulled ooey gooey smelly sugical packing out of an abscess in someone's armpit. And the girl has a history of and is probably colonized with MRSA, so it was doubly gross.

Back to lunch.

11 months until the wedding! Everyone said once we got within the year mark it would go quickly, and the past month went in a blink (...in some respects anyway. I felt like I worked at duPont for months and really we spent only 8 days there). It feels like there is still a lot of time-sensitive stuff to do for the wedding, and by the time we finish our rotation it is going to be only 10 months away. We need a band, a florist, and a honeymoon before everything good is taken.

Today we got our hot-off-the-press copies of Harry Potter and went to read them in Washington Square after having a late lunch at a crepe restaurant we found on 6th just below South. It was a nice relaxing day. We also sent out a bunch of emails that needed to be sent, so it was also productive, a little. I am looking to get to bed before 11 so we don't screw up our sleep schedule too much. I woke up at 4:30am this morning on my own. That was uncool. I went back to sleep and then woke up at 7:30 with a sore throat -- I was sure I had caught something from one of my patients. Like my most recent patient who I followed all of last week -- Thursday morning I'm in there wiping off his runny nose goo from all over his cheeks while he's coughing in my face and then Thursday afternoon when his test finally came back positive for adenovirus, we put him on droplet precautions and I could only walk into his room with latex gloves, a disposable gown, and a surgical mask on. I got out of bed and gargled with some Listerine and when I finally woke up the third time at 10:30am I felt totally better. Cross your fingers for me.

Thursday on the way home we swung by CVS to pick up the prints of our disposable underwater camera from Sanibel (none of the pictures came out very well so I have nothing to post) and then we took the short cut back through the playground. We still had our white coats on with our stethoscopes hanging around our necks and this little boy on a bike stopped and stared at us and then yelled HI! We said hi back and then he asked us if we were two doctors?! I told him we were just students... he looked a little confused and maybe I should have explained that better, but my brain was still melted from the day. I was really touched though to see the white coats carry that much weight with a random little kid. :)

Umm, more randomness: here's a great recipe we tried a few nights ago:
Boil a 16 oz package of frozen gnocchi. Drain.
In a pot, brown 3 cloves (or 3 teaspoons) of chopped garlic in 2 tablespoons olive oil.
Coarsely chop (or tear up) and rinse a 9 oz bag of spinach; throw this into the pot with the garlic and oil and cover to let the spinach steam from the water still on the leaves from rinsing.
When the spinach is just wilted, add 14 oz canned diced tomatoes (the small can, or half the big can).
When the whole thing is heated through, add the gnocchi and toss; salt and pepper to taste.

It was really really good and so simple to make. I think you could add any pasta, but the chunky sauce went well with the gnocchi.

I thought there was one more thing to write... but I can't remember so I'm going to bed. Sweet dreams!

Man! My name has been retired from the Hurricane Names list :(

Apparently their list gets recycled every six years unless a country requests a name be retired, and then it's replaced in the loop.

Mine got retired in 2001 for 'devastating' southern Texas. Also hit hard were Louisiana and South East Pennsylvania! Sorry, Philly.

I remember 6 years before that I rained on my Aunt Lesley and Uncle Joe's honeymoon. I mean, if they were going to get rain, at least it had a slightly humorous twist.
(...They got married in fall 1994 though... maybe they delayed their honeymoon until the next spring. I'll have to ask)

So if I hadn't retired in 2001 I would have been first up again this year! Now I'll never be a hurricane again :(

Glen is a back-up name for Fiji tropical cyclones. Are you a hurricane?

(So this is probably when I should get off wikipedia and go back to my flash cards...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Stool_Scale

Courtesy of a friend who will remain nameless. She did not find it via the random article button... but it was something along those lines ;)

10 Day forecast - June 21st: high of 85 and Sunny. We just went from 'rainy day blues' to sunny in 24 hours. This should be an interesting week.
I only sort of care what the weather is going to be like this year -- I'm just trying to prepare myself for next year's roller coaster ride.

One week left until we take our boards, and I don't feel prepared at all. So what do I do? Sleep all morning. I just couldn't fall asleep last night and I was so exhausted when I got up. I would hit snooze and when I woke up again, it was an hour later instead of 5 minutes later. (Glen didn't hear the alarm at all). Oh, well time to go read while I eat my lunch (that's possible as long as you're not reading about helminths[click at your own risk]).

Oh, also, you can lose your sense of smell (anosmia) due to injury, brain tumor, or Cadmium poisoning. Those first two causes were from reading my Neuroanatomy book. The last was from watching House. :-)

I wanted to remind every body that Friday is Bob Barker's last day as host of The Price is Right (I have my calendar marked).
Then I saw this article: Bob Barker Offers to Fill In as Host of 'Price Is Right'
I didn't realize they took the summers off so now I guess we have to wait until the fall to see who will be hosting. Super exciting stuff!!! (you can see my standards for exciting have kind of fallen off).

Glen has a subscription to Wired magazine and they had this little mini article in the catagory "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch" about a gadget that curls and then kind of hairsprays your eyelashes. I thought the catagory just referred to the fact that this sounds like something that Japanese schoolgirls would use, but the product is indeed super Japanese. Check out its webpage.The company's other products are on the left and they are even funnier.

And finally, I saw on the wikipedia "Current Events" section that a new strain of Bartonella has been discovered. Normally, who would really care? But a couple of days ago I got a QBank practice question that described the symptoms of what turned out to be Cat Scratch Fever (Bartonella henselae) and then asked me which of given choices was caused by the same pathogen -- and every single answer choice was a disease caused by a different strain of Bartonella. So I take particular offense that scientists have decided to burden me with learning a sixth strain of this microbe.

A fun, complete and total time waster:
Click for a random wikipedia article

What did you get?

This morning I woke up thinking about whether DiGeorge Syndrome is accompanied by lack of the parathyroid glands or the C cells of the thyroid. I remembered First Aid saying it was accompanied by tetany because of the calcium imbalance, but I couldn't remember which way that should swing.
It's lack of the parathyroid glands and hypocalcemia.

This kind of contrasts yesterday morning when I woke up dreaming that the Pope had given my sister a secret mission, but we had figured out that the mission was part of some huge conspiracy and we were going to use our 'in' to take it down. So in the meanwhile we had a reception for the Queen of England at our house. The Queen Mother was being so rude and itching her butt with this disgusting handkerchief which she proceeded to throw on our lawn. (Did you know she died in 2002 at age 101? Impressive. Apparently she was well loved by the British people so I don't know why I'm having dreams about her picking her butt.)

Anyway, waking up thinking about schoolwork got me up pretty much on time, so maybe I'll be on schedule enough today to actually go get that pedicure :)

Ye olde procrastinations

Sometimes my procrastination tangents lead to interesting places.

"How The Immune System Works" was talking about how memory B cells confer life-long immunity to infection, and used the Swedish travels to the Faroe Islands as a case study.

I had never heard of the Faroe Islands so I looked them up on wikipedia.
It turns out they have a language called Faroese that's still spoken by about 60,000 people (I have an interest in obscure northern European languages -- I took a semester of Irish Gaelic one summer). That article mentions that when you use a Faroese keyboard, you can type Latin, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, etc. except the Icelandic letter þ is missing! Oh no!

I had seen this character before in the character map; I had occasionally used it for a tongue-sticking-out smiley (:-þ), so I was surprised to see there was a whole wiki article on it. It's called thorn. Not only is it used in modern Icelandic, it was used in early, middle, and early modern English. It's a "th" sound, so up to when the first bibles were being printed, the word "that" might be abbreviated with a thorn with a superscript t or even a crossed thorn. "The" was written thorn with a superscript e. Over the years, the written version of thorn in English had decayed to a character almost resembling a Y, so when the first printing presses were made, they just used the Y press for thorn. Thus, Ye, as in "Ye olde...." actually means "The olde..."

I love wikipedia.

I'm about 24 hours into seriously studying for the Boards, and amazingly my enthusiasm is still high. Sometimes I just want to get started with the hard part so the hard part can be over. I did my first practice questions today. They can be amusing: one of the answer sets was A) primary hyperparathyroidism, B) primary hypoparathyroidism, C) pseudohypoparathyroidism or D) pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism. Another one's explanation was that "the rule of thumb is that the levels [of drug] decrease by half every half-life" -- that's not a rule of thumb, that's the definition of a half-life. OK, obviously my standards for "amusing" have already plummeted, but you have to get your kicks somewhere. I also have to admit I got an MP21 question wrong!!! (behavioral science, practice of medicine, whatever you want to call it) I actually went too sappy for them. I didn't think that was possible, I just chose the sappiest answer available and assumed that was what they wanted. Apparently the Kaplan QBank questions weren't written by our professors.

At 6pm, I finally changed out of my PJs and left the house for the first time -- the original plan was to get into this whole scheduled exercise thing by taking a long walk. Instead, since we had run out of paper towels at lunch, I took a not-so-long walk around the corner to SuperFresh. (I bumped into Donna on the way there, so I really felt like I was out having normal human interactions; very refreshing!) When I got out of SuperFresh, it was sunny but pouring out! I had no umbrella but didn't know how long it would last to try to wait it out, so I just headed home and got soaked. I guess I should be happy that I wasn't out on that long walk after all. It was kind of a nice rain though, and once again I am glad that we have our own washer and dryer, because all of my sopping wet clothes got thrown right in.

Speaking of laundry, there's nothing like doing ten loads of laundry to make you realize how much the weather has changed lately... or maybe how long it's been since I saw the bottom of my laundry basket. No turtlenecks, it hasn't been quite that long, but still some much warmer clothing than I would want to be wearing now... during the 25 minutes I leave the house each day.

One last thing -- during this past week, it was 400 days until our wedding :-D I wish I had some wedding planning scheduled into my days, but maybe I can bring a copy of Brides down to the exercise bike and multi-task. We got the latest menus from the Down Town Club, and although it's way too soon to decide, it's fun to look at the possible combinations of all that delicious-sounding food. Another fun distraction is trying to pick out where we should go on our honeymoon. We're probably headed to the Caribbean because we both love to waste the days away lounging on the beach, but we can't decide which island. If anyone has any recommendations, please leave a comment!

OK, I'm late for my date with Linda S. Costanzo.