Hx - no title

So I've had several days to normalise (read: see real friends and stay up too late and sleep in) and I am feeling much better and am now enjoying my time off. I spent a decent chunk of the weekend tutoring a classmate in the anatomy lab; poor thing, she'd gotten sick during the semester and had to put off a test until the Monday after finals. It was creepy being in the cadaver lab when it was half dismantled with no one else in there, but it helped to close off the semester for me. I don't really expect that to make sense to most of you because I don't fully understand it myself. My mother (who has her bachelor's in nursing - and that is insanely hard) does, though, which supports my vague theory that when you have poured yourself continuously into something that demands all of you, it is more stressful to simply stop abruptly than it is to taper off gently. Of course nothing about school is gentle, so I take it as a strange but excellent sort of gift that I got to phase school out of my system this time instead of just turning it off like a tap.

In other news, today I (re)learned how to purl. My mother taught me this stuff fully a decade ago and I totally ignored her, so now I have to learn it again as my ambition outstrips my skills. I can't just make garter stitch wool scarves for the rest of my life. Not that I've graduated out of scarves, ha! But the one I'm making now has got stripes, and maybe I'll be able to put patterns in the next one, and then
who knows what evil I could accomplish
I'll take over the world
I could strangle annoying people with cable knit
maybe a hat? Watch out annoying people and world circular needles, I'm coming for you!

I have no good way to end this post. Aren't you glad my writing skills are starting to atrophy? I KNOW I AM.

Hx - I know this is weird, but

finals are finished and not being in school so suddenly kind of makes me want to die. I am assuming this is a really strange response to the sudden cessation of stress, which is in itself a kind of stress and really I just want to curl up in a hole.

Break is meant to be a Good Thing! I FEEL CHEATED.

Hx - Hours

More often than not, it is a pain that I am most productive and efficient after midnight. Example: I have an exam at 10am tomorrow, but I couldn't settle down for long periods of time to work until about 20 minutes ago. In that 20 minutes I accomplished more than I managed to do in the last 2 hours, so naturally I am celebrating by taking a break.

Clearly I am made to work a strange shift in a hospital, or be the urgent care doc for a practice because I work well when most other people are winding down. It wouldn't be a problem if I could just go to bed at 2am each night and get up at 9:30 or 10 every morning. But no. I have to be up with the rest of the normals at seven. Or earlier.  Makes a girl want to get her own practice so she can set her own strange hours.


...KIDDING. I have no wish to start my own practice and -shudder- run a business while spending my days dealing with runny noses and hypertension and "well, I have this pain, and it sort of comes and goes... no, it doesn't hurt now..." No.

AnyZoehatingprivatepractice, I should get back to the science of BORING aging so that I can keep this awesome week of awesome grades going. I can't wait until my very! own! stethoscope! comes in in a month because that signals the beginning of Clinical Sk1lz I and did I mention that I am so excited I could pee myself to have my OWN STETHOSCOPE. And also a blue leather doctor bag. And a whole bunch of other stuff that adds up to a terrifying $1200 and whose purposes remain entirely mysterious to me (an ear insufflator bulb? There are multiple levels of idk contained within that phrase.  Example: what is an ear?). But mostly the stethoscope to hold and love and squeeze and pet and call George.

On to aging!

Hx - On The Ridiculous Hardcore Mentality, OR Finals, Falling

I am still alive. It is finals week. Yesterday was anatomy; I walked in with a solid grade and for sure walked out one grade lower. -sigh- We'd been warned that it would be brutal, but still - a letter grade? Well, that's what cushion is for. Today is (gasp!) a day off; tomorrow I have my OMM two-part final, then Biochem on Thursday and Histology on Friday.

I don't think I'm going to be that exhausted by the end of the week. I'll be tired - obviously - but not so completely exhausted that I will be nonfunctional. I know a lot of my classmates are going totally balls-to-the-wall, but I think that's just because they are immature type-A's who think that you're not "doing it right" if you don't go multiple days without sleep during finals in medical school. Part of me understands where they are coming from; there's this kind of mystique and drama about having to work! so! hard! that you literally can't ever sleep. It's hardcore and other type A's secretly (or openly) respect that. But you know what? There is a reason I studied a ton last week, and that was so I could get regular sleep this week. It's not cheating or slacking, it's planning and time management. And I am walking in to these tests with all passing grades so I have space for things to go wrong. I am realising that this is how medical school is actually supposed to be. You work every day so you don't have to cram; your stories aren't as cool drastic this way, but you get better grades and lose fewer years off your life from stress.

...This is going to sound totally hypocritical after what I just wrote. The way I appease that part of me that insists that sleeping during finals is cheating is by reminding myself that I am absolutely going to do medical missions once I'm a doctor, and go for a couple of months at a time and help out in refugee camps and give shots to tiny babies with kwashiorkor and whatnot. Those people wear themselves out and break their hearts AND pay for the privilege. If that isn't hardcore, I don't know what is.

And now to learn about testosterone - no, not the interesting stuff, that's next semester. Right now all I get to learn is how it's made and where it goes and blah blah blah. A future medical researcher I am not.

Note from the future: Premeds, learn this lesson now.  Spreading stuff out = win.  Cramming + all nighters = fail.  You've been through calc II; this should be easy math for you.