Temporary Shower

Started the PhD portion of my MD/PhD today and so far so good. I was a bit nervous because I haven't ran an experiment for awhile but luckily all I had to do was a pull-down. I'm glad I wasn't incompetent on my first day back! That said, I'm sure the next month will be a steep learning curve. I have to take over someone's project (meaning learn mouse genetics/how to keep colonies alive) AND I have to help someone else out with there project. I'm excited though! I've always been good with my hands and it's just nice not having to bury my nose in books all the time. I'm currently reading Michael Au's book and it's AMAZING. I LOVE narrative medicine and yes....I consider it leisurely reading. It's weird how a test distorts your perceptive but I actually had a good time cleaning, shopping, writing emails, and updating my life today. I guess mundane stuff becomes "fun" when you don't get to do them that often. On a side note.....

So I finally took the beast today and I guess it wasn't as epic as I though it would be. In my mind, it had been a life or death situation. I literally dreamed about it countless times last week. All in all, I have to say that I'm feeling pretty shitty right now. I just hope I passed and with a decent enough score to get into residency. Yuck. I keep thinking about all the questions I missed. Things I should of known (and did at one point) like the difference between positive sensing and negative sensing RNAs etc. I "lucked" out with a ton of pelvic anatomy questions and a ton of repro questions but luckily, I had studied for repro using pathoma. I do think I failed every anatomy question though....sigh...here's to praying that it all works out in the end... I guess I have never felt good after standardized exams. I'm not particularly good at them...SAT gave me nightmares, MCATs made me cry...at least I didn't cry after the test today lol. My family la...

With three more days till the exam, I'm getting more and more anxious. I guess I'm mostly scared to fail this thing. It's not like the MCATs where you get to try again. Of course, if you fail Step 1, you can retake it but it just looks really bad... after all,it is what a lot of residencies use to determine whether you are "interview material" whatever that means. Ha! Today, I got up to go to lab meeting at 7am....but didn't go to bed last night till 4am so I was super tired. I thought I could pull a full 16 hour day of studying but instead, I got home, studied for an hour, and napped for 3. Needless to say, my plan of 16-18hr study days have not been going well...thank god this will all end soon (for better or worse). I also decided today that I can't get through 800 more world questions and finish BRS physiology, pathoma, and First Aid. Since I've gone through world once already, I decided to just scrape it. I'm 3 chapters away from finishin...

So I had a blog....till the Chinese Government blocked it while I was in China (more on that later) and I thought to myself...what better time to start another one. I mean, my Step 1 board exam is 4 days away and instead of studying, I've decided to procrastinate here. The truth is, sometimes I wonder how much I'm actually learning and why any of it is important. It seems like like years before I will use any of this "knowledge" and by that time, maybe ACE inhibitors won't be the go to drug for diabetics with hypertension and IL-1 will be called by another name. Lol. Just the other day, I went to the pharmacist to pick up my prescription for back pain and he preceded to warn me about the side effects of Tramadol for 15min. When I informed him I had just studied the drug, he looked at me and laughed....a) he didn't believe that I was in med school and b) he didn't believe I wouldn't abuse the drug....so much for this education of mine.