Great First Day Back

Hope that you all had a great Thanksgiving. I definitely did. The weather here in Cleveland was astoundingly gorgeous all weekend: sunny, mid-sixties. I spent a lot of time sleeping, going for walks, and hanging out with my friends. Yeah, I did all of the things that you hardly ever have the time to do when you're a medical student. It was great. I just wish I could have had one more day off.

For some reason, we didn't have anatomy this morning. Instead, we had a seminar about lipid biochemistry. The seminar was ok, though I wish it had been more interactive and less like a lecture. We already covered some lipid biochemistry last summer, but now we are getting more into how lipids are used and transported in the body. You probably know that lipids, being fats, are not soluble in watery liquids like your blood. (Think of oil and vinegar salad dressing.) So the body has some pretty ingenious ways of getting around that problem so that the lipids don't all clump together in one big fatty mess. It's pretty neat to learn about, though also very complex and sometimes confusing. We're going to be learning about lipids and how they are transported this whole week. This is a very important topic for physicians, because problems with lipid metabolism cause a lot of common diseases like atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.

We had PBL after seminar, and today we started our final case for this unit on heart and lungs. Our session went really well, and I think this is going to be a good PBL week. The case is about a "patient" with lipid problems, naturally, and it's a little different than the others we've done so far in that this patient came in to get a check-up and advice to improve his lipids, not because he was wanting to be treated per se. So we don't really have to come up with a diagnosis, at least not so far. (You can see that I've learned not to trust my Monday impressions at face value any more, because things are changing now on Wednesdays!) My learning objective is about interpreting lab lipid values, and I am very interested in learning to do this since I had my blood drawn last week for class and for a clinical trial.

That's about it for today, so I'm going to go to the gym and go home. Tomorrow and Wednesday are both going to be very busy days for me. I have to make up my missed clinic day tomorrow, and I have clinical skills class on Wednesday.