Clinical Research and Anatomy Office Hours

We are getting close to the end of the clinical research class, which I'm glad about. Today's session was yet another three hour powerpoint fest, this time about designing clinical trials. I'm interested in the topic, but I don't have that kind of attention span. We had homework due today from our last class session before break, too. I had intended to get it done during break, but, well, you know how those things go. I wound up working on it last night instead. We had to do some calculations and draw graphs. My graphs were not coming out properly, and I was getting annoyed with the whole thing. So I stopped for a while and did something else, and then when I came back to it, I realized that I had forgotten to subtract the answers from 1. Such a simple thing, but the graphs looked much better once I had done that.

I went to the Internal Medicine lunchtime seminar today with a couple of my classmates because it was an endocrinology talk. Ironically, the speaker was the same physician who had led one of our seminar halves yesterday. (He's also one of our endocrinology block course directors.) Today he was talking about parathyroid and thyroid problems as they relate to levels of hormones and bone mineral density. I guess the most interesting thing that I learned is that the body will sacrifice the entire skeleton if there is a need for more calcium. It kind of made a funny picture in my head, imagining someone walking around with rubbery bones made only of collagen. But I suppose the person would have a lot worse problems before reaching the point where all of the mineralization was gone from their bones.

I worked on my learning objective for tomorrow, and then I went to anatomy office hours at about 3:30. I was the only one there again, and as tired as I am, I did not do so well with being pimped about levator ani muscles. Anyway, I got them all in the end. A couple of the urology residents were there dissecting the genitals of male cadavers for next week's anatomy session. I watched them work for a little while also. I'm sorry to say that male anatomy really is just as complex as female anatomy is.

It's snowing outside now. How sucky is that. Last weekend, Monday and Tuesday were all warm, sunny, and gorgeous. The temperature was like in the 70s. Yesterday it started raining and went down to the 50s. Today it's in the low 30s and the snow is actually starting to stick. I can't freaking believe it. I had put away my boots and parka, but I'm going to have to dig them out again, because tomorrow is going to be even colder. It's supposed to keep snowing all weekend. Some spring we're having here.