End of a Hectic Week

I'm leaving for my conference tomorrow! I just finished packing my suitcase, including my suit, which I haven't worn since I was interviewing for medical school two years ago. :-P The entire week has just been so crazy because I had to do this week's school work, get prepared for the conference, and collect up next week's assignments to take with me.

One of next week's assignments is for us to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting. I went to one at a church near CCF after my MS class yesterday morning with two of my classmates. It was a very good experience, much better than I could have possibly anticipated. We met some regulars who have been coming to AA meetings for several decades. Others were first-time attendees like we were. We told the AA members that we are medical students at the Clinic, we are studying addiction and alcoholism in school, and we want to learn more about how to help our alcoholic patients beat their addiction. I wasn't sure how the regulars would feel about us coming, but they seemed happy to have us there. Several of them even came up to us afterward and talked to us more about their lives, and they invited us to come back again for another meeting whenever we wanted.

Yesterday was just a whirlwind. After the AA meeting, I got my PBL evals finished since they were due today, and I finished logging in all of my patients from Wednesday's peds clinic. It turns out that I saw EIGHT patients. No wonder I was so exhausted--that's twice as many as I see on a normal clinic day in IM! I also prepared my PBL learning objective, which was on adolescent depression.

Our seminar this morning was about sleep, and within a few minutes after it began, I was very tempted to go to sleep. Good thing that 3-57 (the library room where we have our classes) is so cold, or I really might have fallen asleep. The ARM (almost called it POD again!) talk today was kind of boring too. It was about preventing the blood vessels over the brain from spasming and leading to stroke in patients who have just had an aneurysm in the brain. That is an interesting topic, but for some reason the session turned into a discussion between the speaker and the professor in charge of the seminar series. Last year, the prof in charge hardly ever spoke, because the sessions are supposed to be for the students to interact with the faculty, not for the faculty to interact with each other. Not very cool.

There was a neuro histology review session this afternoon. But it was optional, so I opted not to go. Neuro histology wasn't so interesting the first time around that I wanted to go through it again, and I had enough other stuff to do.

I want to take the time to thank those of you who have donated to my Blogger Challenge this past week. So far we have raised $83 toward our goal of $951 to buy a skeleton model and books for underprivileged middle school children. If any of you other readers would like to find out more about my Blogger Challenge or help out, please click here.