:: eye of the storm ::


About Me

A 27-year-old PA student who wants to visit all seven continents, write a book, work at a pediatric clinic in Africa, and basically meet as many of the world's challenges as possible.

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Life List

(already accomplished)

Become a PA

Visit all 7 continents

Take a SwimTrek trip

Bike through Western Europe

Raft the Grand Canyon

Improve my Spanish proficiency

Go on safari in Africa

Trace my roots at Ellis Island

Vacation in Hawaii

Work on a hospital ship in a Third World country

Celebrate New Year's in Times Square

Visit all 50 states (29 to go: AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, HI, ID, IL, IN, IA, KS, MI, MN, MO, MT, NE, NV, NM, ND, OK, OR, RI, SD, TX, UT, VT, WA, WV, WI, WY)

See the ruins at Pompeii

Swim in Capri's Blue Grotto

Tour Mt. Vesuvius

Throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain

Tour the Colosseum

Visit the D-Day beaches

See the Mona Lisa

Visit the palace at Versailles

See the Acropolis and Parthenon

See the Egyptian pyramids

Hike the Inca Trail

Walk El Camino Santiago

Take an Alaskan cruise

View the Taj Mahal at sunrise

Hike Table Mountain in South Africa

Climb through the Amazon canopy

Walk at least part of the Great Wall of China

Get laser hair removal

Learn to surf, ski, and snowboard

Learn to drive a stick-shift

Learn to play the piano

Go on a tropical cruise

Ride horseback on the beach

Ride in a hot air balloon

Get tickets to the Olympics

Go to adult Space Camp

Witness a shuttle launch from up close

Build a full-sized snowman

Sew a quilt out of my old race T-shirts

Update and continue my Life Scrapbook

Become the oldest person to ever do the River Run

Live to be a happy, healthy 100 years old - at least!

(unlikely dreams)

donderdag 23 december 2010

The last week of school was simultaneously really nice and insanely stressful. We had one exam each on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, from 8am to 10am, and then nothing else to do for the rest of the day. That sounds like there would be plenty of down time, but in reality, we spent the whole of each afternoon and evening studying for the next day's test (or, during study breaks, panicking about how we weren't studying for the next day's test and how unprepared we felt. I'm sure I was absolutely no fun to live with for those three days.) Passed everything in the end, and so can proudly claim to have finished the first semester remediation-free! (If we score below a 70 on anything, we have to complete a remediation assignment, which goes far more in-depth than the things we learn in class -- think six separate pharmacology essays for one assignment -- and doesn't even help your grade in the end. Needless to say, we all do our very best to avoid that!) Still waiting on official final grades to be posted, but by my estimation, it's going to be six Hs (Honors, 90+) and one P (Pass... in anatomy, of course), which I'm pretty darn thrilled with. We're told that the fall semester is the hardest, and that it gets marginally easier from here. I'm already terrified about our Patient Assessment course, though; as I mentioned in a previous post, starting the week we get back to school, we're going to be heading over to the hospital a couple of times a month to perform physical exams on actual patients. Yikes!!! Facing a patient actor (which we all did during the first week of December) was nerve-wracking enough; the prospect of having to face an actual patient is currently preventing me from believing the second-year students who tell us that the spring semester is a little bit better overall.

Anyway, we were supposed to have our Evidence-Based Medicine group presentations on Thursday morning (presenting articles to our small groups about the effect of sleep curtailment on weight loss), but a mass email was sent out on Wednesday citing the possibility of bad weather and dangerous road conditions on Thursday morning... so our vacation started a day early. We'll be giving the presentations in January instead. (This email only came through after my partner and I had spent over two hours prepping our PowerPoint, of course.) Ah, well, I'm not complaining. :)

Since class was canceled, I slept in a bit on Thursday, and then we had an end-of-semester bash at Josh and Jeremy's awesome apartment at West Village (they set a new record for the number of people they fit into it: fifty!). One of my friends slept over that night since she had an early flight the next morning, and we were both up at 4am to head to the airport. I dropped her off, then came home, went to the gym, took care of some loose ends around the house, then made another airport run at 10am for another classmate. Needless to say, I was ready for a nap after all that!

On Saturday we got some more snow flurries (I happened to be running on the Tobacco Trail when they started, which was kind of cool), and then most of Sunday was spent hanging out with Liz and doing some Christmas shopping. On Monday I was up before 5am yet again, this time to take Liz to the airport for a fly-by visit to her father and grandparents in Pennsylvania. I dropped her off, came home and worked out, then did my grocery shopping before the mad rush of Christmas shoppers descended upon Target. I took a nap in the afternoon, then met up with some classmates at the Duke vs Elon basketball game, which we won by a huge margin (are we surprised???). We all went to Tyler's afterward, where we were disappointed to find the kitchen closed; however, I ran into the father of a former patient, which made me smile.

Tuesday was the first day that felt like a real vacation. I slept in until 8:45 (funny how 8:45 feels like a luxury now), went and had coffee with an old friend and coworker, then did some Christmas shopping at A Southern Season and the Duke bookstore. Came home, made gnocchi, watched A Christmas Story, did some laundry, and discovered Pandora Internet Radio (haha). The low-key vibe continued yesterday; I made gingerbread while watching (of all things) Free Willy on Instant Netflix (yes, I am a total dork), did some packing (I'm headed to Jax on the afternoon of Christmas Day), then ran 10 miles in today's upper-40s weather, which felt positively balmy after the low-30s highs we've been having lately. Came home and watched another movie while I finished wrapping my presents, then went and picked Liz up at RDU. Slept until 9:30 this morning (and was informed upon waking that I had repeated, "There were pancakes on the windowsill; don't you remember?" multiple times in my sleep) and am now sitting at the kitchen table drinking chai tea and typing this post.

Let's see, what else is new? Well, I'm sort of casually training for another marathon, the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach on 3/20/11. I say 'casually' because I haven't officially signed up for it yet, but it's being held on the same day as the Georgia Marathon and the Wrightsville Beach Marathon, both of which are also within easy driving distance, so even if I miss the Shamrock deadline, there are a couple of other options. I read about a new plan in this month's issue of Runner's World which former skeptics are now swearing by: fewer miles, but at higher intensities. The longest 'long run' in the plan is 16 miles (you'd more commonly go up to 20) and the program includes a lot more 'speed' workouts, runs of 3 to 6 miles where you're running intervals at 10k pace (which is faster than marathon pace). This plan appeals to me for a couple of reasons: first, as someone with a history of foot issues, I tend to get injured if I try to log too many miles, so being able to pack a more quality workout into a shorter distance is great for me. Secondly, I've been doing more speedwork lately anyway for the past couple of months (among other things, running with a wicked-fast friend who was a Division 1 college heptathlete in her day) and it's been incredible to see the changes. A couple of weeks ago, I ran six miles and held a 9:15 pace the whole way, which would have been unthinkable for me even just a year ago. Then, yesterday, I did a ten-miler (my long run for the week), aiming to hold a 10:00 pace. 9:45 was easy for the first five miles; when the fatigue began to sink in around mile 8, I struggled momentarily, but then found another gear and was actually able to push my pace back under 10:00 for the remaining 2 miles. That degree of control isn't something I've had historically; before, when I started to flag, I was just done, period. My point in saying all this is that I'm starting to really believe in the benefits of speedwork, especially for someone like me who has an established distance background, so the idea of this plan is intriguing. We'll see how things go.

Oh, by the way, here's something else for y'all to chew on. Emory's PA class of 2010 made a video about their program which is absolutely effing hilarious. (If you watch it: 'capturing the kidney' is a physical exam technique, 'Mayfield' is the director of the Emory program, 'Bates' is the author of our Physical Diagnosis textbook, a 'smile-frown' is a neurological test, a 'Panoptic' is a fancy instrument to check the eyes, an SP is a 'standardized patient' (one of the patient actors I mentioned before), and Welch-Allyn is the manufacturer of our (pricey) otoscopes and opthalmoscopes.) Anyway, so our class wants to come up with something similar. However, we don't want to just 'copy' them; we feel like we need to add some sort of new and different twist to it. Emory is the #3 PA program in the country, Duke is #2, and Iowa (of all places) is #1. My thought, since Emory's lyrics included "we're number three in fact, y'all just can't handle that", was to include something about us being number two, then doing some sort of hokey "we're all gonna be great PAs no matter where we're ranked" and then ending by somehow saying "OK, Iowa, your turn." That way it's like we're one of a series, rather than just straight-up copying and not bringing anything new to the table. Anybody else have any suggestions? And does anyone have any ideas for a song we could use?

maandag 6 december 2010

There are only a few more days left of our first semester of PA school. How did that happen??? And how is it that I STILL have zero energy for Christmas? Honestly, I'm not sure anyone is getting presents this year (apart from Liz, because, you know, I might get kicked outta the house :)). This is an unfamiliar feeling -- I'm used to being totally jazzed about the holidays. I still am, I guess; I just have so many other huge things on my mind that I (selfishly) don't want to have to do any work or spend any money, which kinda knocks a bunch of things out of contention for my attention. :)

The big news is that, as of last week, we are finally done with anatomy and cadaver lab (thank goodness)!!! However, we'll continue going over to the hospital once a week during the spring semester for what they call 'vivarium lab', where we learn to suture, cast, and so forth. We're also done with EBM, a.k.a. Evidence-Based Medicine (or, at least, we WILL be done with it as soon as we present our final projects on the 16th), which is another huge relief; that class is mostly about statistics and research studies, how to read them critically, and how to know which ones are reputable and which ones aren't. It's necessary, I'll give them that, but it's also pretty boring compared to the rest of the awesome stuff that we get to learn. It will come back to bite us again in the second year when we have to spend one rotation (a solid month) writing a research paper on a topic of our choice, but it'll be great to have a few EBM-free months in the meantime.

So the two 'swaps' we're making are (1) picking up Surgery/vivarium lab instead of Anatomy/cadaver lab, and (2) moving away from Physical Diagnosis (learning to do a physical exam) and into Patient Assessment (going to the hospital and taking histories / performing exams on actual patients, YIKES!). In addition to those two exchanges, we'll also pick up a brand-new course, Behavioral Aspects of Medicine. I have no idea what to expect from that one; it hasn't been mentioned to us at all yet.

The other half of our spring curriculum will be made up of our normal 'trio' of Clinical Medicine, Diagnostic Methods, and Pharmacology, all of which run all year long because they're so (a) detailed, and (b) intimately connected to one another. This triad covers basically every aspect of what we'll see when dealing with a patient face to face -- what signs/symptoms will they present with (Clin Med), what labs/studies will we want to do (Dx Methods), and what treatment will we prescribe (Pharm)? These 'Combined' exams are our longest and most intense tests since they are tri-fold; each question is written in such a way as to specifically test our knowledge in each of the three areas, and we get three separate grades at the end of the exam based on how well we do in each 'category' of questions.

The three things I'm going to have to work on over break are (1) scholarship applications (because goodness knows that's a full-time job unto itself!), (2) practicing my physical exam in anticipation of starting Patient Assessment, and (3) my Global Health Elective application for the clinical year. Basically, that's where I 'officially' express my interest in going abroad and rank my preferences as far as a country to do my elective in, but it is a true application nonetheless, complete with essays -- if you're not serious enough to take the time to do all that, then you probably shouldn't be doing this elective in the first place -- so it's going to take a while to complete.

This is what my next two weeks look like:

Tonight - dinner out with Liz, then Duke Chapel Christmas Carol Sing-Along
Tomorrow - dinner out for a classmate's birthday
Thursday - dinner at home with Liz and Erin
Friday - DPAP Holiday Luncheon, spin class, DPAP Yankee Swap
Saturday - tickets to Duke vs St. Louis, then Liz's and my annual holiday shindig
Sunday - studying my tail off!!!
Monday - ANATOMY FINAL, advisor meeting about clinical year
Tuesday - ORTHOPEDICS FINAL
Wednesday - CARDIOLOGY FINAL
Thursday - EBM FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION... and then a party to celebrate being done with our first semester!!!

Thursday at 10am marks the 'finish line', and we're in the final sprint. Just gotta keep on keepin' on...

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