Plate o' Shrimp

Earthquake

Aparently there was an earthquake in trinidad yesterday that was felt by some here in Grenada, but I didn't feel it.

posted by Sa @ 8:03 AM 0 comments

Too thin to plow....

Okay so the rinse water in my washer looks like it came out of the rio grande (...too thick to drink) and I chose my skirt this morning because the color matched the color of the lint from my towels adhering to my shirt. Not enough hours in the day and I am already behind because of my wacky need to do dishes.

And the heavens opened yesterday (and I mean OPENED) and it rained all afternoon so I didn’t get a walk.

Did I mention that I am in a strangely bubbly and happy mood?

posted by Sa @ 7:45 AM 1 comments

Maters

After having purchased apparently every tomato available in Grenada, I came home yesterday with an abundant selection of vegetables and not much else. Having honed the art of putting off studying, I proceeded to make the meal pictured below. You too can make this for lunch by following these simple instructions:

1 c corn masa tortilla mix, dried
1/4 medium yellow onion
1/2 medium ripe tomato
1 clove garlic
2TB softened cream cheese
1/2 c crumbled queso blanco or other Mexican cheese
salt and pepper to taste
canola oil for frying

Mix the masa up with warm water.. enough to hold together but not make a dough that is too sticky, add a pinch of salt and set aside. Mince onion and garlic, saute until soft in 1 ts canola oil. Toss with tomatoes, mix in cheese until well blended, add salt and pepper to taste.

Dived Masa dough into four balls. Roll out masa into thin pancakes between two sheets of wax paper. Place 1/4 of filling mix in center and fold masa over to make 1/2 circle. Crimp sides. Repeat with other masa dough rounds. Saute in 1/4 inch canola or peanut oil over medium heat until golden brown all over. Let steam inside clean kitchen towel for 5 minutes. Serve with green salad and guacamole.

posted by Sa @ 7:37 AM 1 comments

Month o midterms

My first midterm is Monday and I have a midterm the next two Mondays following. If procrastination patterns hold, this is the ritual announcement that I will not be posting much during midterms to be followed by one or more long post and then silence as the fear and neurosis really kicks in.
Be forewarned

posted by Sa @ 9:02 AM 0 comments

Snack Time

Today in a small group where each person was presenting a different paper on diabetes, a group participant suggested that we not tell diabetic patients that a low glycemic index snack at night might increase their chances of waking up with more stable blood sugar. “You know those people tend to be overweight and don’t need to be told it is okay to have a snack”

And so the rationalizations for manipulating patients and withholding comlex truths begin. Do I believe most people are capable of understanding the difference between high glycemic index carbs and low glycemic index carbs, absolutely. Did I say anything in this group to the young woman about her assumptions? Challenge her to treat her patients as intellectual equals? No. So am I a part of the problem? Yes.

So there is one more thing about me I need to change. I don’t know when I got hesitant to rock the boat.. you who know me would think I would get seasick in still water I am so used to constant motion. But having chosen to be up to my eyeballs in challenge I choose to be quiet more often then not and there-in lies one of the many pitfalls of my chosen profession.. an educational system that keeps you too busy to think outside the box or challenge the status quo.

posted by Sa @ 4:44 PM 0 comments

The front of Nada's Shirt said....

Spring Break in Paradise...

The back of Nada's shirt said ...
B.Y.O.B.
(Bring Your Own Boyfriend)

The lovely talented and now famous Nada is pictured on the right, sitting next to my row buddy Christine. Changing the row in which you sit can be very controversial and upset several levels of the socio-educational structure. For those students who still attend lecture of course. Many students choose to skip the whole annoying lecture thing and get straight to the studying. The same students also do not seem to buy the text books. I am old-fashioned and refuse to study exclusively from powerpoints and wikipedia.

I am off to impress some of my fellow students with both my torilla making ability and my knowledge of b cell development and activation.

posted by Sa @ 3:10 PM 0 comments

Some people get it

.. and they asked me "how was medical school" when I got back to the states. Other people asked "how was the Caribbean and looked at me funny when I reported that you couldn't tell by me. Well I celebrated the six week anniversary of my return to the island on Monday, and I went swimming for the first time yesterday.. It was gorgeous. Note the time of the post.. I am up to study. Nuff said

posted by Sa @ 4:56 AM 0 comments

OTA statistics conclusively demonstrate......

Now that I am a second term medical student and now that I am taking I am taking neuro-anatomy, I feel fully and completely qualified to identify new psycho-social disorders.

The first disorder is BPDMS or Bipolar Disorder of the Medical Student in which the affected patient becomes first convinced that they will fail all their classes and have to return home in disgrace followed rapidly by a feeling of euphoria and enlightenment accompanied by fantasies of telling their mothers that they earned straight As that term. These mood swings follow each other rapidly, often cycle several times within the course of a one hour lecture.

There seems to be a statistical correlation that indicates sufferers of BPDMS later developing ADDP, or Attention Deficit Disorder Of The Physician, a condition that manifests itself in a permanently distracted state, the inability to discuss anything without using acronyms, and an unwillingness to return phone calls or to comply with simple requests for information. It may be theorized that those suffering from ADDP have crammed so much information into the neural pathways that they are simply incapable of communicating with anyone who will not discuss signal transduction pathways or left and right axis cardiac deviations or the differences between the VPM (ventral Posterior medial) nucleus of the thalamus and the VPL (ventral posterior lateral) nucleus of the thalamus.

Current treatment for BPDMS involves having the affected student/patient watch House and Grey’s Anatomy with their fellow students and attempt to diagnose the disorder of the week before the TV docs do, thus establishing a somewhat false sense of calm that never the less relieves the overwhelming sense of panic. Experimental doses of Mango ice cream have not had beneficial affects above that of placebo and have demonstrated adverse side affects such as the excess deposition of adipose tissue on the hips and abdomen. Further studies to follow.

posted by Sa @ 4:14 PM 4 comments

What Nada's Shirt says today

Angel Behaving Badly

posted by Sa @ 10:00 AM 1 comments

Morning

It is almost 5:30. My eyes opened at 4:59 so I was awake and aware when the alarm went off at 5:00 instead of pushing the snooze until it no longer functioned.

Yesterday I studied for a greater part of the day, taking breaks to eat, take shade for a short walk at noon, and spending about an hour saying goodbye to Deanna and Blanc who are headed back to the states.

I took two formative quizzes one in neuro-anatomy and one in physio and got about a 65% on each. It was pretty demoralizing since they were open book. I have the answers and can retake them for full points but the feeling is inadequacy is hard to shake. AI got intimate last night with a loaf of raisin brain—which makes excellent cinnamon toast, and a hefty glass of Irish whiskey. But it is onward and upward today; and three weeks until my first midterm, and there really isn’t any point to being up this early except to study. But I like listening to the rain, listening to the birds wake up and imagining a winder world than the cocoon of my little whitewashed apartment I have hidden myself in for the 24 hours.

posted by Sa @ 5:46 AM 1 comments

More words of wisdom from Dr. Perrson

When speaking of physiologist Adolph Fink he said
“It is a name you practically can’t write in Germany because as you can imagine, Adolph is not the most popular Christian name and Fink is pretty much the same word in English with one letter changed”

posted by Sa @ 9:02 AM 0 comments

How could it not be a good day

When you are greeted in the morning on the bus by smiling faces such as these..
Anna and Molly

posted by Sa @ 7:53 AM 0 comments

Two Truths

There are two truths of course. One truth is that I don’t study if I don’t feel a sense of urgency. The second truth is that I am REALLY REALLY trying not to complain. I don’t want to complain about the work because I am here in Grenada for the work. And I am behind.

So it was a good weekend, Mac & Cheese and scrabble with Molly, Anna Peggy and Ian (Ian didn’t play scrabble, he is only one years old). And Deanna and Blanc are in town for a week, and Deanna smuggled in real ribs from the Kansas city area and a huge wedge of Maytag blue cheese so last night we had dinner on their porch at the Blue Horizon resort, overlooking Grand Anse beach with a full moon, and feasted on ribs, homemade mango chutney, vanilla coleslaw. We started with Maytag blue and crackers and ended with lemon and raspberry sorbet and mangos.
And I studied a lot. And I never SEEM to get as much done as I want.. yet… do I need somewhere, somehow need to keep that sense of unfinishedness close to my heart in order to keep going? Who knows….

posted by Sa @ 5:20 PM 0 comments

grav·i·tas n,

Once again someone commented on my professional and comforting demeanor, "Its like you've been a nurse or are this awesome doctor already" the young man said as I jammed my fingers into his chest making him flinch as I looked for his fifth intercostal space. Nice to have gravitas. I am SGU's own Morgan Freeman. I should do car commercials.
I may not have the memory capacity of my younger classmates, but I have the gravitas

posted by Sa @ 2:50 PM 1 comments

More words of wisdom from Dr. Perrson..

After playing some nearly indistinguishable heart murmur sounds and letting us know we will be tested on them and then moving on to a new topic 10 minuets before lecture ended:

“I know you are tired, but this is so easy I know you can grasp this even in your current state of despair”

In effort to explain why fetal pulmonary (Lung) circulation has such a high resistance:

“The lungs haven’t expanded yet before the infant takes a breath so they are very dense. In old Europe, in Sweden where I come from, they used to leave girl children out for the wolves because the Swedes wanted sons. In other parts of old Europe they said it was not okay to kill you children so when a woman said that she had a child that was born dead, they would remove the lungs and see if the baby’s lungs floated. If they did float, then they know that the child had taken a breath. If the lungs sank, they knew the child had not taken a breath. Of course they didn’t much care if the child had died on its own immediately after birth. If the baby’s lungs floated they just put the woman in a sack with some cats, tied her up and drowned her and the cats. That’s the way we did it in old Europe. Maybe that’s what Rumsfeld was talking about when he talked about new and old Europe.”

You gotta love this guy

posted by Sa @ 12:51 PM 0 comments

Blood Brain Barrier

I noticed today, and I don't always notice, that there was a group of students quickly getting a last smoke before going into lecture. I live in a glass house so....
And then in neuro we took a look at the curve that plotted solubility against uptake of common substances, basically telling us what gets across the blood brain barrier quickest and and easiest. The substances are in descending order:
1. Valium
2. Ethanol
3. Nicotine
4. Heroin


Physicians... heal thy..

Oh nevermind.

posted by Sa @ 11:06 AM 0 comments

Crickets...

What am I doing? Fair enough question. It is 8:38. I am in my jammies, laptop in lap and risking the flaming battery that apple has recalled but seems unwilling to send to me in Grenada. I am sitting on the loveseat that passes for a couch. I am listening to Rock Star super nova and I am looking at a midsagital section of the brain. It is an interactive online quiz actually. It asks me to click on a structure and tell me if I get it right. I have muted the TV and I hear now that it is raining. I hear the ever-present chorus of crickets and frog.. some sort of night bird that adds to the cacophony of the Grenada night. Shade has taken up her regular station under the couch and contributes with a half grunt half moan of relaxation and contentment every so often, crashed out after a walk and a good roll in patch of deep green grass.

posted by Sa @ 9:08 PM 0 comments

Genetics Final

Is over as of last monday.. but last sunday Molly and I got Pizza at la Boulange.. and took the edge off with a glass of wine...

posted by Sa @ 8:57 PM 0 comments

All Hooked up

I now not only have cabel TV, but internet in my little apartment. I feel very grown up.

If you are interested in chatting, I now have a US based internet phone line. Drop me an email if you would like to call.

:-)

posted by Sa @ 6:44 PM 0 comments

Milkshake

If I haven’t been clear in the past about this, each major class I take features 3 to 15 different lecturers presenting the material at hand. Although there is one course director managing everything, SGU manages to recruit lectures to come here to teach part of a course for the “expenses” incurred. Basically these visiting professors get put up in a very nice hotel or at the very nice SGU university club, work for 23 or 4 hours a day, and then enjoy the Caribbean

So for the last two weeks and the next week we have this incredibly nice physio professor named Dr. Perrsonwho is Swedish, who teaches in Germany, who edits a very very important physio journal and who is one of the best, I mean THE BEST, lecturers who I have ever had the pleasure of being in class with. Plus he is just an incredibly nice guy. He was wandering around campus center the other day and I invited him to sit with me and a couple of other class mates. He told Molly what her (last) means in German (It means something like “paralegal” I think).
His father taught physics at cal tech in Pasadena for a while so he speaks English with a good California accent, but his conjugations are all German. He was explaining the “plumbing” of the heart and the physics behind how the heart fills with blood and moves it around the body. He was speaking about the diameter of blood vessels and how a tube with a small diameter was more difficult to pump fluid through than a tube with a larger diameter. He used the analogy of drinking a milkshake wrote down this sentence in my notes: “If I have a narrow straw it is very difficult to get up my milkshake.”
I will now, and for the rest of my life, think about “getting up my milkshake” every time I need to think about or explaining the narrowing of an artery or vein.

posted by Sa @ 8:38 AM 0 comments