The Final Countdown

• Well. Year One is coming to a close. 42 weeks down. 1 to go. It's the final countdown! Sing it with me! (Click on the video below for a little help)

• Hopefully, I cross the finish line with as much panache as this little guy:

 

• For the record, I have no idea what's going on in the clip above, but I just love it. Never seen a cat wearing a race number before. Or a cat in a wheel chair. Or a cat winning a race. Let alone all of those together. A+ for originality.

• The past two weeks, we covered ear and eye stuff (in addition to other topics). In my clinical group, we finally got to dust off our oto-opthalmoscopes and look into each others ears and eyes. Here is a picture of me getting my ears checked out by Andy and Lauren. Good news! They got to practice being doctors. And they didn't even burst my ear drums in the process! Win win. 

• Friday, I went up to Washington, DC to visit Lauren and go to one of our temples. Here's a little background reading on Mormon temples, if you're interested: LDS Temple Info. The DC temple is one of the most incredible buildings I've ever visited. You can actually see it from the beltway. Taking pictures at night isn't my forte, but I gave it a try anyways:

• What else? Oh yeah. My class is in full on party mode. I think most of us were ready for summer break weeks ago. In celebration of our last team-based class this past week, we threw ourselves an indoor breakfast beach party. During class (when the professors weren't lecturing). Don't think that's possible? Think again:

 

 

 

 

Well, that's it for this week! See you next week, same time, same place.

The day I met the Rev. Sir Dr. Stephen T. Mos Def Colbert, D.F.A.

Most of you are probably here to hear about my run-in with Stephen Colbert. I’ll get to that first and then hit a few other things later. For those of you who are over the age of 50, under the age of 10, or who have been living under a rock for the past decade, Stephen Colbert is a political satirist that hosts The Colbert Report, a daily-news comedy show (Here’s a link to his Wikipedia article if you still don’t know what I’m talking about Stephen Colbert Wikipedia). I’ve been watching the Colbert Report regularly for the past four or five years. Even though I often don’t agree (or at least completely agree) with Stephen’s views or consider him a hero or role model or anything like that, he almost always makes me laugh. And he seems like a genuinely nice guy. I consider myself a big fan.

That being said, you’ll understand how completely thrilled I was last November when UVa announced that Mr. Colbert would be the valeciction speaker at UVa’s 2013 graduation. I fully planned on attending the speech.

Ok, fast-forward 6 months….

Friday night I got a text from a friend. This friend’s sister was flying into Charlottesville to visit. As she was boarding her plane in New York, she ran into Stephen Colbert, who, as luck would have it, was headed to speak at graduation and on the same flight to Charlottesville. So of course she texted my friend who then texted me. Next thing I knew, I was driving to the Charlottesville airport to “help” my friend pick-up her sister at the airport. And by “help,” I really mean “attempting to track down Stephen Colbert while pretending to help my friend pick-up her sister at the airport.”

Annnyways, long story short, I saw Stephen standing at baggage claim waiting for his bags. Deciding I had nothing to lose, I went up to him, told him I was a huuuuuuuuuuuugee fan (yeah, I said it just like that), and asked him to take a picture. He laughed (probably because I drug out the word huge for a good three seconds), snapped a picture with me, and told me it was nice to meet me. And that was it. As I walked out of the airport, other people approached him for pictures. He had every reason to say no. I’m sure he was exhausted after a full day of work and a late night flight. But he was extremely kind to every single person. I was impressed. So there ya go. That’s the story of “Nate meets Stephen Colbert.” Here is photographic evidence:

And here is Stephen's valedictory speech:

Other stuff:

• Happy birthday, to my beautiful lil’ sis, Emily! The big 2-0! So proud of you! 

• We had an eye dilation lab this week. At first, I was really excited. I'd never had my eyes dilated before. Plus, it gave me an excuse to wear these bad boys:

• But then, 8 hours of my right eye being dilated (we only did one eye) and a massive headache later, I decided that getting your eyes dilated wasn't as fun as I imagined:

• Moral of the story: Eye dilation is more of business thing and less of a pleasure thing.

• This past week we were assigned a prerecorded audio lecture on anti-emetic drugs (Emesis = throwing up, so anti-emetics are basically anti-nausea drugs.).  As I listened to the lecture, I typed notes at breakneck speed (per usual). After I finished, I glanced back over my notes and noticed that every single time I typed anti-emetic, my computer auto-corrected anti-emetic to anti-Semitic. Apparently, my computer has a beef with Jews. For future reference, I apologize in advance to any of my Jewish friends who my computer inadvertently offends. Mormons love Jews! No seriously we do: Check out this article.

• Lauren moved on Friday. Sad day. We were so consumed by finals and exams the past month, that we barely even saw each other. This is basically what it was like:

•  And then I finished an exam and Lauren finished finals a week ago. The past week was like:

• But then she left on Friday, and now it's like this again:

 

• Oh well, I suppose that's part of being a med student who is dating a law student. Life is busy busy.

• Well, that's not even a tiny bit of my week, but I have to run. See ya next week!

A Hard Day's Night

DINGDINGDING, WE HAVE A WINNER:

 

Big announcement. I’m dropping out of medical school. I got this email a few days ago (click on it to make it bigger):

So that's why I'm dropping out. Who needs a career when you already have money? And who cares that Mr. Bente Lybecker can’t use proper noun verb agreement? Or that he is married to a flower rather than a woman? Not this guy. He’s "donating the sum of 2 million USD" to me. Just gotta cross the t’s and dot the i’s. And drop out of med school. It’s going to be a busy week for me. That being said, I'll keep typing on the off chance that I decide to stay in school and keep this blog going. 

 

I do stuff like this all the time:

On Wednesday, I put my shirt on backwards when I was getting ready in the morning. I know I know. Most of us do this every once in a while. But most of us don’t walk out of their apartment without noticing. Or ride the bus without noticing. Or attend their neurology class without noticing. Luckily, I eventually noticed and ducked in the bathroom between my first and second class and pulled the good ole switcheroo. Up to that point, had I committed a felony and gotten arrested, this definitely would’ve been my mug shot:

Hopefully, that doesn't shake your faith in me as a future health care provider. I'm trying to get my act together, promise.

Yo no espeake Medical:

So, according to my clinical group mentor, you learn 25,000 new words in medical school, approximately doubling your vocabulary. While I think that might be a slight exaggeration, I can attest to learning a ton of new words. I use and abuse the NIH Online Medical Dictionary. It's very useful for giving me the textbook definition of a term. What it's not good at, try as it might, is giving me the pronunciation.

Here's a quick example. I looked up the word telangiectasia a few months ago. According to the dictionary entry, it means little red/purple dots that come up in your skin due to capillary dilation (It happens secondary to various conditions.). Cool. Great. Now I knew what it meant. What I didn't know was how to pronounce it. After consulting the dictionary's pronunciation (To hear the dictionary's pronunciation, click on the speaker icon under the Telangiectasia entry), I quickly determined that was not the correct way to pronounce the word. At least not the correct way for a human to pronounce it. 

So, what's a med student to do? Well, I had a lot of stuff to do, so I moved on. Which worked out just fine, until I ended up needing to use telangiectasia in class in front of all my classmates. At that point you just take your best guess. And unfortunately, this is not an isolated event. It happens ALL THE TIME. I don't know how to pronounce at least 50% of words until I attempt (and often fail) to use them correctly. Part of the learning process I suppose. It's happened so many times that now, whenever a classmate asks me how to pronounce a word, this is basically my response:

Medical lingo. It really is a different language. So do I currently speak medical? No, not yet. Not fluently at least. But I'm working on it. And I've got telangectasia down, so there's one. Only 24,999 to go!