ANTOINETTE: Do it for the story.

I’m a talker.  It’s what I do: talk, think, usually talk without thinking. I’m not an expert at many things but I’ve pretty much mastered the art of foot-in-mouth. But after studying for over 6 weeks for Step 1, I find myself at a loss for words. I’m s/p 5 days (I guarantee you’ll do better at the bars/clubs if you use med jargon, trust me…), and I only almost feel human. Almost. I wanted to have something profound or even remotely funny to share but I don’t. I’m drained. Studying full-time somehow manages to suck up pieces of your soul and I need this next month off to scrounge up all the little pieces. It’s going to take me that long to reacquire social and communication skills.

But as is my M.O., I’m headed out of the States – passport in hand, backpack strapped on – and spending 3 weeks in Kenya and Tanzania. What’s on the schedule so far: 5-day safari in the Masai Mara Reserve and 5 days in Zanzibar for Sauti za Busara. The rest, I will P.I.B.E. aka play-it-by-ear.

I temporarily hailed from the Hometown of Obama and now I’m off to the Homeland of Obama. My motto for life but especially for travel is: do it for the story. So, here’s to storymaking and storytelling.

keep on rockin’,

Ant

PEARL: Shameless Proselytizing

I am a shameless proselytizer. My cause? Vegetables. Also, fruit – although I feel the cause somewhat less desperate with fruit. My favorite dish to bring to a potluck is brussel sprouts, sautéed in olive oil with shallots and finished with white wine. One of the best things about living in the south are the local fresh vegetables that are available year-round. Trendy as it may be, the “locovore” phenomenon (striving to eat predominantly local foods from small organic farms) is one that I hope will continue to grow. Every week, I get a box of vegetables and fruits from small farms near the Atlanta area via the Moore Farms CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Once you eat a salad of fresh greens, roasted sweet potato, purple carrots, and other delectable goodies (see below for recipe), I don’t know how you could go back to shopping in the fluorescent glare of the supermarket. After learning to love vegetables, eating well becomes a treat.
I have time to think extensively about vegetables because I have just finished taking Step 1 of the USMLE (otherwise known as boards). Step 1 is seven hours of 336 questions testing the medical student’s understanding of the basic sciences, pathology, pharmacology, and physiology. Since there’s so much material, it takes about 5-6 weeks of full-time studying to prepare. While the time spent studying for the boards will decidedly not go down as the favorite time of my life, I must admit that it is pretty incredible to see just how much material one can synthesize in six weeks.
And now, it’s over! For two weeks, I am leading a life of luxury, worrying about vegetables and how much healthier the country could be if we all took the time to sit down for a good meal prepared at home every day. At the beginning of February, I will move back into the laboratory, starting on my Ph.D. Most of my classmates have the month of February as vacation before they begin in the clinics, learning to put their book knowledge to good use. It is an exciting time of transitions for us all.

Roasted root vegetable salad

Two handfuls pecans
3 small turnips
1 large sweet potato
2 medium or 1 large potato
Fresh thyme (not dried!)
1 clove garlic
2 heads lettuce, washed, dried, and torn into bite-sized pieces
3 medium carrots, washed and sliced thin
½ c cherry tomatoes, washed and cut in half
2 baby Vidalia onions, washed and sliced

Rice wine vinaigrette
1.5 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
½ shallot, minced fine
1-2 teaspoons kosher salt (to taste)
1 teaspoon sugar
½ c high quality olive oil

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Spread pecans on a baking sheet and roast for 10 minutes until they are brown and smell nutty. As you wait for the oven to heat, prep the sweet potatoes, turnips, and potatoes by peeling and slicing into ½ inch rounds. Toss vegetable slices with high quality olive oil, fresh thyme, and kosher salt to taste in your salad bowl. Spread evenly on a baking sheet. When pecans are finished toasting, turn oven up to 425 degrees. Roast vegetables at 425 degrees for 20 minutes until they are easily pierced with a fork. Toss pecans with olive oil and salt in the salad bowl. Crush the garlic clove and spread it about the bowl. Prep the remaining vegetables and make the vinaigrette (combine first four ingredients, drizzle in olive oil while constantly whisking). Combine everything, toss well, and enjoy!

JOSH: Dissecting My Life – Or – My Life Dissecting

Hey again, everybody! I just got back from an amazing two week break in which I was able to sit back and reflect on the whirlwind that was first semester here at Emory. It was amazing to think how much I’ve learned and how many new experiences I’ve had in such a short time.

To give you a blitzkrieg recap of where we’ve been so far, our “healthy human” module – a week-by-week progression through normal human physiology – has come and gone, and we’ve moved on to the real reason we all came to medical school, human disease. Furthermore, we’ve begun our Outpatient Experience (“OPEX”) internships in which we work side by side with doctors to integrate our new knowledge in a clinical setting.

However, as hard as we worked last semester, I’m now realizing that it was just med school spring training. If, on your interview day, you notice a group of bewildered looking M1’s stammering through the halls in surgical scrubs, it is because anatomy has officially begun to consume our lives. I’ve heard anatomy described as “the best time you never want to have again,” and I couldn’t think of a better way to put it. Yes, at times it can be incredibly frustrating as we spend hours a day searching for a particular nerve or vessel that often bears little resemblance to its picture in the text book, but at the same time there is something very special about being down in the lab, late into the night with your fellow students, taking part in a centuries-old tradition of medical education. After years of putting blind faith in textbooks, it’s very rewarding to be able to explore the human body first hand.

And just for fun….

Top 10 Signs that Anatomy is Consuming Your Life:

10) The first thing you notice when meeting a new girl/guy is surface anatomy

9) Everything you eat tastes like formaldehyde.

8 ) The sun wasn’t out when you got to school…or when you left

7) Your motivation behind mapping out your cadaver’s vasculature is to determine which of your peripheral veins would be ideal for your intravenous coffee drip.

6) When people see you in scrubs, they think you must be important…until they

smell you.

5) When your buddy says he’s going to the gym to work out his biceps, your response is “femoris or brachii?”

4) You don’t have time to round out your own top-10 list

To the untrained eye, this probably looks like Jessica Alba. But as per #10, all I can see is the sternal head of her sternocleidomastoid muscle. It’s just as pretty.

TENG: Anatomy and Xmas Break

I still think that if you open me up you’ll find nothing but fairy dust. But can you believe that there are a bajillion muscles in the feet, and a gazillion nerves in the neck? We all started anatomy around Thanksgiving, and had our first Block (module/anatomy) exam before Christmas break. So while Anatomy takes up a lot of time and doubles the workload, it is fun. Most people will agree on this. First of all, it is a very collaborative course. We work through every 3^rd dissection with our partner, and then teach the other people in our group (6 people per group, split into 3 teams of 2). Secondly, there are the the anatomy urban legends — “and when she woke up, beside her head on her Egyptian cotton pillow was…a piece of fascia!” (true story, just ask Sheila J).

Because we don’t know her actual name, my group has affectionately nicknamed our donor body “Agatha”. I like to wonder about her. What kind of person was she? What made her decide to donate her body? At Emory, before we started Anatomy, we were given stern lectures about how to treat the bodies with respect. We even have a lab reverend to help us with any ethical or religious issues. Knowing all this, about how the bodies are in good hands, I still don’t know if I could ever donate mine. It is a serious decision. It’s got to be one of the most generous things you can do — for your children (who would not have to pay for cremation services), for science, and for mankind in general.

I wish there was a way (a non-creepy way) the donors can talk to us — to make it clear what exactly they want us to do with the knowledge we gain from their bodies. There was probably some specific, outstanding reason as to why ‘Agatha’ would take the huge risk of relinquishing control over what happens to her body to the unskilled hands of fumbling, scalpel wielding strangers (that’s us, btw). Perhaps she wanted us to find a cure for lymphoma. But we don’t know for sure. In the end, there is only an unspoken trust that because of her sacrifice, we will become more skilled physicians who will do everything we can for our patients when the time comes. So I guess even though that’s not a direct line to the netherworld, it’s pretty cool, too.

So that’s it for now for school stuff. Christmas break was FANTASTIC. I was very happy to slum at home in Baltimore for a week. Christmas break at the Lu’s — let me paint you a picture: The scene is in the living room. My mom is on the recliner– with her laptop; my dad is on the other chair — with his laptop; I am on the sofa — with my laptop. My parents are both very busy people. Since my mom is now taking classes as well as working full time, when I call home she is always the one saying “Oh, I’m so busy I have to write a paper and study for a test”. It’s a pretty funny role-reversal. Over break, I also did quite a bit of shopping, eating out, and going to church with the parents. Since there are only 3 of us in my family, we spend major holidays at the church potluck with other small families (which are more festive if you can imagine than the aforementioned scene described above). I spent the second week of Christmas Break in South Carolina — also a fantastic, relaxing time. So, Happy 2009 everybody!

My mom, wrapping up food to take to the Christmas potluck

SWAISHA: It’s Like this Alternate Universe…

I don’t know the day it happened. I have no idea when it was that I crossed over.

In the first week of school, during orientation, the faculty made it a grand point to notify us that we would no longer be laypeople. They made sure we were informed that this process that they call medical school would change us forever, and we would never again be the people we were before that day. When you hear that, you believe it. I mean, that’s the point, right? We want to be doctors, and that is a huge deal. Of course we won’t be the same. We believed it, and we were all very excited. What we did not know was exactly how or when this change would take place. So here we were happily (or not) living our lives, attending new classes, learning new things. We met new people, made new friends. We did some partying, did some studying, took some tests (okay, many tests). Then finally, there was a break. Thanksgiving break! We were so happy, so excited, and so burned out. Thank GOD for holidays, and bless Emory for giving us the whole week off! Yay!

Thanksgiving break! “What a good time to catch up with friends and family!” is what you are thinking. That’s exactly what we were thinking too, and it is a really good time for that. But, what we didn’t know was that we were no longer a part of their world. Don’t get me wrong; we are still very important to our families and old friends, and we still love them and they us. We are certainly still a part of their lives. What I am talking about is that world that we were so very familiar with, it seemed as if someone had plucked us out of it and dropped us into a different one without us noticing. Okay, fine, it could be just me. See, there’s this world where my family and friends have what is sometimes referred to as “leisure” time. They make plans for this time, and they do stuff during these times…sometimes together even. There are TV shows that they watch every week at the same time. They can even predict the next time they will have this “leisure” time. Thinking back on it, I used to know this “leisure” time. There was a time where everything on my calendar wasn’t tentative based on how difficult lecture was on any given day, or how many hours I may need to catch up on my studies, or how much fat and fascia were between me and a major nerve, artery or vein. There was a time when my day would end simply because it was the end of the day, and not because my brain refused any new information. It all felt very familiar.

So there I was, amidst my family and friends and their TV shows and their leisure time…feeling like I had been abducted by aliens for a few months then returned to Earth. I mean, all the things that had been going on, it felt like maybe I had read about them somewhere but I was definitely not around to see them for myself. And it all happened so quickly. It had happened. I had changed! I was so different! My priorities were different, my commitments were different, and my brain couldn’t even process real-time the way it used to. But I had a week to relax, and that is just what I did. Who knew how much of that I would be able to do from now on? It was a little shocking to realize. I couldn’t do what they were doing except this one week. For a moment there was panic. No one wants to feel like they’ve lost control of their own life or their own time. “Will I ever get it back!?!” Next came envy. “Why can’t I go out in the middle of the week?” Then, after the reality set in, there was a little bit of fear. “I have to go back next week!!!”

For a moment, I started to dread the inevitable. The break was going to end sooner or later and I would be back in that alternate universe that is medical school. And all too soon, that is exactly where I was. But when I got back, the shock & awe had subsided. It was like I never left and I realized it was exactly where I wanted to be. It is who I am right now. I am a med school student. I work hard, I study hard, I stress out a little bit, and then I rest hard. There’s really nothing else that I would rather be doing (except fast-forwarding to actually being a doctor, maybe.) So when Christmas break rolled around I was more than ready. I took a little time off to visit my old universe, got a lot of sleep, then it was back to business as usual.

Med School Kwanzaa

BRITTA: My Body of Knowledge

Welcome back! I hope that you had a lovely Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice/December! Since the last time I wrote, we M1s have faced a number of new challenges and obstacles. We’re now solidly into the Human Disease portion of the curriculum – more interesting, yes, but also a lot more work! The most exciting part for me has been getting into the anatomy lab. At first, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, to be honest with you. Surprisingly, it turns out that a dead body is completely different from a living, breathing human being. They feel so cold and stiff and…dead. My first contact with our cadaver was two Tuesdays before Thanksgiving when my group and I came in to roll him over in preparation for the first dissection. At Emory, we dissect our cadavers in groups of 6, paired off into 3 teams of two. (We call our group the Supergroup – we’d hate to be too modest!) The teams alternate, each one performing 5 of the 15 total dissections over the course of the year. It makes for a lot of work during your dissection week; on the other hand, you’ve got plenty of space since you’re not trying to elbow your way in amongst 5 other people. But I digress. I was telling you about the first time I met our cadaver. The first dissection was scheduled for the back, and since he was facing upwards, we had to roll him. That doesn’t sound too hard physically, I know; the emotional strain was something else. It felt so insensitive, somehow, flipping him like a big sack of potatoes. Maybe if the six of us could have turned him more gracefully I would have felt better about it, but it was our first experience turning approximately 180 pounds of dead weight, and we were not particularly adept. I hurried out of the room as soon as we were done, thankful that my partner Chrissy and I were third in the rotation and not due back to the lab for another couple of weeks.

Eventually, however, I had to come back. I sat down at the table, bracing myself for the moment when I would have to touch him, and then all at once grabbed hold of the leg and made a quick, long incision down the tibia. The first few cuts were disturbing – it’s an odd sensation to cut into a human body. Respect for the dead is something engrained into us, I think, more than I had ever realized. It was amazing how quickly I adjusted, though. Distaste turned to tolerance, then tolerance to enjoyment. By the end of our first three hours in the anatomy lab, I discovered that despite my apprehensions, I loved anatomy. There’s something fascinating about getting to dig through the layers of the body to see what lies underneath. It’s something so few people outside of a medical school get the opportunity to experience. (As a caveat, I will say that I have been considerably more frustrated with our current dissection – the neck. Too many nerves to keep track of! Still, I can’t deny that it’s interesting.) It also helped me considerably to find out about the stringent requirements necessary to donate one’s body to a medical school. Anyone who donates their body absolutely knows what will be done with it (and to it); that’s the way they wanted it to happen.

So that’s my introduction to the wonderful world of anatomy! Whether you can’t wait to race into the lab or are dreading the moment when they drag you kicking and screaming inside, you can’t deny that it’s a major rite of passage.

Me rocking out on the drums on my brother’s new Wii game (Rock Band 2) at Christmas break!

ADEEB: Winter Vacation

I had a stress-free and food-filled winter vacation that allowed me to excel in three important aspects of my non-student oriented life.

The first (most time consuming and grueling) endeavor was to catch up on the TV shows that I’d been missing out on. This was made possible by an abundance of snacks and unlimited rentals from Hollywood video – an 8 minute walk from my house

If you have not watched LOST….you must take a moment to decide whether or not you want to. The pros to watching it is that it is an amazing show that will captivate you and play with your emotions. The con is that you will not want to leave the house and will be forced to watch one episode after another – regardless of hygiene, prior commitments, or time constraints. I was bound to watching 48 episodes. It was beautiful.

The picture says it all

Who doesn’t dream of having super powers? That’s right, everyone does. That’s why HEROES caught my attention. Though the acting is sub-par, the storyline is decent. Season 2 wasn’t all that it could’ve been (due to the writer’s strike I hear), but they make up for it in season 3.

I also had the urge to re-watch the Lord of The Rings Trilogy. This time I went all out and watched the extended versions. I found that the beautiful scenery really lends itself to being great movies to watch in the morning while eating breakfast. Granted, the scenery outside my window isn’t half bad either….but there are no hobbits, dwarves, or elves in Savannah.

My second and third goals are a little more musically oriented. I like to think that I can take a stab at playing the guitar from time to time. During my weeks off, I wanted to finish learning a piece on the guitar that I had spent some time on earlier. After 6 weeks and some change, I finally finished. It’s called ‘Song for Stephen’ and it’s by ‘Antoine Dufour’. I’m not as flawless as him, but you can check out what it’s supposed to sound like on the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgsB_xA2G0I

Finally, I wanted a djembe (If you say ‘djembe’ fast enough, people think you’re saying ‘gym bag’). I had bought one a year ago and was trying to teach myself how to play by watching youtube videos. Although I had gotten decent at it, I lost motivation because the djembe I bought was half the size of a normal one, if that. Now, I’ve got everything at my disposal to rock out, all I need is some time set aside to practice.

A djembe

Overall, I would rate it as an extremely relaxing break. Maybe a bit too relaxing. Now, with the start of a new year, I have newfound willpower to achieve some resolutions that I’m setting for myself. I guess we’ll see if I actually achieve them in the next installment of le blog.