Got a New Book in the Mail!

My Amazon.com order came in, my new nighttime reading is Walking Out on the Boys, a true story written by Dr. Frances Conley about her days as a neurosurgeon at Stanford and what lead her to resign from her tenured faculty position.

Time flies

I'm in disbelief that there are only 6 more days of class in my first quarter of medical school. Does time really past that quickly? Will I really have learnt 1/6 of what I need to learn before starting clinical rotations (answer: no, they take it easy on students during the first quarter!). I still haven't figured out an adequate schedule, a way to continue running, to study effectively, to not go crazy but also not get behind. But, I am enjoying all my classes still, I love getting to know my classmates, figuring out all that there is at Stanford. Stanford is amazing, there are so many opportunities, areas of research, talks, seminars, volunteer opportunities, it will take me at least a quarter to figure out all that is going on here before I can start to hone in on what I would like to work on, devote myself to. Tomorrow I get to learn knot-tying, Saturday I'll learn how to "scrub-in" to surgeries. Now when I look at someone's arm, I can imagine all that lies beneath, but when I look at someone's face I just see it as a normal person would see it. I'm both humbled and nervous that this ability to view the body as a "normal person" does is leaving me, week by week because of anatomy lab. It's getting chillier here in Northern California, but boy do I like it when "chilly" is 50 degrees and not 30!

SketchyMed.com: A Cartoon Guide to USMLE Step 1

This is a shout out to one of my dearest friends, Lilly Zhang, who recently created a website to help medical students prepare for the USMLE Step 1 Exam (giant standardized exam taken at the end of 2nd year). Check it out!!! Let me know what you think!

SketchyMed.com

Oh boy

Med School final exam #3 is tomorrow morning. Up to Bat: Biochemistry, aka Hyperammonemia, Hyperglycemia, Myoglobinuria, Lactic Acidosis, Methemoglobinuria, ketogenesis, Glycogenolysis, Gluconeogenesis are all on the brain tonight! I think I like biochemistry after all, it's really interesting to learn how all the pathways intersect and the ways in which different diseases present (and now I can understand why that is!)

Can you tell I'm having a little too much fun learning all these long funny sounding medical terms?