So, psychiatry is over with .. finally. It was boring. Sure, I learned alot, but I learned alot during the first two weeks and the last 4 were pure repetition and monotony. Fun. But, worse than this, OB/GYN starts this monday. It’s going to bad. Long hours and constantly doing what I hated most about Family Medicine.
And now I clean my place, do laundry, and try to figure out whether or not I should move out of the dorms into a fellow medical student’s house. Lots to do!
The Self-Checkout lane at Wal-Mart and Kroger is, of course, an excellent addition to stores. But half the time it is a big annoyance. I believe that these stores should fine customers $5 for infraction of any of the following rules:
1. You must have fewer than one layer of goods or less than 3 min of total check-out time at the self-check out lane.
2. You must be less than 65 years of age.
3. You must have minimal computer use experience.
4. You must be able to see the screen.
5. You must pay only with cash, credit, or debit.
6. You must not require, under any circumstances, the help of a store employee to check-out.
This isn’t much to ask. The point of the self checkout lane is to allow rapid check-out of customers with few goods to buy! If it takes you longer than 5 minutes to checkout, please have someone who is paid to check-out do the work!
</rant>
-Chris
So, one of my study buddies has been taking Ambien to help her sleep (as I do) and has stated she likes it because she has no dreams - or if she does, she has weird, stupid dreams. I, on the other hand, haven’t ever dreamed on Ambien, so I thought this a good thing.
Last night I took Ambien and had a very odd dream, which at the time I thought was not odd. I dreamt that I loved to dig up things and that I had this ancient book on digging. Anyway, in the book it said that if you encounter a box that sings when your shovel hits it, that you should dig it up - and, of course, I encountered such a box in my dream. I dug it up and opened it up and it was full of bones.
So I continued to read in my book and it stated that these bones are the bones of Moses (you know, lead the Israelites out of Egypt) and that to bring him to life, you should do *this* (I can’t remember what it is I had to do, but it involved running around to a lot of stores). Anyway, I brought Moses’ head to life and then the rest of his body. I then performed “surgery” to reconnect his head, which, of course, was a success. All this time I kept a blanket over him (he was in my bedroom - btw, this all took place when I was a kid) to keep my dad from seeing him. Anyway, one day I pulled back the blanket and discovered some color had come back to Moses’ skin, and then he started talking to me: asking how he got there, etc. I showed him the book and I can’t remember what he said afterward - I think he told me that we had to re-kill him and that I didn’t want to do this. We then prayed about it (but our prayer only showed up in my dream as a written prayer and Moses’ was much more lengthy and poetic than my part).
So then I hear my dad coming, so I throw the blanket over Moses and pretend like he’s not there (I think I was sitting on him). My dad comes in and gives my chocolate and starts talking to me about something. Then Moses coughs and gets up - my dad is shocked until I give him the book to read how Moses got here. In the mean time, Moses got up and went to the bathroom (and saying some sort of insulting remark to my dad) and the made himself a bed in my closet - then the dream ended (I think I woke up).
The next dream I had was kinda hazy - I think it involved the disembodied head of John Locke (from Lost) talking to me. He was instructing me on how to do something. And finally I got tired of talking to John Locke’s head and so I “stood” him up (so that his head was vertical and sitting on his stump) and told him to think hard about his spinal cord growing. This he did and he immediately regenerated his arms, body, and legs, at which point we continued to talk. I don’t remember much after this.
So, yeah, dreams about disembodied heads, dead prophets brought back to life, etc. Very odd. Ambien, you win: 1 weird-dream down, many-many more to go.
Ahh, how I fought the idea that Charlie could really be dead - how I wanted to believe that he would swim out of the port hole and appear sometime in the 4th season, to the cheers of Lost fans!! But now after reading an interview with one of the Lost writers and watching an interview with “Charlie”, I am forced to accept that Charlie will no longer be “on” the show. Such a sad day!
Hopefully today I will finish Renal and cover some Pharm drugs - but first, I think I’m going to take an early morning nap. I found out that I have a very noisy neighbor last night.
Yes, so I am 32 days out from the Step 1 and already the stress of it is messing with my sleep schedule - couldn’t sleep last night (eventually fell asleep around 5) and woke up at 11 since this is a “study day” and, therefore, I had nothing “pressing” to get up for (if you see what I mean). Very aggravating - the entire morning wasted because I couldn’t sleep. Of course, that aggravation builds on the anxiety - ugh! vicious cycles suck!
At any rate, I plan on getting a lot of questions done and (perhaps) start and finish the Renal system, which would be a good use of the day. My overall plan is to finish all of this review sometime next week, which would leave me with nearly 4 weeks of solid First Aid, Questions, and Pharm cards, which I think would be a good use of my time. I’m currently using Kaplan for questions, but figure that once I’ve exhausted those, I’ll switch to USMLEworld’s questions and continue with those.
If I can work hard today, I’ll “reward” myself with a movie this evening with my brother & sisters (Pirates of the Caribbean movie) - maybe I can psychologically induce myself to get some crazy studying done today. Maybe …
Edit: Found this on Digg.com - How to get up early.
33 days to go. I hope to be finished by next week with everything, and then do First Aid and questions for the remaining 3-4 weeks.
There are so many Pharm drugs! I keep getting them backwards. My estimation is that I really (really) learn about 4 new drugs a day - that’s 132 drugs by the Step 1. That ought to be good.
I’m glad the above is staying true to my Blog title ;-).
Yes. Studied today for about 6 hours and got to the point where I couldn’t read any more - the information simply stopped coming in and every word was excruciating. I think I’m having an adverse reaction to anything medically-related, a medicalhypersensitivity (information-mediated). Oh, that was bad.
I have 36 days till I have to take this test - I thought the MCAT was a bad test, I don’t know what I was thinking.
First post here and first attempt at actually having ’something’ on han0522.com.
So, 2nd year is over and I’m three weeks in to my Step 1 studying blitzkrieg - and the invasion is slowing. First two weeks were great - full 8-10 hour days, doing questions, pwnzing review books. But this last weeks has been 4-6 hours of crappy studying. Test is on June 26th, so if I’m going to complete my ‘to-do’ list, I need to get my ‘butt’ or ‘buttocks’ in gear.