I saw my first birth today! As the baby was in a breech position, it was a c-section, not a vaginal so there was very little screaming and swearing and things proceeded in a rather orderly manner. Very un-TV like =)

I think the main thing I noticed was how quickly you can become cavalier towards life. I think because this was my first birth I expected something big, something inspirational y'know? The miracle of life. Serious looks on the faces of the doctors and the nurses giving way to looks of overwhelming relief as a healthy child is pulled from his mother's womb. Gratitude and exhausted happiness on the faces of the parents. Instead it was so ordinary. The staff were cracking jokes and talking to each other and ignoring the woman behind the surgical drapes, and the mother herself looked rather bored at the end of it all. It was more like taking out a gallbladder or a kidney stone, as opposed to a human being.

How many births will I witness before I stop seeing each one as something that the world should celebrate? How many deaths will I see before that same indifference takes over?

How is it that the weather always turns nice just as an exam is coming around the corner? Like Clarissa, I too am a huge fan of global warming. It's November and everyone around me is coming to class in skirts and flip-flops. If this is what the future is going to be like for our children, we should all trade our Echos in for Safaris. That'll do the trick. Sure it'll cost a small fortune for gas, but I like to think of it as investing in the future - we'll pay more now, but in 30 years none of us will have to heat our homes. Think about it...

Changing topics though, I really don't think that it's a coincidence I have an exam just when the weather's turning nice because this year, I almost always have an exam. I've entered a state of perma-studying where the times in between meals and classes are filled with little more note re-writing and rote memorization. Whereas last year, I would spend the weekend after an exam partying with my classmates, this year I spend my weekend doing my laundry and cleaning my apartment because Lord knows when I might get to it next. The pen calluses on my right hand are back and thicker than ever and I've already exhausted 2 highlighters and 3 pens.

One of my classmates sent around a song called "Waiting for my life to begin" by Colin Hay and that pretty much sums it up. Enough 8 hr. days in the classroom, enough mind-numbing lists about the potential causes of oligohydramnios, enough multiple-choice tests. Bring on the 36 hr. days, the lack of food/sleep, the evil preceptors, the abusive patients, the hospital politics, and practicing our gynecology on papayas. Let's get on with the business of actually making us into doctors and the rest of the knowledge will come.

"we're normal, she's crazy and Dez is just Christian"

Right...

Just feeling blah today. It's always hard coming back from a long weekend. It's even harder when that long weekend was spent in Toronto. It's worse still when you know you're coming back to piles of work and an upcoming exam in an area that doesn't particularly interest you and you don't even have a phone call to look forward to for another 3 days. All this and the fact that I'm listening to some particularly depressing Lonestar at the moment (yes I listen to country music. I know my classic Shania by heart) has resulted in a particular profound "oh poor me" kinda blah-y mood. Blah.

Dez wants to go back =( Go Baaaaaaack! *pouts*

Yay! Dez is in Toronto! And it's been far, far too long since I've been back here. I used to come to Toronto at least once or twice a semester and now it's been an entire year! Oh how i've missed the shopping, the food, the Polish smokies and most of all, the people =) As it is, I'm sitting at Andy's kitchen table playing around with one of her many laptops (I never used to be a Mac person but this laptop is starting to change my mind), admiring her sister's ability to secure her wireless Internet connection to such an extent that I was absolutely unable to connect with my Palm and scratch my Internet itch until now.

One thing that I definitely haven't managed to do is get some homework done. They decided to turn off the cabin lights on the plane and that teeny little reading lamp they give you covers an area about the size of my hand. I took it as a sign that I was meant to watch hours of meaningless TV. Then yesterday I was trying to accomplish something while waiting for Viv Hon to finish class, and I ended up getting hit on by a red and curly-haired glassblower wannabe from Peterborough. Aiy...there are things about Toronto I haven't missed at all...

Why are the hours passing so slowly??? Less than 48 hours to go until I hop on a plane for my yearly pilgrimmage east and it just could not pass any slower. Words on my page seem to be dragging, chapters feel like they'll never end, lectures just stretch on into eternity. Trying to fill the hours with anatomy studying doesn't seem to be helping. One would think that hemisected penises and vaginas would make for a fairly interesting evening but after the first one it kinda loses its thrill.

I keep a tracker on my blog and it lets me know some of the searchstrings that you can enter into Yahoo/Google/Altatvista and somehow wind up on this page. Somewhere out there people, are entering searchstrings like "I insert my finger into her rectum" (I don't want to know why!) and I can't help but wonder if they're disappointed when they wind up here. There are after all, no descriptions, no graphic pictures and no tantric sex techniques that could possibly help them. I highly doubt they came here to learn how to do a DRE.

So the TOSCE was a bit of a gong show...This time we had 10 minutes to do a complete history and partial physical on a patient. For the first time, I had a preceptor who spoke to me during the exam. Not just spoke, but outright hinted at things that I should've been asking. And then when I went to do certain parts of the physical exam, outright stopped me and said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Oh never mind that, just move on. What do you want to ask her (the patient)next?"

Of course, I hadn't been planning to ask my patient anything. What I HAD planned was to tell her was what my next step would be and hopefully we could come to some kind of a consensus. So once the preceptor said that I started thinking "ask her? Crap. What did I forget to ask her..." and that sent me mentally spinning backwards in time trying to think of any minutiae that might have been missed during my initial history-taking. In the end, I was one sentence away from finishing telling her about my incredible plan and saying goodbye when the buzzer went and I got cut off mid-sentence. Crap. Thank goodness the 'T' in TOSCE stands for teaching and this one wasn't worth anything.

I find I'm always a little apathetic the night before an exam. I could be reviewing the material, but I'm not. I could be doing Histoquest, but I'm not. I could be doing a great many things right now, but I'm not. I'm sending my thoughts out into cyberspace deluding myself into thinking that people out there actually care. Lately I've been playing with the idea of starting to blog anonymously. Not here of course. It's fairly obvious who I am and almost everyone who stops here knows me (I'm stalking you all with my webtracker. Just so you know...). And while that's great for updating everyone on the minutiae of my life, it's really not so great when you need to get a more sensitive issue off of your chest. So instead of being a place where you can express yourself, your blog becomes a place where you have to censor yourself! Thus completely defeating the original purpose of your blog which was to have a space in which you could vent consequence-free rather than explode with all the pent-up emotion that tends to accumulate within me over the course of a week.

I think I have a tapeworm. For dinner, I've been eating exactly the same amount and yet the past few nights I've been voraciously hungry by about 10:00 PM. Last night I gave in and downed a bowl of wax-encrusted instant kimchi noodles. Tonight I was determined to stick it out and not eat late (as per Oprah's instructions) but now I'm afraid that my alarmingly loud stomach grumblings (borborygmi! Teehee!) will keep me from falling asleep.

My to-do list for the next 8 days:

TOSCE tomorrow
Study for Friday's repro midterm (read: memorize like a fool)
Study for Wednesday's anatomy bellringer
Clean entire apartment including vacuuming for the first time since moving in (eew...)
Pack!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finalize all my long weekend plans
Shave legs in anticipation of long weekend =)