Hey all! I know it has been a bit since you heard from me, and for once, it's not because I am a huge slacker. I AM a huge slacker still, but I really haven't had much newsworthy to post. I am just following along the med school groove: go to class in the mornings and sometimes the afternoons, study, go home and play with Buttercup, hang out with Alex for two seconds, sleep, and repeat (with an exam thrown in every other week). I have a feeling that is going to change a lot in the next few weeks with my new clinical class starting and Gross Anatomy around the corner!

I am really looking forward to my service learning project. I am going to be learning a brief intervention technique to screen trauma patients for alcohol abuse at the Washington Hospital Center (the largest hospital in DC) and then using it to screen actual patients! I get to go around the hospital in scrubs, instead of sticking out like a sore thumb in my short white coat, get to "play with some electronic shit" (my advisor's words, not mine), and hopefully even get a publication out of the whole thing. Bottom line, I think it's going to be awesome!

Second exciting thing is that I am almost done with the biochem modules :) The saved the "best" for last with the genetics (oh, I'm sorry, the Development, Molecular and Human Genetics) module and it is really difficult for me to know what to study for Monday's upcoming exam. Happily, it's a lot of clinically relevant techniques, abnormalities, etc., so it's a lot more interesting than learning about homologous recombination double strand break repair, but because it is illustrated best by examples of diseases, I am having some trouble studying for it. We'll see. I cannot wait until Cardio-Pulmonary (and Gross) starts the first week of November :)

Stay tuned!