spring cleaning

Holla- so yeah its been forever- I just haven’t really been motivated to write- last months rotation went pretty well- I got to see a hip surgery complete with a moderate amount of blood, and it went off without a hitch- i was actually standing about 4 feet behind the surgeon in the same room- blood splattered a couple feet away from where I was standing- I could see/smell every little detail. It was pretty neat- it was hard to believe with all the drilling that any good could actually be done to that leg! They did a lot of x-rays during the surgery to make sure the metal rods were aligned properly so we all had to wear lead aprons that were pretty heavy… I can give more detail about this if anyone is curious, but all in all, it wasn’t too bad and it was neat to be right there scrubbed in with everyone else in the surgery room- I could actually draw a lot of similarities to the surgeries you see on TV-

This month I’m in a biochemistry lab- the guy I’m working under doesn’t actually have his PharmD, but a PhD in biochem- which is neat cause that’s what my BS is in- I really enjoy it so far… he’s picked up that I know as much about Excel as he does so he’s let me take on some more advanced projects making spreadsheets of data and doing the formulas and what-not… the girl I’m with this month has never used Excel—I’d try to teach her stuff, but I’m not sure it’s a skill she’s made a priority of picking up. It is interesting to work in academia/research… much of the day is made up of talking about things, sharing interpretations of journal articles, and just trying to make everything make sense- I would have a hard time doing this for a job because its difficult to really see the pay-off on a practical level- his area of study is that of infant nutrition- specifically- parenteral (getting all your nutrition in an IV for reasons of a non functioning GI tract) nutrition, baby formula and specific amino acid substitutions and their effects on development, and meal replacement drinks- “ensure”, “boost”… we check the viscosity of things, run samples through HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatography) to determine their AA content, and look at a lot of current pediatric nutrition literature for presentations and papers that we have each week- I have a 30+ minute pres yesterday for him and another PhD clinical pharmacology research guy who works here… I thought it went really well, and I got the impression they did too- we followed it up by another 20 minutes of just sitting around discussing the findings and them asking me questions…

Today the grand president (of the entire country) of Phi Delta Chi is staying at our house here in Memphis for a special social thing on Saturday- so needless to say, we’ve been cleaning up a lot in preparation- my room is still messy, but the rest of the house looks awesome- kirk came over and did a ton of work (the function is in conjunction with his birthday party- which has turned into a large yearly thing at the PDC house- so I didn’t mind letting him)- it wouldn’t be the same without him- but other than that…


Oh its funny- some really loud med students are talking about anatomy stuff right across from me… you guys would probably be pretty entertained by 20 minutes spent in this computer lab- on every 3rd screen you can see gross pictures with labels that people are studying for either anatomy, or dental surgery, or other disease states/surgeries they are studying up on…

Any questions?