I'm on the home stretch...

What’s up party people?

Stuff is good here… just trying to get motivated to finish studying for this test tomorrow… my sleep schedule has really been bad the last 4 nights. I’ve got to stop staying up so late the night before my presentations- I mean I think I did decent, but the night before I just stay up really (REALLY) late just staring at my handouts- changing some spacing, moving some borders… not really making a big difference- not sure what makes me do that… It’s truly hard to imagine that in just over 1 month I’ll be moving out of here. I made a decision about a month ago that I was tired of looking PAST pharmacy school to the future, and that I really wanted to enjoy these last few months here… really reach out and connect with people here as much as I can before I go… I don’t want to have one foot out the door when I could be enjoying myself.

This month has been really good… really challenging, but really good. Had a funny moment yesterday—we had our applied therapeutics class with the P1s and P2s and to start it off Dr Hudson proudly announced how my partner this month, Brandon (who also happens to be either #1 or #2 in our class- scary) matched with his first choice residency location (i.e. he’s going to do the extra 2 years to do clinical for a living), and that the 1^st year resident matched with her first choice for her 2^nd year of residency… and she started in for me to say that I was going to work at Target, and I interjected “and I got MY first choice at Target!” and everybody laughed- I guess it’s just one of those things where you have to laugh at yourself to let everyone know it doesn’t bother you… my class had a record number of people apply for residencies (I probably haven’t really explained all that very well- it’s kinda like how to be a full-fledged M.D. you have to do several years of residency after you graduate medical school? There’s a very similar thing for pharmacy if you want to be a full-fledged clinical pharmacist- i.e.- all these “preceptors” I’ve been working under/talking about graduated with their Doctor of Pharmacy degree like I’m about to, and then went on and did at least 2 years of hospital/clinical work under an older more experienced clinical pharmacist… )… its been a long journey for pharmacy… 50 years ago you could go 5 years of school and be done… then 6 years… then they made the extra year of rotations (what I’m doing now) mandatory… and now they’re even thinking about pushing the profession one step further in the next 10 years and requiring all pharmacists to complete at least 1 year of residency… but man… some of the best community pharmacists I know went to school for 5 or 6 years… and I know several people who did residencies who have no idea what they’re doing… I dunno… so I picked some really challenging/difficult clinical rotations, but I’m going community… I’m basically surrounded by people who consider community pharmacists to be second-rate, and that’s what I’m going to do- a great example would be on this nephrology rotation, we have these little slide cards that help us estimate people’s renal function (GFR= glomerular filtration rate)- and I lost mine (they’re cheap/free, don’t worry), and it’s no big deal because we all have PDA programs that can do the equation just as easily, but I mentioned that to a guy in my class at lunch who was going on to do his residency, and he said “it’s ok man, you won’t need that at TARGET anyways…”… and I kinda chuckled, but it was absolutely true. Never in my future 35+ years of chugging away in the community will I need to estimate someone’s renal function for dosing adjustments- never! It’s really mind blowing just how much of what I’ve learned doing these tough clinical rotations that I’ll never use… people will expect me to simply fill their MD’s paper orders! It’s kinda funny when I think about it… I’ll always know what I’m capable of- I remember thinking when I was starting, “wow, pharmacists have to learn a lot that doesn’t get used in community pharmacy” and I’ve really found out that it’s so much more true than I expected in the first place… and I say all that, but I’m not down about it- I’m not complaining- I’ve wanted to be a community pharmacist this whole time- it’s always been my goal… oh hey- I’m going to cut myself off mid-blog… I need to finish studying!

and in true Josh/Todd fashion, I thought I'd just put up a youtube version of a song I like for the purpose of sharing.... The one main difference is that this isn't a live performance- it's just the MP3 that somebody wrote out the lyrics to- like almost in Karaoke fashion- it's just the best quality of the song i could find on you-tube... so maybe open this in another tab and just listen, no need to watch. The title track from Mae's album "The Everglow"...