I'm beginning to think that any dealings I have with cars are cursed.
Or maybe it's just this car.
I drive an ancient Subaru I inherited from my brother, who inherited it from our father. The car has . . . issues. It's the same car with the mysteriously stolen-and-replaced tire from last Easter. To set the stage: the front blinker is duct taped to the car after being hit in my apartment parking lot; the cover for the back light has fallen off; at some point keys were taken to the side; there's one off tire missing a hubcap. Oh, and the lock is busted so I have to crawl through the passenger side to open the driver side door. Makes me feel really safe when I'm entering the car in a dark parking lot.
Tell me the first thing that goes through your mind when you see this vehicle.
It's definitely "I'm going to break into this car because it clearly contains something valuable," right?
Right.
I entered the car, intending to drive to Idaho Falls. After fending off the automatic seatbelt - it occasionally snaps and tries to throttle me - I looked around. Something seemed off. Every compartment was open and the trash bag had been scattered. This certainly wasn't how I left it. It slowly dawned on me that the loose change had all been removed, as had my cassette tapes.
Who, in 2011, steals cassette tapes and leaves the USB charger?
I know my junior high self's taste in radio music and slight ineptitude at recording songs and not commercials is worth thousands, if not more. But seriously. They also stole my wickford express tape, which I'm significantly more upset about (who in Idaho apart from my father and myself even listens to sea chanteys?!).
At least they didn't take Edgar.
It's an only slightly belated blogpost!
I've had a decent couple of weeks. Halloween was pretty fun - I spent the day watching Supernatural with Sarah. She was crocheting an octopus and I was working on the Darcy sweater of doom. It's in moss stitch, so it takes forever.
The pharmacy school has a Halloween party every year, with a dessert contest. I made pumpkin cookies and a haunted house cake. It was an awesome cake, if I do say so myself.
I also made pumpkin cookies with cream cheese frosting. They were delicious, and won me the contest. Which got me a Texas Roadhouse coupon. I used it the other night with the ever delightful Dan and the food was actually pretty good.
We finished up the second infectious disease module before Halloween, so this last week was a lovely rest period. It would have been more restful had I not decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year. It's the hardest year for me so far, largely because I did not have time to really formulate any plan of what I would be doing. I'm stumbling in the dark and have fallen behind on word count. I'm sure I'll catch up though . . . maybe . . . It would probably help if I spent less time reading Steig Larsson's series and more working on the nano.
We're just going to pretend that it hasn't been six months since I've updated.
Yes, yes we are.
To very briefly sum up: it was a busy summer, it's been a busy semester. Story of my life. I'm now proficient at performing brain surgery on rats, and have been touched by the gods of IV surgeries. Seriously, I have magic hands. I can cut open a rat, find the main artery, tie it off, insert a needle and then catheter into the heart, and then tie it up. And the rat survives.
I'm not so great at putting the rats under anesthetic, however. (Tip: when you hit the liver, the rat dies instantly. And the lab's 'No Rat Left Behind' surgery day fails.)
That was most of my summer - working in the lab of one of the pharmacy professors, while still working at Shaver's. I worked 13 days in a row all summer and generally had no time off.
This semester has been insane. Modules are always fast paced, but this seems more intense than last year. We're finishing up the second infectious disease module right now. I have been devouring these topics, and feel even more confident that infectious disease is what I want to do. It's absolutely fascinating. I've also been shadowing an expert pharmacist in a local HIV clinic, and have discovered some interesting things about how I view patients.
What can be one of the most frustrating parts of working with the general public is patients with progressive, preventable diseases. It's hard to see patients who are at the tail end of a condition when at literally *every step* along the progression of this disease, patients have been told what they can do to improve and/or reverse part of their condition. Invariably, they chose not to act on this information. These are diseases that need patient involvement and commitment to see any real improvement and more often than not it just isn't there. Things like cholesterol, hypertension, or type II diabetes - in a majority of cases, when caught early, lifestyle changes are enough. If patients don't put forth the effort, nothing I can do will help them. It's hard to watch that and not be able to do anything and it gets frustrating.
However, I have nothing but empathy for the HIV patients I see. It probably helps that a majority of the ones I've spoken with are very proactive when it comes to their health and have done the legwork on their part to understand the disease.
I think it comes down to having more empathy with anyone who takes the time to understand their disease and at least makes an effort to help themselves. Lifestyle changes aren't always enough, and that's when I'm supposed to be there.
This is something I need to work on.
Another reason this semester has been insane is because I'm the chair of the pharmacy fair. I've worked with a wonderful committee for a year to convince companies to come and interview students, hopefully for positions. It was already stressful with the tanking economy and resulting reluctance to attend in companies, but then a selection of students decided my efforts were all in vain and it wasn't worth their time to attend. Enter a month long battle with scheduling, angry e-mails, and general excessive drama. What happened to professionalism? What happened to enjoying an opportunity to bond with your fellow students? To practice interviewing with companies you will be dealing with at some point in your career?
This is a very contained version of the frustration I've had over the last months, but thankfully it's over now and the fair went well. And I only came close to slaughtering my fellow students a few times (blood is so hard to get out of suit fabric). The worst was when a student was verbally attacking a recruiter in front of approximately 150 people - had I not been in another room watching with utter horror on camera, there would have been blood. Someone actually yelled "Go get her, Kirstin!"
Unfortunately, I have four days to study for the final of the second infectious disease module. Such is life.
I promise I'll be updating more though.
