Clinicals

I should be making up medication cards instead of writing this, but that's the way that procrastination goes when I don't have the energy to bake something.

I've now done a whopping 5 clinical days in two locations. My clinical group consists of 8 students and 1 instructor. The way it works is we invade a unit of some kind, get an assigned patient (only one) to take care of for the day/week/whatever, and then are let loose on the floor. Kinda scary, huh? We work W,Th,F from 7-3 every week with a post-conference from 3-4. We do some shadowing of the RN's, and we follow instructions when given, but mostly we're left to manage whatever parts of our patients' care we can (either limited by legality or our learned skills) completely independently. That includes bathing, oral care, feeding, dressing, changing, repositioning, dressing changes, range of motion exercises, and whatever special sorts of things they may need. Like emptying ileostomy bags. As we learn more skills in class and lab, we get to practice them on our patients. For example, I'll be giving heparin and insulin injections for the first time tomorrow.

So, my first unit was in a long term care facility. Also called a nursing home, but that's less PC nowadays. My patient was the only one that was lucid enough to hold a conversation, but needed plenty of care because a stroke had paralyzed half her body. So I did whatever I needed to do for her, and let her husband do whatever he could, and then spent the rest of the day just sitting around. The pace in that kind of facility is not particularly fast, so there was never really a lot to do. I spent most of my time bathing and changing people. I also got my first real exposure to tracheostomy tubes. They tend to fill with phlegm almost constantly, not something that is usually seen on TV. The other thing that I got to use a lot was the Hoyer lift (A less swanky version of this. The soundtrack to that video just makes me laugh). Hoyer's are fabulous for patients that can't get up on their own for whatever reason and are too heavy to be lifted easily or safely.

My second clinical unit is a lot more exciting. We're on the ENT (ear, nose, throat) floor, which also happens to serve as a regular medical floor too. There are a lot more staff, the patients are a lot sicker, and everything moves quite quickly. I was running around most of the day today without any real downtime until about 2pm. I was mostly taking care of my patient, but did a lot of assisting with other stuff too. My patient is nonverbal and mostly immobile, but alert and aware of his surroundings. He had a trach for a while, but it was removed. He's the one with the ileostomy, and he also has a feeding tube and gets nothing by mouth. His medical diagnoses are numerous and complicated, but the prognosis is not great. He'll probably survive a long time, but is unlikely to regain mobility or speech. The only reason he's still in the hospital is that they haven't been able to find him a placement in a nursing home yet. It's a very sad situation.

I've only got two more weeks before the end of my first semester of nursing school. Wow, this is going by fast.

Clearly Monday was too optimistic

This one is going to be another quick and dirty list.

1. The wedding was beautiful and I had a lot of fun with all my Oregon (and other) friends.
2. I made it back to Rochester without a problem and even got a 3 hour nap on the floor of the Philadelphia airport.
3. Sarah kidnapped me for hanging out on Monday and I fell asleep on her couch after dinner. Ronen was kind enough to drive me home.
4. I've started my Acute Care clinical. It's a lot more exciting than Long Term Care was. I'll elaborate more about clinicals when I'm less busy (read: after August 15th).
5. I emailed my landlord and there will be bat-proofers coming to check out the house either Saturday or Monday. Apparently after the initial bullying attempt he becomes a reasonable person.
6. I have an RIT student coming tomorrow night to check out my room and the house to see if he would like to sublet. Therefore the rest of the night will be spent cleaning and then collapsing in bed.

And finally, a plea for help. My suitcases were stored in the basement and apparently that was a poor choice, because they are now filled with bugs and spiders and various creatures that I don't want in my stuff (not sure about bats). Any ideas on how to rid said suitcases of said critters?

Quick update

1. I'm ignoring my landlord until after the weekend
2. Clinicals are going well, but were mostly anticlimactic
3. I have wonderful friends, both in Portland and Rochester
4. Storing luggage in a dirty basement is a bad idea
5. I arrive in Portland at 10:30pm tomorrow and leave again at 10:30pm Sunday
6. There will probably not be another update until Monday

Righteous Anger

See the title? That's what's powering this post, since I certainly don't have any energy left. Here's the crux of the reply from my landlord:

You had no right to act on your own behalf without my consent. You had no right to go into my bedroom which is trespassing. And you had no right to make alterations to the house. There will be no refund granted. Had you contacted me first I would have had my bat person come out.

Seriously, he would rather I had called him at 3am? And trespassing? Next time I lock the bats in his bedroom and leave them there.

I'll post about clinicals and other stuff when I have energy again. Don't hold your breath.

Feeling better

I'm back home now, having spent a really nice day hanging out with Sarah and the little ones. I had gone over to her house to do that online exam, because if I went home I was pretty sure I would forget about it, and ended up staying until after dinner. She gave me lots of hugs, fed me, chatted with me, let me play with her adorable children, and generally did a fabulous job of cheering me up. I think Maya is starting to get to know me, and Yasmine will usually give me random flying hug attacks throughout the day and won't let me leave without saying goodbye. It's very sweet and cute and a perfect way to forget about stressful life stuff. We even went for a walk to the park after Ronen got home and I got to play with more adorable small children, including a set of 2 year old twins named Henry and Calvin who insisted on repeatedly filling my hands with woodchips.

Tomorrow is my first day of clinicals. I'm going to a long term care facility close-ish to the hospital, but far enough that I'll be carpooling with my friend Laura. I offered to buy the coffee if she'd drive, which I think is a good deal. We have to be there at 7:00am, so I'm meeting her at her house by 6:30, just to be sure that we're not late on our first day. I have a few final things to do before I'm ready to go, but otherwise I should be all set. I'm sure I will have a lot to talk about after this first day, but I may not get to blogging about it until later, depending on how long I need to recover.

Even more bats. No, I'm not joking.

Last night there were two bats in my room. This time, being about 3am, I woke up when I heard the fluttering sounds. I thought I had been dreaming about bats until I saw a dark shape fly across my ceiling. I turned on my light, and there was indeed a bat in my room. Again. So, I opened the screens in my windows, grabbed my pillow and blanket and made for the doorway. I paused in the doorway for a minute hoping that it would just fly out the window, but no luck. Just as I was trying to time my exit so that the bat wouldn't follow me out, a second bat appeared. It must have flown in through the window, but it seemed to come out of nowhere. Now I was really freaked out. For one, the chances of a bat following me downstairs had doubled. Secondly, if there were two bats, there were probably more. So, using my pillow to protect my head, I dashed back to my nightstand to grab my phone and then quickly ran out the door. I'm pretty sure I smacked one of the bats with the pillow on my way out, but oddly feel no remorse whatsoever. I also stuffed a towel under the doorway.

When I got out into the hallway the first thing I noticed was that there were no bats with me. Good. The second thing I noticed was that there was a light coming from under Robert's door. I knocked, loudly. He answered, I told him there were bats in my room, and we looked up animal control on his laptop. When I called them they said that bats are treated just like mice and rats, meaning that I had to call a pest control company and the county wasn't going to do anything about it. After some deliberation, I checked the phone book for a 24hr pest control. I found one, and the guy said he could be there in an hour and a half. Ugh.

At this point, Robert wanted to get to bed, but was kind enough to loan me his laptop so I could sit downstairs, with all the lights on, trying not to panic, and watch episodes of Family Guy until the official bat remover showed up. He showed up exactly on time, for which I was grateful, and when we opened the door to my room the bats were gone. No surprise, since the screens had been open the entire time. He did do a thorough check of the entire room making sure that there was no way bats could get in and that there were no remaining bats lurking anywhere.

At this point it was already becoming daylight so we went outside to see if he could spot how the bats were getting in. Turns out there's no cap on our chimney and there are cracks and holes all along the eaves of the house. Delightful. So, with this new knowledge, we went into the attic, which is also Jon's bedroom. Up there he found bat droppings around the chimney, a window that had a 1 inch opening, and lots of holes and cracks that bats could squeeze through. Luckily the only thing he didn't find was more bats.

He offered to do some temporary sealing up of the attic in order to keep bats out until I can contact Jon regarding bat-proofing the house. I jumped at the offer, and he filled in all the little holes and cracks with a foam stuff. He also duct-taped around the doors to the attic and duct-taped a plastic bag over the heating vent in my room, just in case. So now, if a bat does manage to get in, it should at least be contained in the attic. If Jon comes home to find that bats have trashed his room, I really couldn't care less.

So, the grand total for about one hour of work, done from 5-6am, was $160. He estimates the cost of a full bat-proofing at about $3000. There's no way Jon is going to pay that. Especially since he already paid $500 to a different company to supposedly bat-proof the house back in January (He left the receipt on the bookcase downstairs). The guy that I had called in said that Jon got completely ripped off. But there's a one year guarantee on that receipt, so maybe they'll come back and actually fix things. I'm mostly concerned about what will happen if the bat problem continues when I sublet this room. So I'm planning to call Jon this afternoon and at least get reimbursed for the cost of the one pest control visit and see what else he can do about the whole problem.

So, I had about another night of about 2-3 hours of sleep, managed to drag myself back out of bed to get to lab at 8am, and then found a flat tire on my bike. This was not a good morning. I changed the tire, and showed up for lab about 30 minutes late and started crying as soon as someone asked me if I was okay. I managed to get under control for the duration of lab, until a few friends came over to hug me and I lost it again. One of those friends insisted on buying me coffee and a muffin, which helped a lot. And now I have to go take an online exam. I'll update more as the situation progresses.

More battiness

This whole bat thing just keeps on going. I did some research online today and according to the CDC anyone that wakes up with a bat in their room (it doesn't even specify whether the bat lands on your head) should get vaccinated for rabies. This was not what I wanted to see, but I decided to go along with it since rabies is rather fatal.

So I called the university health services weekend number and the nice doctor on call told me that I should go immediately to the emergency room because they are the only ones sure to have the vaccine and be open on a Sunday. So I went, after I had finished watching today's stage of the Tour, and began my 4 hour journey through the Strong Memorial Emergency Department. Each time I told someone I was there for a rabies shot because a bat landed on my head the look they gave me was slightly more incredulous.

After being shuttled from waiting room to waiting room, listening to an elderly German couple reminisce about Heidelberg, and getting my scalp inspected for bite marks by a nice physician's assistant, I finally got into a real exam room. A pair of nurses came in looking incredibly apologetic and carrying a handful of syringes. They explained that I was going to be given a rabies vaccine, the first in a series spread over the next 15 days, and some immunoglobulin. Unfortunately, the immunoglobulin had to be split into 5 separate shots because you can only give a certain amount in each intramuscular injection. And because I was going to get so many shots, they wanted to put them into the largest muscle possible. That meant that I got a grand total of six shots in the butt today. They stood on either side of me doing simultaneous injections, so now I have two bruised areas with hard lumps of fluid under them. The lumps have been slowly going down over the course of the day, but it still feels pretty bruised.

Tomorrow I can expect a call from the Monroe County Health Department (they reported the whole bat incident to the health department) to schedule a time and place for my remaining injections. Luckily those ones will just be for rabies, no more immunoglobulin. I don't know how that will work with me going to the wedding next weekend, but I guess that will be figured out tomorrow.

I spent the rest of the day feeling sorry for myself and waiting out the rain so I could go grocery shopping. I managed to get to the store in dry weather, but on the way home was caught in a truly torrential downpour. My groceries survived mostly unscathed, but there was not a single dry spot on me. All my clothes are now hanging in the bathroom and I hope my backpack dries out before tomorrow.

Chiroptophobia

I didn't think I was afraid of bats before I went to bed last night. Then, around 2am, something with claws landed directly on my head and woke me up. I bolted straight upright in bed, which was a mistake, because there was now a very freaked out bat flying in eccentric circles around my room. I quickly lay back down so it wouldn't hit me in the face and, after the initial shock wore off, made a duck and cover run for the door, all the while thinking, "Bats are the main vector of rabies. I'm going to get bitten and go insane." Clearly I am not at my most lucid at 2am after being violently awoken.

Of course, when I made this run for the door, I didn't give any thought to the fact that there was no way for the bat to get out of the house. I paced in the hallway for what seemed like a very long time, and eventually the bat landed somewhere in the vicinity of my closet. There was no chance that I could get back to sleep knowing that there was a bat in the room, even if it stayed put all night, so I decided to make a dash back into the room, grab my phone, and do what any scared girl would do in my situation. Call my dad. Luckily, it was only 11:30ish Portland time.

He very kindly didn't laugh at me too much and suggested I open the screen of my windows, grab a blanket, close my bedroom door, and go sleep downstairs and the bat would make its own way out of my room. Well, I fell asleep on the couch, and about an hour later was woken up again by fluttering noises. Turns out the bat had made its way out of my room, by somehow crawling under the door, and was now flying around downstairs. It ended up doing loops around the kitchen, and I now had absolutely no clue what to do with it, since there is nowhere downstairs to trap it and the doors all have springy screen doors that I can't leave open. So what did I do? Called my dad again. By now it was 1:30ish Portland time, but I was too freaked out to care.

While talking to him trying to figure out what to do, the bat left the kitchen, and flew upstairs. After a few minutes I heard a lot of bursts of extra loud fluttering, and then silence. And then another burst, and more silence. So I slowly crept up the stairs, fully expecting the bat to come flying at my face in the narrow stairwell. It didn't, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I discovered that the bat had got itself caught in the shower and kept flying into the shower curtain. So the first thing I did was close the bathroom door. Now I had a bat trapped in the bathroom, with no means of escape. That wasn't something that I wanted to deal with when I woke up in the morning, or leave for one of my roommates to discover (they were all gone for the night). So, with paternal encouragement, I opened the bathroom door, darted inside, closed the door behind me, pulled the window screen open, and then ran out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Fortunately the bat stayed in the shower. I made sure there were no cracks around the door that the bat could squeeze through, and then, after much reassurance, finally got back into bed.

I think it was 5am at this point. I tossed and turned for a long time, listening to imagined fluttering sounds. My alarm went off at 7:30 because I had to be in lab this morning (I don't like Saturday classes). So my calculations give me about 2-3 hours of real sleep. Not enough. When I woke up I really had to pee, but I spent several minutes listening at the bathroom door for signs of the bat. I didn't hear anything, so I went in. I still didn't see or hear it, so I poked at the shower curtain, hoping to scare it into movement if it was still there. Nothing. So I peeked into the shower and it looked like the bat was gone. There was much exhausted rejoicing.

I was like a zombie in lab, barely responding to anything, and when I got home I just collapsed in bed for an hour but the heat eventually woke me up. Now I'm trying to stay cool, but failing miserably. I think I might go for a bike ride. If I'm going to be overheating and sweating anyway, I might as well be getting exercise.

Wound care, catheters, and trach tubes

I get to watch fun videos for this course. Tonight was oxygen therapy, wound care, urinary/bowel function, and urinary catheters. It's remarkable to me how bad the acting is in these videos, especially when the nurse says something like, "I'm not making you uncomfortable, am I?" while inserting a catheter. Umm... I don't think there's any way to make that experience NOT uncomfortable. You can make it LESS uncomfortable, but no one is ever going to say, "That was fun, let's do it again!"

This week I've got lab on Saturday, which is where I'll practice all of the fun stuff that I watched in the videos. We only get to do it on mannequins, though, not each other. It wouldn't be fair for the 1-2 guys in each lab group to have to suffer through every other student inserting and removing a catheter on them, after all. Funny, but not nice. Though I don't know how nice it'll be for the first real patient that I get to do it on...

Class is just plugging along slowly, trying to get us up to speed on all the basics we'll need for clinicals next week. After class today I went home with Sarah to hang out. We went out for lunch, chatted about everything, but mostly boys. We've concluded that boys are dumb (sorry, boys) but we like them anyway. Then we tried to do some homework, succeeded briefly, and continued to chat until she had to go to lab. I'll probably be going back over there tomorrow night for the weekly "get Paul and Caitlin in the same place" dinner.

This weekend I'll be spending most of my time transcribing the group session that happens tomorrow morning. I hope I'll get the audio file early enough that I can get a lot of it done tomorrow afternoon. I also hope that it doesn't take as long as I think it will, but that's not likely. Today was my last day of real relaxing fun time before the normal school craziness comes back in full force. I'm actually looking forward to it though, since I've had a little too much free time on my hands lately. I don't think I'll ever get over my need to be busy all the time.

EDIT: There are now 5 sprouts. All of them look a little different. It's very exciting.

Sprout!

Part of the care package I got last month was a collection of seeds. Some were just in the usual packets, but there was also a sheet of handmade paper with seeds embedded inside. The instructions on the paper said to just plant it directly into some soil and the seed will grow, so that's what I did. These are my little improvised pots, each with a section of the paper planted in it. From left to right they originally contained peanut butter, salsa, and gatorade. I'll keep the seedlings in there until they get too big and then improvise something else... maybe a milk jug or cottage cheese container :)

I planted the papers on Friday morning, and today found my first little green sprout! I have no idea what it is, since the seeds were just a collection of wildflowers. With luck, it'll survive long enough for me to figure out what it is. I'll keep you updated on its progress.

Rainy Day

I'm loving the rain right now. Yesterday was a miserable 90 degrees with the sticky humidity permeating everything. Today it is about 70 and raining, which just feels like Portland.

I'm done with my first classes. I've written the last paper and taken all the tests. I have most of the grades back, but not quite all. Some are better than others, but I should pull at least an A- in everything, I think. I'm actually going to go talk to my pharmacology professor about my clinical paper assignment, because I either really screwed up something and can't figure out what, or the TA that graded my paper didn't do a very good job. I'll find out which tomorrow.

This weekend has been pretty lazy. I spent all day Thursday at Muddy Waters writing my genetics paper. Friday I lay around the house watching a really good stage of the Tour, then went for a ride in the rain that was sadly cut short by a flat tire. I changed the tire but the pump I carry with me is only powerful enough to inflate the tire to 75%. That's enough to get home on, but isn't fun to do any real riding on and any underinflated tire is more likely to flat again. After I got home I was covered in mud and grease and spent about an hour scrubbing myself clean.

I then ate lunch and promptly fell asleep while attempting to read. Luckily I woke up in time to get dressed and head over to Sarah's for a game night. Unluckily, I decided to pump up Johnny's tires before I left and managed to break the valve and let all the air out. That meant that I would have to change the tire, which takes a ridiculously long time on Johnny because his tires are kevlar and not very stretchy. So I called Sarah and she came to pick me up. She had Yasmine and Maya with her and Maya was not very happy at all. She's got a probable yeast infection, and was doing a lot of screaming. Anyway, when we got home Sarah took care of Maya while I got a lesson in cucumber peeling from Ronen. Apparently there's a very particular way to do these things in his family. Paul showed up at some point and we were all put to work getting dinner ready. Dinner involved the usual toddler-induced hilarity and chaos. After dinner, while the little ones were being put to bed, Paul and I made cookies and got Settlers out to play. We played the Cities and Knights version, which I had only played a couple of times before but really like. Paul beat us without too much competition, and then we just sat around chatting until Sarah looked like she was going to fall out of her chair from exhaustion. I got a ride home from Paul and immediately passed out in bed.

Yesterday was supposed to be my first day of working on the Fuld project. I met up with Elspeth, another friend from class who is working on the project with me, and we rode our bikes to an STD clinic in the "bad part of town." It's actually about a mile away from my house, but it's amazing how the neighborhood changes in a very short distance. It's not a dangerous place to be in the middle of the day, but I would never go there at night. We found the clinic and met with LaRon, who is running the study. We thought that we were going to be recruiting young moms to participate in the focus groups but LaRon informed us that they had been having trouble getting enough people, so they've hired a full-time recruiter. That was a big relief to me, since walking up to teenage moms in the street and asking them if they'd like to come talk about their sex lives didn't sound like much fun. So Elspeth and I just got a tour of the STD clinic, which is a cool nurse-run free clinic that offers a lot of really good services for free. He then gave us the software and stuff we would need to do transcription and emailed us the audio files of preliminary group sessions so that we could get an idea of what to expect. I started listening to one last night and transcribing it is going to be hard work. First of all, it's hard to understand what they're saying because of the way the talk and all the slang they use. Secondly, they all talk at the same time, and they have their kids with them to scream in the background. I'm one of the people transcribing next weekend, so it'll be very interesting to see how well I do. At least I don't have to recruit, but it'll be slow going.

Today I'll just be hanging out at home finishing up a lot of minor chores. I'll edit my genetics paper, do some laundry, maybe some baking, finish listening to those audio files, sew patches onto my scrubs, and maybe get to the assignment that we already have for our next class. It's not due until Wednesday though, so I'm not terribly worried. My schedule looks pretty manageable next week, it's the following week that things get crazy with the beginning of clinicals.

Three down, one to go

But first, because I know at least some of you really want to see it, check it out. There's something funky going on with the pictures right now, but that will probably be fixed soon. Sarah's up there too.

I've now finished with Nursing Science (thank goodness), Pharmacology (actually sad about this one), and Genetics. Well, I have to write a paper for genetics, but I can do that tomorrow. My last final exam will be Health Assessment, tomorrow at 8am. I don't have to do anything at all on Friday, and Saturday I'll be recruiting for my condom-use project. Then a whole new class starts up on Monday.

The new class will be nice because we'll only have to focus on one class, but it's going to keep us busy. The syllabus is already online, and the workload looks pretty hefty. Plus there are clinicals associated with this class. I'll be here for 3 shifts (one week), and then at Strong Memorial Hospital (across the street from the nursing school) for the following 3 weeks in an acute care unit. There are about 6-7 students in each clinical group, and I know a few of the ones in mine pretty well. I actually get to pull out my scrubs now and use them for the first time. It's pretty exciting, but also terrifying.

Now it's time to go do some reviewing for tomorrow's test, and maybe watch a movie before bed. I'm liking this free time thing.

Fun holidays

I got a real break this weekend. That's why I haven't updated, I've been too busy having fun. I haven't had class since Wednesday and I've been thoroughly enjoying myself all this time. Here's a brief summary of my long weekend:

Thursday: Be Lauren's patient for her final demo. She did a great job, and I managed to not giggle too much. Then I went to the gym, did some homework, baked some muffins, watched a movie, and just relaxed all day.

Friday: Went for a ride with Bernie and another friend of his. Can't remember the friend's name, but it was a nice long ride. I was pretty tired by the end, since I had done a lot of riding throughout the week. Post-ride I took a little nap and then went out to Sarah's for a 4th of July BBQ. It was almost all people that I'd met before, including Paul, the tall geeky guy. Everybody had a great time, and I spent most of the evening with 2 year old Yasmine on my lap trying to convince her that she could only hold one piece of watermelon in each hand and should eat what she had before trying to grab more. That was only somewhat successful, but I've apparently become one of her favorite people, second only to Paul. When she wasn't sitting on my lap she was busy splashing around in the kiddie pool or trying to help her mom feed Maya, the nearly one year old. Besides the time playing with the little tiny people, I did manage to have real conversations with the adults too. I even got to talk to Paul for a while. Sarah tried as hard as she could to get us to go watch the fireworks, but that didn't work since he seemed unwilling to offer me a ride and I was too shy to ask for one. So after everyone else had gone home, Sarah, Ronen, Paul and I all stuck around and chatted until almost midnight. I found out that they play Settlers and other board games, so maybe there are board game nights in the future. I think the BBQ thing is starting to get old, so Sarah's going to have to come up with other ways to try to throw Paul and I together.

Saturday: Lot of grocery shopping, a pathetic attempt at homework, and then headed over to Katherine's house for a Wii party. I'd never played on a Wii before, so this was very exciting. Turns out I'm a very good Wii boxer and have excellent balance on the Wii Fit, but can't hula hoop to save my life. Wii Fit is really fun. It's a questionable workout, but it at least gets you moving and is very well designed. There's even a little step aerobics game that works like DDR. After we'd had our fill of the Wii, we baked some cookies and watched SNL. Then we all found beds to sleep in (it was a sleepover Wii party) and were out for the night.

Sunday: I woke up and got to watch the second stage of the Tour de France live. It was pretty good, though nothing unexpected happened. Then we went to the kitchen for breakfast and about halfway through my bagel I started to feel really light headed and nauseous. I had to go lie down for a while before it cleared, and even then I couldn't move much without getting waves of nausea. I have no idea what was wrong. I'm feeling mostly okay now, so hopefully it was a weird fluke thing. I'm probably just fighting off a bug and all the stress from school was a little too much for me. If it happens again I might go get checked for anemia or something, because I've had some minor problems with low iron in the past. I ended up staying at Katherine's until about 5pm, working on my Nursing Science essay and a few other things. Now I'm sitting at Panera trying to finish that essay, but obviously getting a little distracted.

Here's what's in store for next week:
Monday: Review session for pharm test
Tuesday: Pharm test
Wednesday: Nursing Science test
Thursday: Health Assessment test
Friday: Nursing Science essay due
Next Monday: Genetics essay due.

I don't have any classes after 9am Thursday morning. And then my new class, Therapeutic Interventions starts next Monday. That means that if I can get my genetics essay done quickly, I can have the whole weekend free of homework. That sounds too good to be true.

Happy Canada Day!

So far my favorite quote from any professor: "If you can't handle the hands-on stuff, go to medical school."

Not a lot is happening besides school. Next week is basically finals week. We're finishing up all the current classes and switching to Therapeutic Interventions and clinicals. I'll also be starting my Fuld Scholar project next week. I may be going to help with a focus group session on the 11th, and will otherwise be working on transcribing the sessions and possibly recruitment for the sessions.

I've only got one more day of real class this week and then I'm done and can work on my final papers and studying. Thursday I only have to be a patient for Lauren's final demo. I'll probably get a lot of riding in since I have so much time off. Except that I'll be going to another BBQ with Sarah's family, this time at her house, and a Wii party at Katherine's house. Such a busy social calendar.

Right now I'm exhausted and need to fall asleep. Good night!