Birthday, demo, and babies, oh my!

I had a very good birthday. At the beginning of class yesterday morning, one of my friends wished me a happy birthday, which the turned into a big exclamation of everyone sitting around me saying, "It's your birthday?" and, "You're doing your final demo on your birthday!?" The outburst was loud enough to make sure I was bright red and everyone in the class knew that it was both my birthday and my final demo day. At least they didn't all burst into song.

After class, my partner Lauren and I went over to the lab to do the demo. I didn't know who would be evaluating me until I walked in and when I saw my two favorite professors (both named Pam) there, I was extremely relieved. Then I picked my randomly assigned system and got musculoskeletal. Yikes. Anyway, I just went on autopilot and must have done a pretty good job. Apparently at one point during the demo one of the Pams looked over at the other and whispered, "She's really good!" and the other replied, "Yeah, she's my student." Lauren did a good job at not giggling when she saw that. She actually did a very good job of not giggling at all during the whole demo. I managed to finish in 20 minutes, which had me scared because I thought I must have missed something, but I don't think I did. After I was done the Pams went off by themselves to discuss and after what seemed like forever they came back and talked me through what I could have done differently and what I did particularly well. They were both very encouraging and assured me that as the first person to do one I had set the bar pretty high. I'm very happy about the feedback that I got, since bedside patient care is the one thing I have almost no experience with (at least with strangers).

After the demo I went back to the student lounge and got mobbed with congratulations, birthday wishes, and questions about the demo. Sarah, of my newly adopted family, brought me an angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream and it disappeared in about 10 minutes. It was delicious, and really nice to have my traditional birthday dessert. I spent the next 2 hours in the lounge talking to people, mostly about the demo. It was eventually time to go to class, and we all reluctantly filtered out to listen to a lecture on renal disease and diuretics.

After pharmacology, I was planning to head home and just relax until the usual Thursday class pub night. But, Sarah invited me over to play with her babies (Yasmine is 2.5 years old, Maya is almost 11 months). I couldn't say no to that, so I went and we had a lot of fun just hanging out and talking and playing with the two adorable little girls. Eventually Ronen, Sarah's husband, came home and he joined in the fun. We had dinner, went for a walk to a playground, and generally had a great evening.

At that point it wasn't worth it for me to go home, so I just went straight to the pub to meet other friends. Once again I got bombarded with happy birthdays and final demo questions. A couple of others had done their demos that day too, so we were all being congratulated and interrogated.

I got home around 11:00pm and finally had the chance to open my packages that I'd been waiting to open so patiently. Inside I found a heart rate monitor (Yay!!!!), a really good bike light (which I've been needing), a 4GB flash drive (very useful for school), and a beautiful big poster of a bike race. I was so excited that I wanted to play with the HRM right away, but had to get up for lab the next morning and decided I could wait until the next day. Oh, I also got a voicemail rendition of Happy Birthday that was left while I was taking a shower. I think the performers could use a little vocal training, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and blame it on the phone.

This morning I went to lab, and offered myself up as guinea pig for Lauren and Laura to practice their final demo stuff on. I had to leave early to get to a meeting for my Fuld Scholar research project. I'm going to work on the study about condom use decision by young black mothers. Apparently these girls, when asked about their sexual partners and contraception, don't include their "baby daddy" among their sexual partners, even if teir still sleeping with him. For some reason, he is given a different status in their minds and their more likely to take risks, like not using a condom, with him than anyone else. So the study is done by the county health deparment and their getting these young mothers (age 15-19) to talk in focus groups about the decision they make regarding sexual risk-taking and why. I'll be mostly involved in transcribing the focus group sessions, which I think will be very interesting. I'll also have a chance to do some recruitment and maybe help with the logistics of the focus group meetings. I'm really looking forward to it, although it will add a fair amount of work and stress to my life.

Now that I'm done with classes for the day I'm trying to work on a paper for pharmacology. It's not really started yet, but I should be able to get most of it written this afternoon if I don't procrastinate too much. I'm at my coffee shop, which usually helps me focus on schoolwork. Now that I'm finished checking email and updating everybody on my exciting life, I can get back to it. Thank you to everyone that sent me cards, presents or happy birthdays!