The Olympics Sap-o-Meter

Lisa and I have watched a fair bit of the Olympics over the past few weeks, and I had noticed that NBC's reporting could be so focused on the "emotional" aspect of the games that it could distract from the events themselves. For example, during several of Michael Phelps' gold metal winning races, they talked about his mom nearly as much as they talked about swimming. Well it turns out that I was not the only one who noticed. Check out the Sap-o-Meter I ran into at Slate.com to see just how over the top the coverage was for these games.

Med school is hard

I haven't posted in a while, which is because medical school is crazy! I really enjoy the material that we are covering, but the pace at which we move is nothing less than blisteringly fast. Luckily, everyone I know feels hopelessly behind all the time, so it must work out in the end somehow.

Lisa started teaching this week, and so far it seems like it is going well. However, Lisa has had quite a bit of adjusting to do. Texas and Michigan have different systems for special ed, and Lisa's school is a bit different as well. The school is "open concept", which means that there are no walls between the classrooms. I guess it is supposed to foster a collaborative teaching environment, but with special ed students it can be a huge distraction.

Hopefully I can post more this weekend, but right now I have to study!

First day of anatomy lab

Today was a day that I had been not exactly looking forward to. I have never been super into "gross" things, and previous dissections I have done in school have usually made me nauseated. Usually it is the smell of the formalin (formaldehyde) that gets to me, not seeing or touching something gross. However, today I was pleasantly surprised. The room did indeed smell, but even after 2.5 hours I was doing fine. Also, dissecting a human was very interesting compared to a frog or a rat.

In case you have never been inside an anatomy lab, each body is in a "tank" which is a steel box in which sits the body and lots of formaldehyde. Two levers on each end of the tank lift the platform the body is sitting on out of the tank. Once you remove the towel covering the body, you are ready to start. In most med schools, including Baylor, a group of students are assigned to one tank.

My cadaver was an elderly man who had passed away from advanced Alzheimer disease. In terms of bodies, this was good, because males tend to have good muscle definition, and Alzheimer's does not really affect the anatomy much, except in the brain. One group had the body of a malnourished female, and they could barely find the muscles at all.

I think I am going to like anatomy more than I thought I would, but now I just have to figure out how to memorize thousands of pieces of information just by looking at little pictures...

It has begun...

We arrived in Texas a month ago and all was well. The trip down was made possible by the support of Lisa's parents, who not only packed up most of our belongings, but also drove the truck down and built over 10 pieces of Ikea furniture. We received a warm welcome from the McCormick family and began to settle into our new lives. However, we had some errands to run, and after three weeks of madness we finally came to a few conclusions.

1. Lisa and I can not avoid dealing with people who are incompetent
2. The state of Texas likes to take our money

Luckily neither of us had to start school or work (which oddly enough is school for Lisa too), so everything has worked out just fine. Lisa is in Michigan right now for Sara's graduation from nursing school. I just finished my week of orientation at Baylor College of Medicine and I officially start class on Monday.

This blog is going to be mostly about what Lisa and I are up to, but I'll also probably talk about med school quite a bit. I have never journaled or blogged before, so I'll do my best to update it with some frequency and not be too boring. If you are wondering about the title of the blog, then you obviously haven't been to an Astros game lately.