Well I haven't posted much in the last three weeks, but that is because not much has been going on. The "mini" block I am in now is very short, and the rest of the remaining test periods will be short as well. I have had classes on respiratory and renal diseases over the past three weeks, and now I have tests next Wednesday and Friday. This will mark the real end of block 7, then my last pre-clinical block starts the week after. Block 8 is three "mini" test periods, two with three weeks of class then a week of exams, then one very short one that is only two weeks of class then a week of exams. We cap it all off with our end of basic sciences final, which is supposed to mimic the step 1 in terms of content and format. We have to pass it to go on to rotations.
Respiratory has been interesting, and we have a good course director for it. Renal has had some very good professors, but it is just hard to get excited about the kidney.
One fun thing Lisa and I did a few weekends ago was go to a friends house and play a new game called Munchkin. I linked the regular version but we played a wild west themed edition of the game. Our experience with the game was good overall. It is a turn based card game that kind of resembles Magic + RPG elements. It becomes very political like Settlers, as people can gang up on others or help each other out.
It seems online that people have very mixed feelings about the game overall. The game has a very silly theme with cool artwork, but I could see how the novelty of it would be gone after a game or two. Plus, the deck costs $20, which is a lot for what is essentially a deck of cards. Also, you need level counters, which don't come with the game. Probably the biggest problem we had, since we played with 7 people, is that the game does not have a good mechanic to push a conclusion. You can very effectively gang up on whoever is leading, and you can actually lose levels which sets the game back. So I would be interested to see how it goes with 4 competitive players.
The only other interesting thing that happened over the past few weeks is that we did have a session at Baylor where we learned how to draw blood. The girl who practiced on me had already been drawing blood at Ben Taub for her work study, and she did fine. She had really good veins (which makes a HUGE difference), so I was successful on my first try. It is still a weird experience to stab a needle into someone's arm and take their blood. Skin is thicker than you might think.
3 comments:
It's very funny that you played Munchkin because I just played it for the first time two weeks ago.
I didn't like it very much at all. It seems far too long for the limited strategic content it contained. Our game took nearly 3 hours, largely thanks to the ganging up you mentioned. And yet at the end, the winner seemed to be largely determined by the luck of the draw. A quote on BGG I agree with: "The winner is the one closest to 10th level when everyone gets bored."
Downtime was also a problem, with lengthy gaps between turns and little to think about or do in the interim.
OTOH, if you think $20 is expensive, you haven't been buying designer board games! Phil and I both recently got Dominion (which Phil & Alex like, I'm lukewarm on, Jessie hates) and it's $50 for a (large) deck of cards.
I am glad to know that drawing blood is a base knowledge requirement. Will Lisa let you practice on her? ha, ha.
Maybe Sarah can give you some tips
Dad
I definitely was the test subject for some who were fairly new to drawing blood during my time with Acutane when I had to go in for monthly blood draws. One bad experience was when the girl shoved in the needle, and the vial only filled up halfway, and she went "that's weird", pulled out the needle, and stuck it in again to get the rest of the blood. The other bad time was when one of my veins wasn't popping up, so she just said, "Sorry" and then stabbed the needle into another vein which hurt a lot more than I was used to. Afterwords, I asked her why she said sorry, and apparently she had known that the vein she chose would hurt more, she just couldn't find my other vein. I could see a clear difference between the 20 somethings who drew my blood and the more experienced nurses.
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