Week 3 of Boring Hannah

Argh...can't believe I haven't posted in over a week.

I am hanging in there. I just finished my first two big exams in both anatomy and biochemistry and guess what, am already behind in both classes. We have our exams at 6:30 am so that we don't "have" to miss any class...I call bull$h*t. I am starting to figure this school thing out to a degree.

It is 5x more intense than my previous undergrad degree of computer engineering, but the concepts aren't really any more difficult. It is just the amount of knowledge in a few weeks that we are supposed to get that make it tough.

I am bad at bulk memorization and really need to spend time getting visuals and figuring out things that can help me. I had a steep learning curve on the first tests of both classes because I don't actually think my puny few prerequisite classes were enough to prepare me for this program. A vast majority of my peer have MUCH MUCH more knowledge than me coming into the program. I am studying my ass off though and think I did well enough on my first two exams. I held a human heart today and cleaned the blood out of its vessels...the whole experience is surreal and awesome so I can't complain that much.

My life or what used to be my life is definitely suffering right now. I only have time for eating, commuting, studying and semi regular gym trips right now. Fun things like Saturday's on my mountain bike just aren't happening while I figure out how to survive this program.

Anyway, I am taking off for the weekend to head to San Diego on Friday. I may regret it when my next exam rolls around and I will definitely be studying part of the time there, but with no major tests next week, it ocean time baby.

Firehose Part II

For today's blog update...see last week's.

No seriously. More fire hose drinking, more dead bodies, more insane amounts of anatomy stuffed into a brain that had been on a mental diet for the last 3.5 years.

We have our first exam next week which covers 1/4 of the body. It is a four hour exam. Yes I realize that I have only had 2 weeks of school. This is how we PAs roll.

I am going to be spending this entire weekend studying, because for some reason, I am having a hard time memorizing 75 muscles and their innervations, orgins, insertions and actions (x3 because most have multiple). Memorization wasn't a big part of the engineering curriculum...so it is different.

I still feel very behind the curve as far as previous anatomy knowledge. Most people come from the health care world and just know a lot of the easier stuff. I have to learn it all right now and it is showing. Can't help but feel stupid at times. I am sure to catch up at some point, once we get past the stuff that my fellow classmates already know. Or maybe I am just not as smart as my mother thinks I am. It will be fun uncovering this. Sarcasm...sarcasm.

I have been faithfully to the gym but I am sorely missing things like mountain biking. My "I always drag him along when camping" husband is going camping without me inFlagstaff. Boo freaking hoo...what is the world coming to? I have virtually given up reading all blogs right now (and news/tv/any activity that can't be coupled with studying anatomy...i even study on the stairclimber). My brain is tired, but all the thinking it burning calores (my lowest weight in awhile) so that is good right?

Well enough bitching, time for my 40 min. commute. In all reality though, if you asked me whether I would rather be back at In-hell (my previous co., figure it out) or doing this new insane dance of the first year medical student, dance on my friends.

Signing off for another week. Cross fingers I won't fail my first exam.

Fire Hose Drinking

Wow...can't believe it has almost only been a week since I have posted. During orientation, they told us that the pace of learning would feel like we were trying to take a drink out of a fire hose.

We all laughed then. It is so true. We had four days of class this week, and I can't even believe how much information we both learned and are responsible for learning. We had 8 separate anatomy lectures and 9 hours of anatomy lab dissecting my first real human. We had 4 biochemistry lectures along with about 12 other lectures on everything from medical documentation, taking a patients history, etc. We have four days of class, but every Friday, they schedule study session and lab reviews so I will be on campus that day also. Lectures are so fast that it is impossible to catch everything so a lot of weekend review is needed to master the topic before the brain dump starts again.

It is equals parts amazing, ridiculous, fun and exhausting.

Alert. I will probably be talking about things like dissection of a cadaver quite a bit this quarter...so if that type of stuff bothers you, take note.

We started off day one with 5 hours of lecture followed by the immediate dissection of our cadaver's back skin and muscles. When you cut away the skin and reflect it (pull it back) it allows us to see all the fascia (connective tissue), fat and hopefully the outer back muscles. Our cadaver is a larger lady so we had to contend with a large amount of back fat which we had to remove before we could examine the superficial layer of extrinsic muscles. We uncovered layers of muscles until we were able to examine the spinal cord. We also cut into the spinal cord to see the layers inside of it. Lab was my favorite part this week.

My commute too and from school was about 40 minutes each way. It is shitty but actually better than I expected. I find that the amount of focus needed for the 8 hours of class each day followed by a couple hours of studying and a gym workout burns me up so bad that I do struggle on the drive home. I definitely foresee my caffeine intake increasing dramatically but that is unavoidable. I did find a carpool partner that I will switch some rides with, but she doesn't like to stick around to study or spend extra hours in the lab so I won't trade rides with her every day.

The program is going to be 1 year of this insane schedule, but the amount of information I will learn in that 1 year will be amazing. I did meet a cool biker friend in my class who I took out to Black Canyon Trail on Friday morning for a quick ride.

Okay, gotta study again. Party on my friends.

Schools Not Out For Summer

Orientation is over in all it's amazing glory.  Two days of 8 hours of presentations...fun fun.

This is what I learned.

1.  We can have a keg on campus but don't get drunk.

2.  Don't cheat.  No one wants a doctor who cheated their way through school.

3.  Wear old clothes to anatomy lab.  Dissecting bodies is grusome business.

4.  Expect to get stressed/anxious/depressed.  Apparently PA students use the counselor the most.

5.  Studying is generally a good idea.

6.  My commute is going to be around 40 min. each way.  It is going to get real old real quick.

7.  I need to read actively not passively whatever that means.

8.  Everyone needs some down time. 

9.  Everyone who works at Midwestern seems to love their job.  Even the librarian and the security guard.

10. This next year will be one of the most exciting and crazy years of my life.

I am very excited for school to start tomorrow.  Let the good times roll.

When Fun Must End

My ticket on the unemployed with nothing to do train is coming to an end. It was a great 2 .5 week ride while it lasted.

I can't keep track of all the fun things I did...and I am finally getting into shape again. But alas, tomorrow begins the new journey of excitement and good times studying in the library so cheetos and flappy arms here I come.

Orientation is tomorrow. I am excited to meet my new classmates who I will see for 8 hours a day for the next 14 months. I am electing myself "chief adventure officer" and plan to see any of them want to go explore a waterfall this weekend as a "welcome to arizona" trip.

Speaking of waterfalls, I hit up Christopher Creek canyon a couple of weeks ago and although the water level was a tad lower than last year, it was burrr... freezing. I am made of steel though (aka have body fat to keep me warm) so I didn't freeze as much as some of my puny friends Angel and Tim.

Moab Rocks!!

I got tired of my old header so I made a new one rather than create a substantive blog post. This is my last free weekend before orientation next Wednesday. Maybe I will find the motivation to blog when I start school again and maybe I won't have anytime...we'll see.

Moab was sick, really really awesome sick. We biked Slick Rock Trail and Porcupine Rim Trail (with no shuttle...brutal ride to the trail head), and hiked in Arches National Park. I didn't want to leave..seriously. I improved my riding skills by a bunch and learned how much more I need to improve by another bunch. Overall, sweet trip.

Buckskin Gulch: Chocolate Pudding Edition I

My first week off of work, and I am slacking in the blogging department...tssk tssk. Mission heat biking acclimation isn't going to do itself.

So I have a recommendation for any adventurers out there in the Four Corners area. Get off your duff and make a reservation to hike through Buckskin Gulch..it is worth it.

I have done slot canyons before and I have hiked along rivers many many times, but never has the grandness of the extremes been this visible. It was deeper, longer, muddier, and more beautiful than any of canyon predecessors that had come before it.

When cliffs rise up 400 feet and you can't see the sky all while you can touch both sides of the canyon with your arms spread out, this is a cool feeling. I had a tired cranky moment about 7 hours into the hike where I thought, "I am tired of this dark narrow feeling and I just want to see the sky for for a minute". Then I promptly punched myself in the face and started to appreciate this amazingness of the above ground tunnel I was hiking through.

Without further ado, I present you a picture story...my best writing.

We started the day a little later than planned so the sun was up bright and hot. We dropped into Buckskin Gulch via the Wire Pass entrance. The hike quickly drops into some small narrows and past huge red stone rock walls. Here is our group of 10.

After the Wire Pass trail head dumped into Buckskin, we quickly learned of the challenge of the weekend. Mud holes. Yup, the water spots I envisioned wading varied more from chocolate pudding to chocolate peanut butter consistency. It was ice cold and would try to suck your shoes off. I gave up trying to get clean after the second one when I realized that there was no water to wash off in and that another mud hole was lurking around the corner.

We stopped for lunch and hoped that the worst of the mud was over...it wasn't. The next section of Buckskin Gulch is unbelievably narrow, high and beautiful. There were some fun down climbs, a lot of loose travel over boulders and then a whole series of fun deep mud holes to explore.

We finally rolled into part of the canyon that widened out enough to safely camp in about 8 hours after we started. It was a long, hard but amazing day and we were ready for food, a shower and bed. Except there was no water to wash in...so muddy we stayed. We saw a small rattler snake near our camp but we were too tired to care. My knee was a little achy by the end of the day, but overall held up to my 35 lb pack with 5 liters of water quite nicely.

Most of the better photos by Dale Wiggins).

Day 2 to come....I am off to Moab Utah now for more adventures and will be back sometime next week.

When Everything Falls Into Place

Tomorrow is my last day of work. It sounds so crazy to me.

Almost exactly two years ago, on May 7th 2007, I posted my first official blog entry (after my introductory post) as seen here.

In this post I wrote about my feelings of unsatisfaction I had with regards to my job and my purpose in life. This was one of the main reasons I started blogging, to force myself to analyze and confront emotions that I am very good at ignoring. This is what I said then.

Life, $, and the Pursuit of Happiness:

This is something I struggle with frequently. I work in a very 'high tech' company at the top of its game. Its competitive, corporate, political, and incredibility results oriented. We call ourselves a 'meritocracy' which means that your success at work is based upon the work you do and not who you know. While the entire concept of this is very questionable (is this ever completely true?), there is no doubt that they pay you well in return for sucking your soul out in your 6x6 cubicle. The question is, is IT worth it?

Money makes the world go round. Stop kidding yourself, its important. I deposit a lot of credits in the bank of happiness doing activities that are paid for by my soul sucking job. But sometimes I wonder if is isn't the cause of what is creating the large void to be filled in the first place. And maybe part of the missing passion of my job comes from the feeling that I don't really deserve the money in the first place.

I go back and forth over my thoughts on this but here is the bottom line. Money can't buy you happiness, and maybe some day I will quit my job and get paid badly to do something that really inspires me, but in the meantime, I will just take my pay check and use it to counter balance my life by reaching out and grabbing at opportunities that cross my path.

Now, on the eve of actually quitting my job, to pursue my new dreams, it is all becoming full circle. I am incredibly proud of the effort and resolve that I put in to make this happen. I am incredibly thankful for all the support I have received from my family and friends both physically and emotionally. And most of all, I am so lucky to have a best friend and husband who is willing to let me take this journey even though it impacts our life in many ways. So here's to being sentimental for one minute, and really appreciating that life sometimes works out just as it is mean to. I really believe that.

Black Canyon Biking

Two weekends ago, before I hiked 21 miles down Buckskin Gulch (which was awesome btw, pics and recap coming soon), Sarah and I took a trip up to Black Canyon to do a little biking. I had never been up to this area before, but it is only about 30 miles north of the Phoenix metropolis so it is a nice quick drive up there.

We took off from the northern most point on the Black Canyon Trail and rode south. The trail immediately starts to climb up a ridge along tight switchback along a canyon with sheer drops on one side. It was instantaneously beautiful. I can't believe that I have never been to this trail before.

The trail then drops down and crosses the Black River before climbing once again up a large switchbacked ridge. The trail was created to be totally rideable as long as you are decent at navigating 180 degree turns. We got slightly heated during this climb as there is no shade here and it was a pretty warm day. I think more riding on this trail will have to wait to either cooler or much earlier in the morning times.

The trail drops back down to the river level and we decided to turn around at this point. As we neared the high point again, Sarah's somehow broke her derailer which made for an interested ride back to the car. She was able to ride the long downhill before resorting to pushing up the last couple of ridges. Overall, a great day on the bike. I was a little less comfortable on my clipless pedals with a narrow trail and a cliff on one side so I had a couple of nice tip overs in some rock gardens. Ah, oh well, live and learn I guess.

Bees Knees

Things are looking up my friends. I can count the days left spent in by 6x6 personal box on less than two hands and I have a 3 day trip hiking the Buckskin Gulch Canyon this weekend which I am pretty jazzed about.

I had a very laid back but nice weekend wherein I learned about the death process of bees. It may sound traumatic, and actually it was. I know the bees rights people may send me nasty letters and I can only hope for a PETA sponsored youtube ad, but I was responsible for the complete devastation of literally hundreds of bees this weekend. See we have a slight bee infestation problem. They built their honey comb nest in a unaccessible part of our attic right above our master bathroom. For over a year now, we have had honey residue dripping down onto our toilet. It sounds worse than it is, because we never had any bees in the house or outside to really bother us, only our neighbors. But this past spring, the bees invited their friends to come live with them due to probable bad mortgages they had made on their other houses. And all the sudden bees dead and alive started appearing in our house.

This my friends, is a problem for me. I have the good luck and appealing smell necessary to always get stung by bees. So when our neighbor's yard guy came over and complained on Saturday that he had gotten stung 5 times because of the bees covering the wall of our house, I wasted no time in calling for the bee murderer, aka Jimmy The Bee Guy. He came, he sprayed, he told me we need to cut our ceiling out in order to remove the giant honeycomb sitting on it, and then he took my hard earned $175 with the pleasant refrain that it would take a couple of days for all the bees to die. What he failed to mention is that all the pissed off angry bees who had been gassed with nerve toxins would fly into my house and run crazy like into walls, the tv, windows and the floor all the while making terrible distress sounds which freaked me out.

I of course was home alone this weekend with my lovely husband being out of the state so disposal of the bee carcus job came down to yours truly. I don't like killing most living creatures, but let me just say that I don't feel sorry for bees or rats based on past experiences. They are basically all dead now, and Tom has promised to be in charge of honey comb removal project before new bees move into it.

Anyway, all in all it was a pretty beeeusy weekend and I did some wicked awesome 'cliff where you could fall to your death' biking on Sunday. Beeeusy...haha. Get it?