Mexico Medical Student |

Due to the brain trusts at Kaplan, we have a week off because the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. We were supposed to be getting physio lectures this week, but the incoming prof didn’t know we had already covered that material with someone else. So, in the interest of fairness to the class since he wouldn’t have had sufficient prep time, Kaplan decided that classes would be cancelled for this week. Exqueeze me? I don’t know if cardio, respiratory, or GI was next (we don’t have that detail in the schedule), but you can’t tell me a PhD or MD-level lecturer can’t “wing it” with lectures aimed at 2nd year med students. Please. Something else has to be up, especially since this is the second such “crisis” of a prof’s/class’ unavailability that’s changed our schedule and even cost students some money as they had to scramble to change plane tickets.

So for the first time that I was actually WANTING class to be in session to take me out of my funk to ensure something got accomplished from 9-3 or so, this happens. Now I have the whole day to play with–a dangerous thing indeed. On a completely different but related note, it’s starting to get really warm for parts of the day here now, probably close to about 89-90 degrees. The problem is that the day starts out at about 45 degrees, which means there’s a 45-degree temperature swing from 7am until about 2-3pm. That’s frickin’ crazy!! It’s wreaking havoc with my sinuses–the spring flowers, temperature swings, pollution (ever-present, but worth mentioning). Since the upstairs is so much warmer than downstairs, I moved my laptop, desklamp and books to the kitchen table where it’s cooler due to much more ventilation from downstairs windows. The problem is now the street noise coupled with the fact that I feel weird with all this open space around me instead of my little study cove upstairs means that my chi is off. Feng-shui has something to say about this, I’m sure–perhaps there is too much “yang” down here interfering with my studies. What does the I-Ching say about a good swift kick in the ass?

I know, offer me some cheese with my whine (it’s OK–I’m not on an MAO inhibitor, ha!), but this trend of not being able to get it the fuck together is wearing thin. I need to be cooking with gas, blazing new trails, seeing the lightbulbs go off above my head as I delve deep into the material and say, “OH! That’s what Dr. BarelySpeaksEnglish meant two years ago! Why didn’t he just say that in the first place?” If you look above my head, in true cartoon fashion, you’d instead see a bulb with a thin, pathetic filament, barely glowing with the effort of trying to memorize micro right now.

What physician (non ID-research, obviously) gives a rat’s ass about what media to select for growth? I thought by Kaplan Step 1 time, such microbiology trivia would have been stuck down in favor of, oh I don’t know–pathogenesis maybe? I swear to Christ, if in the coming years I ever have to walk a culture swab back to a lab and remember to pull out chocolate or McConkey agar because I suspect this bug or that bug in a patient (because ALL doctors do all the lab work themselves, just like on “House, MD”)–that’s the day ladies and gentlemen, that I’ll inoculate myself with the culture sample.