Cougar Attack!

So today we had our SPETA (Specialized Physical Exam Training Assistant.  At first they weren't specialized, but that made the initials PETA and they don't care about animals so they became specialized) training session and there was a camera crew there to film and interview students.  It was just my luck that the man with a giant camera came in while I was messing up an abdominal exam.  That's beside the point though.  I have decided I would make a great movie star because I didn't look at the camera once.  Yeah, and I totally improvised all of my lines.  Well, we were unscripted so there were no lines I should have been saying, but I think everything I said was brilliant.  So after my group got filmed for about half an hour we were told we had been the group chosen to interview after as well.  So I went into my interview and did what I do best.  I said "Um" a lot.  Well, not too much.  I said it once per question that they asked me.  I told them all about what we do in SPETA, why I am in medicine, and why I think SPETA is great.  Apparantly they are making a short film for a presentation to show at conferences and other medical schools about why starting clinical training on trained actors early on is more beneficial that getting dropped in 3rd year with your first live patient doing clinical skills you looked at, but never practiced before.  I think it's nice to practice on a "patient" who can tell me if I am performing exams incorrectly.  If I just had a non-trained patient I would be doing a ton of stuff wrong because I would think it was right and they would trust that I knew what I was doing and just lay there quietly thinking they were getting quality health care.  So SPETA is like having a really outspoken hypochondriac who constantly reads medical journals telling you how to examine them properly.  The best part is they never have an illness and they aren't upset when you tell them they are healthy.  So yeah, SPETA's are amazing and I get to be in a movie about them.  And they told us we wouldn't have time for starting our acting career in medical school.  I showed them.

After SPETA I went to my first elective meeting.  It was for Wilderness medicine.  I am going to learn how to save people from an avalanche among other amazing things.  So this is a new field of medicine that I didn't know MDs could specialize in.  I guess it isn't a complete specialty yet, but it is getting there.  Since it is a new branch of recognized and organized medicine there are a lot of research opportunities.  They specifically listed an ongoing study about cougar attacks.  I chose to take that the wrong way, as about half my giggling classmates did, and had quite the amusing picture in my head.  I imagined a young med student hiding in the back of a bar watching a young man get drunk.  They see an older woman enter the bar and start slinking towards the boy.  The researcher excitedly watches as the two begin a passionate conversation.  Then she pounces.  In a matter of minutes the boy is powerless to escape her.  She keeps going and eventually drags him away.  The student must follow to gather information on the survival rate even though the sight is generally not pretty.  The research gathered here is un-paralleled.  The med student becomes a famous published author for shining light into a new wilderness.  That student could be me!  Anyway, I think they meant the non-human animal cougar.  It was less interesting after that.  I'm pretty excited about our two field days because we get to see what equipment they use to do wilderness rescue and practice splinting with branches among other super amazing things.  We may even get to create small scale avalanches and then barely escape them with our lives.  Or easily escape with our lives.  I like to think dangerously though.

Once I got home I studied.  I really didn't get a whole lot done though.  I do know the caval drainage of the trunk and the order of blood flow through the hepatic veins now.  Tomorrow is our last day of lab before the exam on Monday.  I really can't find anything in the giant abdominal maze so I either have to go in the lab this weekend a lot *shudder* or just face the fact that I am about to fail another lab practical.  A loving 3rd year once told me, "I failed every lab practical and still passed the class."  She gives me hope.  Hope that I won't have to retake any exams from anatomy after it is over.  Hope, for America!  I got a little carried away there.  I just get excited around hope and then I get overly hopeful. 

So I have embarked on a mission.  A mission to get in shape in medical school during the anatomy block within the confines of my apartment and without any weights or room to run about.  My entire plan revolves around the hula hoop game on Wii Fit.  I know you think that is ridiculous, but it is ridiculously hard as I think I have mentioned previously.  I swung my hips around like a haphazard bellydancer for 30 minutes before I became severly fatigued.  I have decided to keep an update until the wedding on how my workout regimen is treating me.  I hope you like listening to me whine about how I'll never get rid of my never-born-a-child child bearing hips.  They are just so darned poofy!  Anyway, if it works I am going to buy a size 45 pair of jeans and go to Nintendo and insist they pay me millions of dollars to tell my weight loss story about their game on TV.  I know they'll accept and put me on an ad campaign because I already have a very credible acting portfolio where I talk about SPETAs.