Of Biking and TummyAcheing

After the craziness of Sports Day, I took a day off to recover. I woke up not late, ate a big breakky, took a walk and hung out. I went to school and studied alone for 3 hours straight! It truly was an image for skeptical eyes: me in the corner of our classroom, 4 large textbooks splayed out before me, and on the whiteboard, a huge, quadcolor drawing of the front and back of the liver with all its connecting things. Yes, it was something to make even your mother proud. Came home, at a simple dinner and watched Boogie Nights (good movie, right so). Then I went to sleep early because the next morn' I was waking up early for... bike trip!

I left my house at 6:45AM, rainy Sunday, and biked a bit and met a friend. By then it was already sunny and dry: an onus indeed as I ended up with the BikerBurn (sunburn on tops of hands and feet(sandals), arms, nose, and awesome sunglasses-tanline) Then he and I spent the next several hours biking until we reached the Gold Coast: miles and miles of splendorous beach. We stopped every 40 minutes or so to rehydrate and eat (I figured we were burning at least 1000 calories an hour... yes, there's an equation: 0.28calories/pound/mile) We got there at about 12:15PM (nice 4.5hours) and immediately jumped in the ocean. We just sat, cooling off and breathing easy for about 30 minutes and then went in search of food. Somehow, it took us longer than we thought to find a food place so we settled for a strip mall: him, Subway, and me, a pizza chain. I got a large (admittedly, smaller than a 'Merican Large) with a shitload of toppings and polished it off with ease. We then went to another beach with huge waves and jumped around for a while. At around 3:30 we hopped back on the bikes and headed for the local train station. We definitely did not have it in us to bike home: don't let the scale on the Gmap scale delude you, it was much farther than shown. I just put in the basic route but the other guy had a GPS that kept track of our biking: it'd been about 100k just to the beach, come'on now! We get to the train, catch it right on time and jump on. There are a couple mid-teenagers getting completely interrogated by the 4 (!) train-ticket-checkers. It was really weird: they spent like 15 minutes calling, doing background info, isolating the kids to ask them questions...and after all that we didn't see them doing anything to them. Also, they didn't check anyone else's ticket. After a while the railway died so we were put on a bus to a different train station. By that point, I was only 20minute bike-ride from home and didn't want to jump back on the train, so I just went home. All together, ~130K. Good on me. The most surprising thing and I guess indicative of my mad-awesomeness is that the next morning, I hopped on the bike and my ass didn't hurt and my legs weren't sore.
The week so far has been alright. Classes and classes. Yesterday we had our first clinical session with a patient. We got a psychiatric patient (just happened to be that since our clinical coach is a psychiatrist) and then just drilled him with medical questions to beef up our history-taking skillz. We then did a physical examination of his abdomen. Pretty sweet stuff. Afterwards, all of us in my group went out for a long, nice dinner at a Turkish restaurant. Last night, maybe the Turkish food or the weird meat pies we got during our clinical coaching, but I had a really weird tummyache (medical terminology). I had countless dreams about trying to solve the problem and they were all fruitless. Today we had another anatomy lab and got to watch a stomach and GI tract be excised and played around with it. All the while, I was rubbing my own abdomen, empathizing. Good stuff.
Jesus, I didn't know that!1
I haven't done this for a while, sorry. One interesting thing that I definitely didn't know I learned while practicing physical examination on myself: I have a third nipple! Howabout that? Your good friend Michael has a supernumeray.
Other than that, learned a lot of interesting and gross stuff about protozoan and worm infections and tons about diarrhoea (defined as over 250g/24hr period). If you get diarrhoea, an easy home-rehydration-remedy is: 1/2tsp salt, 1 tsp baking soda, 8oz. orange juice, and dilute it with water to a liter. Drink! Mmm- tasty and good for you.