A real good time

Hello all, I hope you are doing well. I am fine; as fine as one can be, I suppose.
This last week has been plain with few-to-no highlights. The one cool thing was that I got to do a urinalysis on myself. Dipstick test and a culture test: I got no bacteria in my urethra! Huzah! Other than that, I have been studying a lot. Our test in T-minus 5 days (thank christ) and it's all about that. On Wednesday we were supposed to have our Frisbee championship. Free pizza and beer and a battle to the death. It was canceled because of the rain we've been getting lately and instead I studied for almost 12 hours. It was pretty impressive.
Last night I went over to my friend Ben's house where he made a nice dinner and then he, his housemate, and I drank many beers and played 3 games of Scrabble. 2 of the games were speed Scrabble where you have only 1 minute to play, with a timer that beeps at 30 seconds and 10 seconds left. Fuck, it was nervewracking - I thought I'd have an MI. Anyway I won them all (sweet) and enjoyed my bike ride home.
I was in the park a couple days ago, doing pull-ups near a family. The little girl turned to her father and said, "that man is really clever at that!" I don't know which was more: the cuteness of her using 'clever', or the strangeness that I am a 'man' [adult].
Today I went to the market as usual and then went to study. This upcoming week we have no classes and so all it will be is study and cooking and eating. I look not forward to it. But I do look forward to Thursday at 12:01pm, because then I'll be done and happy and partying until I fly home on Saturday.
Jesus, I didn't know that!1
-A urinary tract infection is caused by normally-not-present bacteria setting up shop and wreaking havoc on your poor urinary system. Clinically, it is defined as having "more than 10^5 of the same organism per ml of urine". Let that sink in. That means if you have 9000 living bacteria cells in 1 ml of urine (1ml=1 kernel of corn), then that's okay. Bacteria are crazy.
-UTIs are an interesting thing. They are the most common infection that humans get, more than stomach or pneumonia or anything. 40% of women will get a UTI in their life. That means that if 10 women are reading this blog, I'll be surprised. An unfortunately pervasive kind is termed "honeymoon cystitis" (cystitis means inflammation of the bladder), which women get during their honeymoon due to lots and lots of sex. Sweat and other things mix around down in that area and coupled with the friction of sex send lots of organisms flying up the urethra. The main culprit is E. Coli. That's the little guy who causes Traveler's Diarrhea and inspired that whole meat-scare of the 90s. How does it get there? Ever notice how close the vagina is to the anus? Yeah. It is.
-I think this is something that is kind of on the downlow in the non-medical community, but in medicine, everything (drugs, operations, treatments, etc.) have a Number Needed to Treat (NNT) value that gives a statistical value for the efficacy of a certain thing. If a drug to take to prevent strokes, for instance, has an NNT value of 20, that means 20 people have to take it for it to save one life. Depressing if you think about it, isn't it?