Dirty

I've got sand in my hair but it don't worry me none.
My week was fine... classes were present, as was controversy. See, once a week we go to a hospital where we have a clinical coach teach us how to give physical exams. Our clinical coach was a nice but older psychiatrist = doesn't know how to do physical exams well. Further, it was in a private hospital so we had catered lunch every time we came. While we liked him and, more, the food, it was annoying that we weren't learning much and, as a result, not doing as well as our classmates on the physical-exam assessments. So after many weeks of loyalty, we did the ultimate dick move and went over his head and got a new coach. Without telling him. Oh well. Our first session with the new coach is later today and while she will be much better, I will surely miss those little meat pies.
On Wednesday was the last day of work for a friend of mine. She waitressed at a nice-ish Italian restaurant and I'd always been meaning to go and never had gotten around to it. Since it was the last night and there was mention of discounted food, I rounded up some mates and headed over there. We had home-brought wine, without corking fee, and 2 appetizers and 3 gourmet pizzas, filling 4 of us to the extreme, for 18.50$ AUD. Plus we were there till closing and since we were friends and they were closing, they gave us lots of food to take home: bacon, snow peas, roasted pepper, cashews, jalapeños, etc. It was a glory-hole of eatery. The next day I used their power for good and made my own money pizza.Early Friday morning I got picked up to go camping on loverly Moreton Island. I went with one girl from my discussion group and then a bunch of her friends (also from med). They are hippiesh and therefore called the Dirties. We get to the ferry and put all our luggage on... and man it was a lot. These motherfuckers know how to camp: tables, coolers filled with BBQs, 2 guitars, tons of food, and an amazing thing known as a jaffle iron.
We cross the beautiful ocean, seeing dolphins, and disembark from the barge. Unload the crap, take a look around, and walk to a nearby campsite. It was so beautiful... we were right on the beach but enclosed by trees... the ocean was blue and had some wrecks in it.
We took over several campsites, unpacked, fixed up some jaffles for lunch. A jaffle is an Australian tradition, apparently, that is more or less the same as a george-foreman-pressed-panini-type sandwich. The iron has two handles that clasp together, with a thing to put a sandwich in and then place in the fire. Since you're camping and it's wood-smoked and hungry, anything you put in the jaffle automatically tastes amazing. Featured sandwiches were: avocado and cheese, baked bean and cheese, peanut butter and honey, marshmellow and chocolate, leftover pasta sauce (broccoli and onion) with cheese, sausage, cheese, and a raw egg (and it cooked in the fire.. marvelous) , and the smorgasbord: canned beans, chick peas, corn, brown rice, cheese, curry powder. It sustained me to no ends.
We spent the 2.5 days sunning, playing frisbee, swimming (though the water was fairly cold), and sand-sledding. This is an awesome (EXTREME!!!!!one) thing where you take a sled, or in our case a waxed plank of wood, down a sand dune. About a 1 hr walk along the beach from our campsite, we turned into the island, walked about 15 minutes through forest, and then got to a desert with dunes... it was so cool. We then proceeded to spend hours sledding down and climbing up. We started plain, then worked up to double, face first, double face first, triple, and then ended on a foursome.
My first time I rocked out but this was my second time and it was obviously less glorious.
The weekend passed idly and well. Eating and chilling by the fire, chatting and singing. Two people brought guitars, 1 guy brought a conga drum, and someone brought a bunch of maracas, so there was massive sing-a-longing. A lot of fun was made at my expense because I was the only 'merican out of 15 people and my accent is funny. Also, I'm funny. Ohh, one awesome "too-soon" joke I just remembered!
Someone mentioned some cliche or phrase and I said it similarly but weirdly...I don't remember exactly, but it's like if someone said "kill two birds with one stone" and I said "eat two potatoes with one fork" or something. Then they said, "well that's one way to put it" and I said, "it's just a saying in my hometown" and they replied, "well there must be something in the water, then" and another girl said, "yeah, a bridge."
I laughed so hard, it was great. The weekend passed by quite quickly and my only regret was missing out on my lovely markets. Oh well.
This week has passed quickly already. (I started this post yesterday...) Our new clinical coach was awesome. She totally knew what she was doing, had a no-nonsense approach to teaching it, and made sure we all knew what we were doing. Last night I watched the new Harry Potter movie and boy was I disapointed. Not by the quality of the movie (as I had anticipated shittiness) but by the movie's quality. It was a hand-held camera, whose operator was focusing and unfocusing every 2 minutes. I don't understand - you focus on the screen...what else changes? I was dismayed because I downloaded the 2nd Harry Potter in the winter of 2002 and the quality was better than this one. Jesus.
Today we had anatomy lab for the first time in a while, and it was dissection, baby! By the luck of the draw, we were given the leg of Mrs. Thunder Thighs McGraf... ugh, it was nasty. Over an hour spent peeling away at the fat on one thigh. Like they have 'Scared Straight' programs where juvenile delinquents meet prisoners to keep them out of trouble, they should send fat people to these kinds of labs to scare them into losing some weight. Ugh.
Jesus, I didn't know that!1
As I mentioned previously, we're working on cancer these days. This week was about breast cancer: the horrible motherfucker which affects 1/8 women. Apparently, risk factors are age of first period (younger=worse), number of pregnancies (0=worse), and age of menopause (older=worse). I have decided that if I have a daughter, I'm going to use hormones to delay her puberty until she's 22, then let her get pregnant once, then take out her ovaries (a surgical procedure with the awesome name of oophorectomy) and so she will pretty much be guaranteed against breast cancer. She'll be guaranteed to have osteoporosis, I guess, but what can you do?
Speaking of cancer: smoking. Apparently, smoking releases an awesomely-termed substance known as 'rogue nucleotides' that skeez their way into your DNA (DNA is made of nucleotides as the base... G,C,A,T as you may have heard of). One thing they really damage is mitochondrial DNA (the mitochondria is the power supplier for the cell). Old appearances are, supposedly, caused by death of the mitochondria and thus smoking -> looking like an older person.
To help fight cancer, you need medicine against pain (analgesics): anywhere from advil to morphine. The mechanism of different analgesics (and anti-inflammatories, usually lumped in together) is various and awesome. They all affect different pathways and different enzymes and are crazy. Advil leads to GI bleeding and kidney failure, yet is a great analgesic and somehow anti-platelet aggregation (for heart attack patients). Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is randomly analgesic yet doesn't control fever, and no one knows why. (Note: to kill yourself, you need to take between 20-30g of acetaminophen, but stay hidden for 24 hours, because they can bring you back within that time). Heroin, in its pure form, has exactly twice the analgesic effect of morphine with the same adverse effects, yet you don't see it being used in hospitals for whatever reason.... Codine and the like are similar to morphine but much less potent (which is why you can purchase them more easily). An interesting adverse effect of them is decreased gut motility (constipation) and so if you have traveler's diarrhea somewhere, you can take it to ease the pain and reduce the diarrhea!
One more thing - this one is really random but quite awesome. In hemoglobin (the molecule in blood that carries oxygen) we have what as known as a porphyrin ring, which holds iron. If a person is deficient in the supply/function of that ring, it's known as porphyrinsm. This is a genetically-passed trait and so in small communities with some inbreeding, it can have higher presence. Since the person is anemic, their skin is very sensitive to light. Also, their gums retract higher than normal and they really crave iron. So in a community out in the middle of nowhere - say, Transylvania, Romania - they found people who would be out at night, fanged, drinking fresh cow's blood. It gets better. This was during the time of witchcraft and all that and so they obviously wanted to kill them, so they'd capture them and bring them wherever. The people, obviously defensive, would bite their captors and the mix of their blood with the blood of the person being bitten would have a reaction and leave a mark! One more sweet point (that I came up with so it may not be true) has to do with garlic. Garlic is a known blood-coagulant (it's contraindicated in post-heart-attack patients on blood thinning medications such as aspirin, Warfarin, or Heparin) and so I guess those poor porphryistic people would avoid garlic.
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