Ignoring lecture

I’m currently sitting in an International Health meeting. My primary reason for being here is to see if they’ll give me money to travel around the globe this summer, preferably to beautiful locals with beautiful women. A close second is the free pizza. With green olives! This meeting has already been worth my time.

Things have been pretty busy, hence my lack of writing. I’ll save the anatomy until last so you can stop reading before the end if you so desire. I’ll briefly cover the social scene, since my socializing has been rather brief. My ward is rather small, though it has been growing the last few weeks as the undergrads, dental and pharmacy students moved in. I should point out that it is highly unfair that I have already been in school for 6 weeks and the other students start tomorrow. But despite the relatively low number of LDS people in the area, they have a lot of activities. Many are rather unfortunate affairs (80’s Dance, Karaoke night, Pioneer Celebration) but at least they’re trying. I miss having my vast social network of BYU, but I’m slowly building up friends and associates in this ward. But most of my recreational activities devolve into our med school clique. There are 5 of us single 1st years and we do stuff together most every weekend. We’re not helping each other branch out much, but we have a good time.

Socializing with the rest of the med school presents difficulties. There are tons LDS students, but the vast majority are married. We went to the LDS BBQ last weekend and were surrounded by dozens and dozens of kids. So branching out to upper levels of the school doesn’t work too well. We also try to branch out to the heathen masses, but this is hard as well. The primary weekend activity of med students is drinking. It’s a bit ironic, a bit sad, and darned inconvenient. We sometimes go out to the bars with the class, but without being intoxicated the bar is only interesting for about twenty minutes, sometimes less. So we have to organize our own events to get to know people. I threw a House party a couple weeks back, and Bryce has a weekly racquetball tourney.

We’re now taking Biostatics instead of Histology, and are keeping up our Embryology and Anatomy. We spent quite some time on the arms, which was sometimes hard (there are TONS of muscles and nerves in the forearms and hands.) Not only are there tons of muscles but they all have crazy-long names. Flexor Digitorum Profundus? There must be a shorter way to say this. There was a lot of fat and fascia in the hands to clear away, but otherwise things were pretty clean. The hardest thing was when we had to pull the humerus from the glenohumeral joint and break into the head of the bone with a bonesaw. Most of the body is pretty dry by this point, but the bone marrow felt like warm snowcone. After we spent so long in the arms we did the lungs for a single day. A day! We worked with the heart for a whopping two days before working onto the abdominal cavity yesterday. It was an odd experience to hold a heart in my hands and even odder to clean out congealed blood (which once you wet it feels like red wasabi.) Try anatomy, it’s a blast.