Cats, Cars, and Colorado

Two weeks ago, while Tyler was busy studying anatomy, I was given the opportunity to ride back to Utah with my grandparents to see my family for a short 5 day stay. I left my dear one and got to attend a family reunion of sorts with my dad's side of the family. The road trip was long but it was worth to see loved ones.

Conveniently, my dad's youngest brother Glen and my Aunt Karen were driving through Colorado from Utah back to Virginia (wow, what a trip!) and were able to give me a lift back to Denver after my stay in Utah. Inconveniently, their trusty Toyota Sienna van broke down (actually completely died) just five miles outside of Vail, Colorado. Normally, I'm sure most would consider Vail an ideal vacation destination, but for a family who had already been on the road for three weeks, this was not ideal.

Here's some footage of Karen trying to get cell phone coverage in the frosty Colorado air while my 7-year old cousin Joseph kept saying things like "this is a situation." Here's me smiling at the craziness of at all :)

 AAA gave Karen the phone number to a taxi service to pick us up and take us back to Vail, but because Karen could not be more specific than "we are at mile marker 185.5 about 5 miles west of Vail on I-70," the taxi would not come pick us up. Fortunately, the tow truck driver was completely comfortable with breaking AAA rules and let us ride in the van on the tow truck back to town, as seen here:

Here's cousin Isaac being cool as a cucumber while Glen and Karen brace themselves for the future.

By 10 pm, this little caravan was eating pub food at a local bar, settled into the reality that we'd be staying the night and not leaving with the van in the morning. The only person with a real appetite was little Joseph, shown here with his burger:

 We made it to Denver, and the Petersons made it back to Virginia in a rental van. Waiting for me were two happy kitties, who had been banned from the bed while I was away:

 (Insert my body between these two lovies and you've got yourself a classic Sundy morning ;).

We have moved into our new house, and I am missing Nick (above) and Nellie (below) like crazy. I am, for the first and only time in my existence, a crazy cat lady.

Apparently, Tyler missed me. I sure missed him. Colorado is turning out to be quite an adjustment for me. I can do anything with him by my side (especially since the cats are no longer by my side).

First Exam

At the risk of self-categorization, I acknowledge that there is a medical student stereotype. Medical students are the ones who visit their undergraduate professors to argue for two points on their 150-point chemistry exams. We can be "smart-and-we-know-it" types, who take some pleasure in showing how much we know, especially if it means contradicting someone who got it wrong. We tend to be passionate, type-A, driven people who sincerely desire to help others but want to do so with the prestige of the MD title. After all, it takes a certain high level of self esteem (and masochism, for that matter) to commit to 8-12 years of time-intense post-graduate education and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans that accompany it.

We medical students tend to be those who were near the top of the class in high school and undergraduate education. It isn't easy to be in a program where an immense quantity of information is thrown at us without the hope that we will be able to retain everything. That became especially apparent this week as we prepare for our first exam. On Friday, a professor explained what the exam would look like, and slightly panicked students began firing questions about what they could do to maximize their scores, including pre-arguments for questions they anticipated getting wrong: "What if I answered it this way?" "But I thought that teres minor was fed by the posterior circumflex humeral artery."

I have to admit that I am one of those with a bit of anxiety about how well I will do on the test. This is the first memorization-heavy class I have had in six years - my music classes in undergrad and administration courses in the MHA program I completed tended to be read-and-analyze rather than memorize-and-regurgitate classes. As a result, I think my memorization muscles have atrophied. Information just doesn't seem to be sticking - for the life of me I can't remember which of the erector spinae muscles attach to the costal angles as opposed to the rib bodies, or which of the bundles leaving the brachial plexus is the axillary nerve:

I take comfort, though, in the grading system at the school: fail, pass, and honors. A passing grade is anything above 70%; honors, a pleasant but rather meaningless designation, is anything above 90%. It might take a little adjustment, but I think that I can be content with a just-above-passing grade.

The first exam (clinical anatomy of the back and extremities) is on Wednesday. It has two parts - a written portion and a practical portion in the anatomy lab, where we will be identifying structures on dissected cadavers. Two more study days...