We Are the Champions

Guess which white belt novice beat out two yellow belts and three blue belts at UCSD's karate tournament today to win 1st place in the women's collegiate beginner division? Oh yeahhhhhhh. UCI also beat UCSD in overall team points, and UC Riverside heard we were coming so they didn't even bother to show up to battle the inaugural UCI Karate Team (apparently we've never had a team before). Now I attempt to parlay my athletic success into academics... success begets success!

I hope.

Decapitation

We decapitated our cadaver today. I'm not sure which I dislike getting in my hair more, dead guy parts or live guy vomit/blood/feces/urine. Well, considering most of my future patients are going to be living (or at least on the verge of living), I guess I should like the latter more. I'm so sick of anatomy. It is so foul. Not only did we have to take the guy's head off, we had to saw down through the middle of his face. I elected to saw through the top of his head from the back so I wouldn't have to watch the blade going through his face, but it was still nasty enough.

We learned something interesting in lecture today about "brain death." Did you know, if you are in a persistent vegetative state and your family elects to keep you hooked up to the ventilator, when you finallly do die they will get a bill from the hospital? Medicare/Medi-Cal doesn't cover very much, and most insurance companies have a limit. The lecturing doctor said people can go bankrupt, lose their retirements, their childrens' college funding, etc. over the bill incurred by keeping your body running. Also, regardless of what your driver's license says, your next of kin still has to legally approve of organ harvesting if you should end up in the position of being an organ donor. So, to make this quite clear, I don't want to be kept on machines after my brain is dead or if I have no chance of being myself after a so-called recovery. Just pull the plug! They can have my organs, I won't need them anymore. Did you know that an otherwise healthy donor can change 8 people's lives for the better by giving good organs?

Quickest Blog in the History of Blogs

Week 5

Plants Week 4

Gettin shaggy! I can't wait for the little blooms to come up. By the way, I have an odd feeling that these plants I first called pansies then changed to violets are actually marigolds. I guess I'll know for sure when they show off their flowers, but I have a feeling I've seen these leaf patterns before, when we grew marigolds in 3rd grade.

I spent part of my evening in the anatomy lab tonight. My partner and I have a presentation to make to the rest of the class, so we were doing extra dissection. Usually when I go into lab, no matter what day of week or time of day, there are at least a few other people there. But this time, at 10pm on a Sunday, there was no one there. It was just me and Janet and 20 dead people sleeping in the dim, singly-lit laboratory (Janet and I were not sleeping, the dead people were). It was creepy so I switched the lights on really fast. We were both a little skittish until we started dissecting, but as we picked away at the intermuscular fat and strings of facia among the cervical plexus, it seemed perfectly normal to be sitting there, talking about random things, and wiping away strands of hair that were falling into another person's body cavity. We were proud to have found our parathyroid glands, as they are often inadvertently removed during thyroidectomies due to their inconvenient location and size.

Next week we I hear we have to decapitate our body. Now that will be interesting and not a little bit gross.