picture post!

so i officially survived my first week! and was rewarded with a wonderful 3 day weekend! super happy. even happier that a 3 day weekend = a 4 day school week! hallelujah! -- after a busy, exhausting week, i've enjoyed a relaxing weekend. i went out with some friends on friday for pizza and to hangout. then saturday, my dad brought my sister down to stay with me, and we've just been hanging out. watching the kardashians of course. for some reason, E! has been showing a kardashians marathon, and it is totally killing my study time. i just can't turn it off, ugh.

anyway, thought i would share a few pictures! here is my lovely kitchen! teeny tiny (there is a counter and sink on the other side), but not much counter space! oh well, less to clean :)

lots of de-stress baking happened! luckily, i have friends who have no problem taking cookie dough and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins off my hands!

THREE weeks after my couches arrived, my end tables and coffee table FINALLY arrived!!! so nice to not have my lamp sitting on a rubbermaid storage box! happy day.

picture day (yes, we had to wear our white coats)! too bad my self-portrait came out better than my real picture :( - not to mention that the photographer suggested i smile WITHOUT teeth. what is he trying to say?

and for kicks, a picture with Cloe on my last night at home. miss that furball already!!!

hope you all enjoy your labor day weekend! i know i am! although i do have more studying to do (ALWAYYYS!)

skooool

so today is wednesday! we are halfway through the first week - although i feel like i've already been here a whole semester! unlike undergrad, med school started for real on day one. we had a 2 minute "welcome to utmb" speech, and then we had an hour lecture and headed into anatomy! not to mention that studying started day one :(( -- oh undergrad, i miss you!

highlights of the week so far:
- CUTTING OUT A HEART AND HOLDING IT IN MY HANDS!!! - wow. one of the coolest things of my life. i don't even know how to describe it. especially when you realize that kept someone ALIVE for 73 years. at (an average) of 70 beats a minute. wow.
- holding a pair of lungs was also cool. super squishy! but compared to the heart..
- my awesome small group mentors - one is a pediatric ENT, and the other is a surgeon - they lead our group called "practice of medicine" and basically teach us doctoring skills and how to think like a doctor... and they are both really fun and eager to teach!
- fun classmates!

low points:
- being EXHAUSTED.
- not being used to studying. even in undergrad, i could get away with taking days off. NOT true anymoreeeeeee
- feeling overwhelmed! and feeling like some of my classmates already know everything.

anyway, i should probably stop procrastinating, turn off the kardashians, and get to work on learning all this cardiac anatomy! only 3.98 more years until i'm a doctor, ha.

last day

so today was my last day of freedom! until the afternoon of september 23rd at least! while i'm sure i'll have a spare moment here and there, it will definitely be high stress until then! (our anatomy midterm)

anyway, tomorrow is the first day of class - we have lecture at 8, lab from 9-11, small group from 11-12, lunch 12-1, and our practice of medicine group from 1-4! -- it is definitely going to be a longggg day!

tomorrow is also a big day because we meet the cadaver we will be spending the next 8 weeks with! keeping my fingers crossed for a good one! that sounds weird, but let's just say some are easier to dissect and identify things on than others...

so just for memory's sake, i spent my last day at home this morning, then drove back to galvy, shopped at HEB, baked cookies, watched the kardashians, and pretended to read over stuff for tomorrow...

hopefully you'll be hearing from me again soon! i'm STILL waiting to post apartment pics because my coffee table and end tables have yet to arrive. they are only TWO weeks late. and will end up being THREE weeks late if they arrive as expected (not holding my breath!)

ok - need to go to sleep. day one of being a medical student happens tomorrow. i still can't wrap my brain around that!

year one!

so my blog "a year reclaimed" is hopefully going to end up chronicling my first year of med school! i'm going to attempt to check in every so often, but i'm not making any promises! i hear life is about to get nutzo, and i've heard the "time management" lecture about 100 times now...

anyway, i drove down to galveston on friday and moved in the last of my things! i'm still waiting on my coffee table and end tables to be delivered this coming friday, but other than that, my apartment is starting to feel homey :) - planning on a few more decorations here and there, but i've definitely made progress from just having a lawn chair in the living room!!

please check out the lovely packing box end table i set-up to improvise in the meantime! will post more apartment pics once everything is in place!

saturday was our first day of orientation - nothing terribly exciting. however, i did get to meet lots of my classmates, and everyone i've met so far is really chill and easy to talk to! i'm excited to have ended up somewhere with a good sense of community instead of a super competitive place! school is hard either way, but i think it will make it a lot more bearable with fun classmates!

this morning was our white coat ceremony! up to this point, i didn't really feel like a medical student. but after being coated and introduced as the class of 2015, i'm starting to warm up to the idea of being a MS1!! weird to FINALLY be a medical student after saying i was pre-med for like a decade (or more!!)

big thanks to my dad and sister for coming in to town for the ceremony and helping to set-up my apartment! it was nice having family in town even if it was just for the afternoon!

anyway, we are continuing orientation this week through thursday. lots of exciting sessions about hippa, safety, and how-to sessions to come... luckily they've scheduled lots of fun things as well! class officially starts on monday the 29th - first up is gross anatomy!

the traveler

so i know i've been rather absent from the blogworld lately, but my summer vanished before my eyes -- last thing i remember, it was may, and i had weeks and weeks of nothing ahead of me. now it is august, with a week until the start of school, and i can't believe how fast the time went!

i just got back to houston from pennsylvania and am entirely too excited to sleep in my own bed! i feel like i have been such a nomad lately! while flying home today, i was thinking back to one of my first blog entries detailing my travel goals for the year, and i was surprised that i actually hit most of the spots on my dream list!

this gave me the idea of doing a little "year-off blog recap" -- so i decided part one would be my travels!

i originally set out to visit: dubai, the caribbean, waco, pennsylvania, and colorado...

1) dubai: remember that time (december 2010) that i coaxed myself onto a 14 hour flight to the middle east ALL ALONE?! still can't believe i did that, but it was AWESOME!

2) the caribbean: did NOT happen. not even close. unless you count my 6-week stint in galveston this summer. nope, didn't think so.

3) waco: YES! multiple trips happened - went back for my first homecoming as an alum, ran my first 5k at the bearathon, and other random weekend trips! i don't care what people say, waco will always have a soft spot in my heart :)

4) pennsylvania: SO MANY TIMES. i'm pretty sure i set a record for number of visits this year, which is fine by me! it's nice escaping to the country every once in awhile! i think i ended up visiting 5 times since graduation? including the most recent 24 hour roadtrip there. i will NEVER complain about flying EVER again!

5) colorado: went skiing for the first time (march 2010)! i was hilariously bad. especially considering that my sister went from the bunny hills to the black trails in 2 days. pretty sure she took ALL the athletic genes in the family...

6) turkey: was not anticipating a eurotrip (july 2011), but how could i say no?! it was exciting getting to travel with my sister for her first time out of the country! istanbul wasn't bad either ;)

hoping to recap some other year-off happenings soon! also want to post pics of the new apartment (furniture comes tomorrow!!!)... so stay-tuned!

perfectly ordinary

today was a surprisingly lovely day! my program keeps us busy; we are usually in class 9-4pm with an hour or two off for lunch. today though, we only had 2 hours of class because we have a neuroscience test tomorrow. sounds scary, right? well, the good thing is that the program doesn't count towards our med school gpa's, so as long as we pass, life is good!

this means i had a wonderfully chill day! which was much needed after long days of lecture and 7 hours of anatomy lab! i took the morning off working-out and instead enjoyed my coffee during the today show. then i went to class for an hour, had lunch, headed to starbucks with my friends to "study," ate dinner, watched tv, had a chance to catch-up with leigh anne (!!!), spontaneously decided to go to the beach, and then treated myself to an ice-cream cone!

loving life without grades :) - too bad that has to change come august!

week 2

after enjoying a long memorial day weekend at home, i headed back to galvy for week 2!

this week has been SO MUCH BETTER than last week! for starters, coffee is back in my life! totally makes life happier. and keeps me awake. and i'm used to the schedule and being in lecture. slowly falling back into the school groove. hallelujah!

this week of dissecting has been really fun! yesterday we attacked the brachial plexus and axillary region. who knew the armpit contained so much important stuff?! - the brachial plexus is a network of nerves that start near the neck and move towards the arm. they cross and get different names and are basically a confusing mess.



see what i mean?!? -- well, i made it my mission last night to get learn this! and after some help from my anatomy atlas, youtube, and about a million practice drawings, i got it :) - not sure why, but it totally made me feel accomplished. probably because it is the first thing i've really had to study in FOREVER.
today in lab we took apart the forearm. SO FUN. seriously - the 2 hour lab flew by! once the skin and fat are removed, you just keep finding ligaments and muscles and nerves and arteries and veins, etc etc etc - so it made for a fun dissection.

i know that next year is going to be insanely hard and very trying, but i'm feeling better about it now that i'm getting back into school mode and finding that i'm enjoying (most) of the material!