I Touched a Heart

This morning I accidentally woke up at the wrong time so I was a bit cranky earlier. I thought I had reset my alarm to 7:00 instead of 6:30 because 6:30 was way too early. It turned out that I changed my alarm to 6:00 instead of 7. I tried to make myself go back to sleep but it wasn't working. So today I'm running on about five and a half hours of sleep, which isn't good. I had a regular breakfast, nothing really special.

My class did not meet over by the bike racks, like we did yesterday , because it was raining. However, we made our way to our building. This time we didn't get lost. When we made it to the I was sort of scared to be alone because I knew that Jasmine and Sophia had their Clinic to today which I thought meant that I would be alone, but I wasn't. I talked to this girl named Francesca. She's really smart and knows everything about everything. Our warm up was basically to name the path of blood flow and I only knew about three of the locations, Francesca knew all of them. We went in for lab after a short break and we got to look at some slides. I barely knew what we were looking at but some people seemed to know which organ or artery we were looking at on the first try. But, I did get one answer right, which made me feel better. After looking at microscopes, we went to another station for organ recital. It was the best part of my day! I got to touch a heart!! The heart is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. Lungs however, were really squishy and weird. We got to see the lungs of a smoker and I even saw what a tumor looked like. I would never be able to have this experience at school. We barely even get to use microscopes regularly at my school. I think I've seen a microscope at my school a total of three times. 

Lunch was a lot better today. I didn't really eat that healthy this time around but because I had an unhealthy lunch, I'll try to balance it out by eating better the rest of the week. I sat with Shanti, Abigail, Kaitlyn, Jasmine, and Emily. We all joked about a lot of things. I feel as if most of the VSA students who've been here before all hang out with each other and everyone else is sort of left to fend for themselves. I've met a lot of cool people but I don't think that I've met anyone who I think I've made a deep enough connection with in order to stay friends even when it's over. Shanti is a really social person so she's met a lot of people it's a lot harder for me I think. 

After lunch I headed back to class with Jasmine. She told me about her clinic and the cool minor surgery that she saw. When we got back to our classroom many other people who went to clinics and OR's also shared really cool stories. It got me excited for my OR time on Thursday. After listening to the stories we talked about this really confusing topic; EKG's. I definitely understand it more now than I ever did before this summer but I'm still really behind compared to other students like Francesca. I even took notes on it but it was really hard to grasp it. Even our teachers said that it was probably the most confusing topic they've had throughout Med School. We had a little worksheet that required us to look at an EKG and diagnose a patient. I didn't really contribute much to my table because I really didn't understand it well enough to be any help. However, my table did a great job of diagnosing the patient. 

After that lecture, we got into our project group. Our topic is Pediatrics General Surgery and my job was to basically define what the job entails and what a pediatric general surgeon would do day to day. I finished my part in about 15 minutes; it was a lot simpler than I imagined. 

Yoga was weird today. I walked in sort of late because it took me longer than I expected to change and get down to the room that held our activity. I wasn't really late but I was late enough that almost everyone was there and all the spots in the back was taken which meant I had to be in the front. It wasn't until yoga started when I realized how exhausted I was. I think I fell asleep during one of the poses because when I opened my eyes, everyone else was in a different pose...

Dinner was really quick for me. I basically got the same thing that I got for lunch except I got chicken and fries instead of a burger and fries. I know, I'm very creative. Everyone was excited to go on our very first S.O.F.T night. This means that we can leave campus and visit some shops in a bordered area. We had to be back to our dorms before nine. I decided that if we came back on time then I would finally do laundry since I had been putting it off for a couple of days. I didn't think it would take long which meant I would go to sleep on time and wake up with enough ours of sleep.

It was fun. Shanti, Emily, and I went to Ben & Jerry's which is delicious ice cream parlor. I had to try out three different ice cream flavors before I decided. It was worth it though. Most of the other little shops in the area were closed so we didn't have much to do. We mainly walked around and talked, it was cool to get to know Emily. 

Of course we had to take a selfie