The Rainstorm Cometh (cameth?)

There's been talk of hurricanes and rumors of hurricanes, but up until yesterday, all we saw was a little bit of rain. Granted, it was a rain that seemed to be timed with maddening precision - occuring exactly during the lunch hour, especially when the morning had been sunny, so I of course never brought an umbrella - but it was just rain. Yesterday was a different story.

After getting up for the weekly Case Presentation - a teleconference between the Ross campus and the Princess Margaret Hospital in Roseau, this week covering prenatal corticosteroid administration (to help little babies' lungs develop), Nicole and I returned to our normal classroom for a rousing series of lectures - some anxiety disorders, a little bit of human sexuality, some psychopharmacology, a little neoplasia, etc. However, 5 minutes shy of 10:00am, one of our professors came in with an urget announcement from the prime minister of Dominica: effective immediately, all businesses on the island were to shut down due to the approaching storm - everyone was to go home.

Great - day off, right? My first thought was for the student I tutored - their head and neck practical was today, and they'd lose the rest of the day to study. Next, I wondered when our already rigorous schedule would allow for making up the classes. Nicole and I filled up some water bottles, and then headed on back to PBH. And now, allow me to quote Genesis 7:10:

"And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."

I've been in heavy rains before, but this was something else. We decided to wakl back along the street, because the little cow trail we normally walked to class every morning was sure to be a sloshing mud-hole by this point. So we're walking down the street, and I'm holding the umbrella (I remembered it!) darn-near horizontal, because the wind is coming so hard. This torrential downpour hit us all at once; 5 minutes before, the skies were merely a dusky gray, and I was thinking "they're shutting down the island for this?" So we're making our way down the road. I might as well have forgotten my umbrella, because within seconds, Nicole and I are absolutely soaked. We made it down past the study space, and then around the pool by Ross housing - to find a rushing, muddy river has materialized from the sidewalk between the pool and some buildings. By river, I mean more than ankle deep - but soon after, we were home free.

The storm is raging around us, and what do I do? Take pictures! The bucketfulls of rain had largely subsided by this point, even though it maintained a steady drizzle for hours. That being the case, I snuck out onto the top of the building (shh....that's between you and me).

Now I know that it may not look like much, but keep in mind that all of that swirling seafoam you see is normally as clear and smooth as glass. I made my way down from the top of the building to get right into the middle of the action - I snuck down into the seaside, open air restaurant close to where we live. Looking back, it probably wasn't the best idea because I was up to my ankles in muddy water and I couldn't see the crabs (or whatever other disgusting things had been evicted from their hovels in the dirt by the water), but I was out of there quick-quick.

Everywhere you see water is supposed to be luscious, neatly kept grass, and quaint stone walkway.

You can actually see how the raging storm has smashed our little dock into kindling - part of it washed away towards the Cabrits. Now I know that, in the grand scheme of floods, this wasn't so bad - first of all, the water has someplace to go; the sea is only 20 feet away. Also, it wasn't that much water, but it did all come at once. So, we just relaxed for the rest of the day. I finally finished Stephen King's Liseys's Story and Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity. There was also quite a bit of reading done over neoplasias, and a little bit of reviewing fungi, yeasts, and bacteria. There was actually more reviewing than I would have liked - the cable was out.

Halfway through the day, I sent out a really long e-mail to my anatomy group. I hope they're doing alright - they're taking the practical exam right now.

In honor of the presidential election, Nicole and I have made the joke realized that, the first antibody to bind to a pathogen, IgM, actually means "immunoglobulin Maverick". However, that first response isn't enough, and if thats all you've got, your blood runs thick like syrup (it's called HyperIgM). What needs to happen is a process called "isotype switching". I guess you could say that our antibodies go through a change we need.