Friday night in Miami

I'm livin' la vida loca down here in MIA - here's the breakdown. We had a small group session Friday morning, concerned with the presentations and treatments of right-heart failure, cardiogenic shock, and atrioventricular block. It was nothing new, but it's always fun to to take some seemingly random facts I'd learned a while back and apply them to a patient I might actually see. Then there were some errands run - the necessary foodstuffs acquired - and we headed back to Ross for the first session of their Step Review course (it's called UMBR, but I've yet to expend the energy to figure out what that stands for).

The first few sessions will be taught by my favorite Russian immunologist - a bubble, slight woman who taught when I was at MERP. She has a way of teaching that minimizes powerpoints - in which she explains by drawing, for example, the various events in lymphocyte development - that just seems to make the information stick that much better. The micro and immuno taught on the island went all the smoother for me because of her introduction.

After that, the real Friday night fun began. Last week, our small group session centered around GI pathology - covering everything from eating disorders to diarrhea. One of the things we covered was the bingieng and purging behavior of bulimics (old hat since I was a psych major, but it was still like chatting with an old friend). And thus, yesterday, after class, I dragged Nicole back to Winn-Dixie for an precisely architectured binge, built of coffee ice-cream, magic shell, and those little pirouette cookie-sticks.

After 2 bowls of that decadent goodness while watching the season premier of the bachelorette (don't laugh - it's a fascinating study on dating rituals and media expectations in our society), I simultaneously polished off my biography of Genghis Khan and the last bottle of Killian's Irish Red.

This may, in fact, be the last time I get to relax - next week, I'm scheduled for 30 hours in a family practice clinic, on top of lectures, Spanish, and UMBR.