Blogging from class

Hello, faithful reader. I come to you today from room 1102 in the Education 2 North building at the Anschutz Medical Campus. We (well, some of us) are presently listening to a presentation about the Colorado Board of Pharmacy and licensure requirements. This is important for us to know, yes, but that doesn't make it interesting. All week has been like that. Monday: Introduction to the library, learning styles, and a personality inventory. (Free breakfast and lunch, though!) Tuesday: professionalism, pharmacy care, finding your strengths, and teamwork (the "corporate retreat" day), as well as intro to campus services. Wednesday: curriculum-related, extracurriculars fair, and a really good nap (not really). Thursday: clickers, ethics, career pathways, and medical terminology. Friday (today): Half day! I think I'ma take a nap later. Probably not, but it'd be nice.

This week begins the semester-long, non-stop sleep deprivation experiment. That's not 100% true; I get to sleep in on Saturdays and can probably go to bed early on the days I don't work, but I don't have a day off from both work and school until Thanksgiving. I'll let you sit on that for a second. Thanksgiving is 97 days from today, and my last day off was last Thursday (the 13th). So that's 105 days without a break. And I work the day after Thanksgiving, so the break is one day. I feel a little like Superman. I hope I get a prize at the end (other than the Pharm.D.).

So Tuesday is the first class that counts. This week is a course, and I have to pass it to continue into the Pharm.D. program, but it's not really pharmacy-related. 8 a.m. on Tuesday is the first lecture of Pharmacy Law. That should be fun after working all night. If I had to pick one potential problem for this semester it's that combination of working 6-2 Monday night and going to Law Tuesday morning. So if you're awake late Monday night or early Tuesday morning, think of me. And give me a call maybe. I won't be sleeping.

The pharmacy career paths exercise was sort of interesting. It asks you 48 questions like "How important is vacation and time off?" on a scale of 1 to 10, then tells you which areas of pharmacy are the best fit for you. Mine came back pretty high for compounding and clinical pharmacy, which interest me. Compounding is preparation of custom doses, medications with short half-lives, and special dosing methods like lollipops and creams. Doesn't that sound fun? Clinical pharmacy is a specialty field where you generally deal with patients in a hospital and with a specific disease, type of disease, or patient population (such as pediatrics or geriatrics). If I had to pick today, I would specialize in psychiatric pharmaceuticals or in addictions.

I'm not giving up just yet, but it looks like the Cardinals are going to run away with the NL Central and the Giants and Rockies will be the only players in the Wild Card race. If true, it means no playoffs for my precious Cubs. That's OK; they'd have lost in the first round anyway. The Cubs need to work on developing for the future right now; I think this season pointed out how thin they are beyond their top talents. I haven't looked at the free agent crop, but they do have money to spend, so that's one way to get better in a hurry. Time now to focus my fan energy on those lovable Colorado Rockies. A four-game series with the Giants begins tonight, and the Rox find themselves just three and a half games back in their division. A good homestand could put them in place not only for the Wild Card but for the outright division win, something they've never done in their fifteen seasons spent as also-rans (and one as National League champions).

I'm like 98% certain that the logo I used for my picture here is not a copyright infringement. I don't want to step on anybody's intellectual property toes here, so if any of my pictures belong to you and you don't want me using them, just let me know. I'll take them down immediately.

That's all on my end. Thanks for reading, and come back soon.

It begins!

For the first time since I started this pharmacy school blog, I actually have some pharmacy school to blog about! Today was orientation. Technically it wasn't class, but it was a lot closer than I have been in the past year. I took Biochemistry last fall, and that's the only course I've taken in the past academic year. Getting back into school might be a little rough on me. Luckily, next week's classes are pretty soft material. It's things like how to use the library, the Kiersey personality test, and basic medical terminology. That ought to get me up to speed pretty well.

It was nice to put a bunch of faces to some names. I'd communicated with a number of my classmates through facebook and a Google group that I set up for our class, but before today I had only met five of them, and four of those interviewed with me. Today was the first time all 161 of us P1s-to-be were on campus at the same time. I think officially we're not P1s until the white coat ceremony next Monday, but I am a pharmacy student at the UC-Denver Anschutz Medical Campus (see picture for evidence).

Xander is walking all over the place now, and starting to talk. We've been teaching him baby sign language, and he's picked up a few signs, but last night he said his first meaningful, communicative word - "up." He's said some other things, like "cat," "da" (that either means "Dad" or "that" - I'm not sure yet), and something close to "dog," but "up" is definitely the best communication he's exhibited so far. He really means that he wants up when he says it, which is great. He's also a lot more mobile than ever. The other day he was chasing the cat around the house with a fly swatter and giggling. The cat hates him, I think, but he loves to go after it.

Someone pointed out after my last point that spiders are meat. I knew this, actually. My complaint was that he won't eat the clean, safe, cooked meat that we give him, although this isn't as true any more. I guess the live spider experience broadened his horizons. He's now interested in some meats, particularly at breakfast. We took him to Denny's last week and he dug in to some bacon like it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. I have to admit bacon is pretty good.

What encouraged me about the spider comment on my last post was that I actually have at least one reader! So, faithful reader, thank you. I hope you keep coming back.