Sick...again

Spartacus: Blood and Sand...my main diversion from studying

So to prove the old belief that stress-->lowers immunity-->leads to illness...I am sick once again. Except my battle is not with a virus or bacterial infection it is once again with my self..ie. Allergies. I am now on a heavy dose of prednisone for the next 10 days, starting with 6 pills a day for the next 4 days and then tapering down the dosages. As a result I not only feel fatigued, have a headache I also have arthritic pain in my knee joints. I am officially an 80 year old woman. God, I hate medical school sometimes. It is nice to be able to go to bed at 10 pm every night though, I haven't had this sleep schedule since I was like 9 years old.
In other news, if I do make it through the next 2 weeks of hell I will have survived my first semester of medical school in the 3rd world! Yippee!
If not, well that thought haunts the back of my mind every day. In fact I have heart palpitations just thinking about the consequences. Scary!
My goal is and will be for the next 12 months to pass and earn my freedom back to the U.S.! It's a crazy goal to have, but it's the price you pay for going to school in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean.
My goal for this weekend is to catch up on the massive amounts of lecture materials that I couldn't get during my bout of illness/allergic attack. So far I have a lot of physio to do...bleh. And even more anatomy..double bleh.
These are two of my favorite subjects but the profs who taught them for the past few weeks were awful. Especially the anatomy prof. I'm convinced they hire the worst profs for this subject..which is lame considering this is the first time most of us have studied gross anatomy.
We had our last dissection on Monday of the semester! Hooray! But I have a mocktical (mock anatomy practical) tomorrow, yes, on a Saturday at 11am to prepare me for the real thing on Tuesday.
The anat practical is supposed to be cumulative (everything from shoulders to toes, literally) but luckily that's not feasible as it would take 2 days to get through with our class size.
So instead we "only" have to know everything from the waist down + heart +pleura + lungs (so all thorax). Fun times. I did get to perform the internal heart dissection which was wicked cool! Hearts are amazing and squishy too! Love it. Lungs a pretty gross though, especially because our cadaver was a smoker in life and his lungs are very large and very black. Blech.

Wish me luck on the end of this part of my journey! Hopefully I will be healthy before my exams come around! Ta ta for now!

More later...

P.