Wow, I’ve been wanting to get that off my chest for a while. Anyway, what was I saying? Right, what’s annoying about The Sixth Sense. It’s not Toni Collette’s atrocious fingernails, which by the way are awful and sometimes late at night I can still hear the clicking. No, it’s the title. Because as disturbing as it is that Haley Joel Osment can see dead people, the sense that he’s actually using is just one of the five. It’s vision. He sees Dead People. And as I have recently, painstakingly learned in our newest (and last of the year!) class, Mind, Brain and Behavior, all creepy Cole is doing is projecting a super-exclusive stimulus onto his retina, and from there through several very complicated and hard-to-memorize pathways to his cerebral cortex.

So let’s all agree to call this movie something slightly more accurate. Like, We Can’t See What He Can! or, An Extremely Scary Use of One of the Five Senses. Deal?

Rebecca: I just want to go hide in a ball.

Me: (Sob).

Someone save us?

Home is where your textbooks are.

8 a.m. I wake up, and silently curse my circadian rhythm for waking me up at 8, even on the weekend. Why, pineal gland, why?

8:04 a.m. For some reason I am still staring at my alarm clock. Maybe I’m hoping it will suddenly read 10:30, so that I can feel like a normal person (read: college student. I’m still in denial about having graduated. Go Quakers).

9:30 a.m. Still in bed, having watched 2 episodes of Buffy. I toy with the idea of going to the gym. “I can do flashcards on the elliptical!” I think, knowing full well that I’ll just end up watching the Kardashians for 25 minutes, hating myself a little more every time Kourtney says something stupid.

11:30 a.m. I get back from the gym. Obviously, I watched Top Model, hating myself a little more every time Tyra said something stupid.

12:30 p.m. Grilled cheese with buffalo wing sauce = taste bud (fungiform? foliate? circumvalate?) heaven. Which reminds me, I need to look at my histology slides. Pretty sure there’s one of a tongue in there somewhere.

1:00 p.m. I begrudgingly make my way to the library with Rebecca (hi Rebecca!), spread out my abundance of crap all over a table, and do the internet dance. Step 1: I connect to the internet and see who’s on gchat. Step 2: In a moment of will power, I disconnect from the internet. Step 3: Will power be damned. I connect to the internet. And lather, rinse, repeat.

1:15 p.m. Gawker.

1:20 p.m. Daily Intel.

1:25 p.m. Miriam’s blog, Rivky’s blog, Susie’s blog, Adi’s blog. Why are all my friends so prolific? It’s seriously hampering my productivity. Stop it, you guys. I mean it.

1:30 p.m. Fun with font! I go here, here, and here. Also, having recently discovered the strikethrough feature on gchat, I try to wittily strike things through.

1:45 p.m. Crossword puzzle.

1:50 p.m. (yes, I’m that good) I finally start to work. I pull out three textbooks, a notebook, and a stack of index cards. I sigh deeply.

2:15 p.m. I have no idea what I’ve been reading for the past 25 minutes. Something about the reproductive system. Med school has actually succeeded in making talking about sex boring. Good job, med school!

4:00 p.m. The eternal question of what constitutes good study music has been plaguing me for the last hour. Do I want my mellow mix or my head-banging mix? Or do I want to steal an electro-techno-alterna-mix from Alli?

5:00 p.m. I’ve settled on head-banging. Which means that I’ve been literally head banging to the Ramones in the library for the last hour. I start getting weird looks from the future psychiatrists of America.

7:00 p.m. Something about the enteric nervous system? Corpuscle is an ugly word.

8:30 p.m. Oh man do I wish I was writing a paper right now. Those were the days.

11:00 p.m. The library closes, because it’s not like go to a school where people would ever need to study late. I relocate to the soul-sucking study lounge in MSB.

12:30 a.m. I have now consumed so many chocolate bars/cans of soda/cups of coffee/bags of Doritos that I have literally (but actually figuratively) started turning into a vending machine. I am in desperate need of expending the extra energy that I’ve gotten from the combination of sugar and caffeine, so I run barefoot down the halls of MSB. It’s not gross at all, I swear. Except that it is. Whoops.

2:30 a.m. I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t sitting in this study lounge. Is this going to be forever???

3:00 a.m. The English language has stopped making sense. After mindlessly repeating it under my breath 20 times, I am completely convinced that “lungs” cannot be a real word. It’s probably time to pack up.

3:15 am. I trudge home and collapse exhausted into bed. I briefly consider watching House, but the idea of watching a show in which someone says the word pheochromocytoma makes me physically ill. (Well if my main symptom is nausea…hmmmm, I wonder what disease I have? No. Stop it.) Instead, I turn Buffy back on, and promptly forget everything I’ve learned today.

…in this movie.

Please don’t make me elaborate.

P.S. Hi, Mom and Dad! Thanks for reading.

So, thanks to my dad for being ever-so-helpful on the morale front!

Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s kidding. Right?

1. They allow Julie and I to relive our glory days (sigh).

2. I get to see movies before they come out, which is probably the thing I miss most about college.

So on Monday, Julie took me to see Alice in Wonderland, which was an absolutely wonderful movie that I’m still thinking about, three days later. Quick review (old habits die hard): Johnny Depp turns the Mad Hatter, one of Disney’s most off-putting characters, into a heartbreaking figure. Depp’s Hatter knows he is going mad, and is desperately clinging to the last shreds of his sanity. As a result, Tim Burton’s Wonderland is so much more than a place where “everything is nonsense”, but a place where people who are lost can go to try and find themselves again.

Mad as a hatter, because there was all that mercury in the hat making machines

But that’s not the point of this post. While I was watching Alice in Wonderland, I started thinking that medical school is really a lot like Wonderland. Though this sounds like comparing a raven to a writing desk (get it? It’s a reference!), I’ve got a list (gosh I love lists) that will totally prove my point.

1. Time moves differently here. Alice falls down the rabbit hole and like nine days go by, but when she gets back, it’s only a few minutes later. In med school, time goes by and we’re so engrossed in studying that we don’t even notice. “Where have you been?” say our non-med-school friends, “we haven’t seen you in a month!” “Huh,” we say, scratching our heads, “Sure it wasn’t a week?”

2. Sometimes our course directors seem like the red queen. Like when they…uh….make us learn stuff. And if we fail a test, it’s totally off with our heads.

3. Medschoolese often sounds like the crazy language Lewis Carroll made up. It’s eerie: “jabberwocky” and “jaundice” might as well be the same word. (And I’m sure if I had more time to think about it I could come up with a better example. See point #1.)

4. We’ve got tons of second years giving us contradictory advice about how to approach first year. Tweedle dee and Tweedle dum, anyone?

5. We’ll eat anything, as long as it’s free.

6. We’ll definitely drink anything, as long as it’s free.

7. We’re not hardly who we’re going to be yet. We’re almost Alice. In a few years (or is it weeks? Who can tell? Again, see point #1), we’ll be Alice.

8. All we need to do to get home is click our heels three times and….oh, wait.

9. Sometimes it seems like we’re all mad here. But all the best people are.

Me: Oh em gee, me too! They’re so cute, and they look like they’d be really fun to put your hands in and squish!

Rebecca: Exactly!

Medical school does strange things to your brain. It’s like living in a David Lynch movie.

1. It’s super important for the whole staying-alive thing.

2. This guy is a big fan of it. Also this guy.

While I’m sure that we went into more detail than that, I tragically did not absorb any of it. It’s my professor’s fault, really. He used the phrase “blood smear,” and immediately I was off into a Dexter daydream (see also: CSI, Law and Order SVU. Those crime-fighting types just love a good blood smear).

Yep, I think we can confirm the presence of erythrocytes. Cuz it's all red and stuff.

Granted, Dexter is a really creepy show to daydream about, but I’ve realized that Michael C. Hall actually has a lot to teach us med students. For one thing, he’s very precise in his…er…let’s call it cleanup. It’s like a mini anatomy class. “Ah,” says our wide-eyed med student viewer, “he’s now disconnecting that guy’s femur from his patella!” (I think that’s right…it’s been a while, and I have a limited amount of room in my brain for this stuff). For another thing, he takes a blood sample from every one of his victims. When season 5 kicks up again in way too freaking long from now, I’m going to know exactly what types of cells are on the slides he so stupidly keeps as souvenirs. (I mean really, hasn’t he seen a movie, like, ever? It’s the souvenirs that always get serial killers caught. Silly Dexter.) And if my past history with random trivia that I happen to know is any indication, whoever I watch with is going to find out too. And I’m sure they’ll appreciate it!

So sure, having my mind wander to the best show on televisions might not have been the most productive use of my time, especially since I woke up at the crack of dawn (otherwise known as 8 am) to go to class this morning. But it clearly wasn’t a total waste. Too bad we’re not still taking genetics. Dude’s married to his sister, so that would have been a gold mine.

Just imagine him with a stethoscope. HOT.

As I sit and study endlessly for my MGM shelf (medschoolese to English translation: shelf=final) I can’t help but wish that I was becoming a doctor in Don Draper’s time.  I’m fudging the chronology on this a bit—Mad Men takes place in the sixties, and I really want it to be 1952–but hey, it’s my blog, and I want to live in a world where women wear pants. The root of my sudden retro desire is simple: way back when, they didn’t know anything about any of this biochemistry business. So instead of trying to memorize every single detail of teeny tiny particle metabolism, I would be…not doing that. I would, perhaps, be doing this.

What did they learn in med school 50 years ago? I mean, really, science didn’t know anything about anything. Every single thing we’ve learned in this course was discovered after 1953. How could it possibly have taken four years, when they only had about a day’s worth of material to cover? I can only imagine that if Don Draper went to med school, it would go something like this:

Day 1

Med school professor: Welcome to medical school! Here’s your leather bag, your jar of leeches, and some penicillin. We don’t really know why it works, but hey, it works!

Don Draper: I am so mysterious. My hair looks great today.

Female secretary: (Sigh.)

Day 2

Med school professor: Today we are going to learn about how to tie a tourniquet, and then you’ll all be doctors! Congratulations, you made it through!

Don Draper: That was hard. It’s lucky I have such great hair.

Female secretary: (Swoon.)

I guess there are some things that make it worth living in this century. But right now I’d trade them all to be able to play in the snow.

I want to go to there.

In the last few weeks, I’ve started playing a new game in class. It’s called “Someone on House Had That,” and it has basically taken over my life. In MGM (Molecular and Genetic Medicine, a.k.a. tons of biochemical pathways we won’t actually need to know when we’re practicing physicians), we learn about diseases related to deficiencies of the various enzymes whose impossibly long names we need to cram into our heads. And, so far, around 83% of the diseases that we’ve covered have been the final diagnosis on an episode of House. When that happens, I lean over to Rebecca and say “Someone on House had that!” And that’s the game.

When I started this blog, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to write about House. It was way too obvious. But, then again, I also promised myself that I would post every week, and we all know how well that worked out (hint: not very well at all. Med school is busy). So I’ve decided to break my promise and talk about how I’m pretty sure the professors who made up the MGM syllabus are House junkies.

My main (er, OK, only, but I think it’s a good one) piece of evidence comes from the seeming randomness of our syllabus. I mean, seriously, what was a lecture on heme synthesis doing in a series of lectures on amino acid metabolism? Yeah, sure, heme’s a protein, but so’s….ummm…..y’know, other proteins. And you don’t see lectures on those in the middle of amino acid metabolism! Something else must be afoot.

My theory is that the MGM profs just wanted an excuse to mention Acute Intermittent Porphyria–which, if you recall (and I’m sure you don’t, because why would you) is what Stacy’s husband had on the season 1 finale of House. “Acute Intermittent Porphyria,” said Dr. Wagner. “Someone on House had that!” said I. And there was really no reason for us to learn about reactive oxygen species, other than as an excuse for them to teach us about Chronic Granulomatous Disease (season 3, episode 8) and ALS (season 1 episode 9). “Chronic Granulomatous Disease,” said Dr. Lea. “Someone on House had that!” said I.

This week we learned about vitamins, purely so that we could be told that pellagra, the final diagnosis in season 2 episode 22, results from a niacin (vitamin B3) deficiency. “Oh!” I said. “Somone on House had that! She killed her baby because she went crazy.” At which point Rebecca ignored me completely. (Hey, I didn’t say it was a fun game for everyone.) Next thing you know, we’re learning that pellagra causes dementia (along with death—a minor side effect). “Ha!” I said. “I knew it made you crazy!” Could this possibly be a coincidence? I think not.

Of course, there is the possibility that since we’re in med school, we’re learning about lots of diseases. But I prefer to think that our professors are as big pop culture addicts as I am, and that they TiVo House reruns (which they watch when they finish teaching us pathways full of words that sounds really freaking similar to each other but are actually–surprise!–slightly different. I mean seriously, phosphoprotein phosphatase? WTF is that?) The only question that remains is—are they Huddy fans?