Countdown: 3 days

When you've gone over your notes for the third time and still discovering things that are new to you, it's not very encouraging when exams are three days away. However, it's just so damn intriguing when you know you've looked at the same powerpoint slides time and time again and then you see something that you had never seen before and it turns out to be so interesting! Behold:

This was from a lecture on infectious diseases of the central nervous system and refers to that very curious, yet scary, yet very rare disease called Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD). As you may know, a new variant version of it has arisen (vCJD) and it is believed to have come from human consumption of beef from cows afflicted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. According to the lovely graph above, you are more likely to get vCJD then win the lottery in Britain (Ha! Goes to show buying lottery tickets is a waste of money AND smoking is very very bad for you!) I wonder if this fact will be the subject of a multiple choice question... since all profs love to ask students the most obscure things that has no bearing on our competence or abilities and really has nothing to do with anything.

By the way, I'm highly ashamed that I have no reference whatsoever to back the stats in the graph up (oh what a bad scientist/critical appraiser/clinical epidemiologist am I), but like I said I pulled it off one of our course lectures.

Anyways, back to CJD. I find this disease fascinating because it blows the central dogma of molecular biology out of the water. This dogma says that the flow of genetic information is from DNA to RNA to protein. The discovery of retroviruses shows that this can be reversed (RNA to DNA) but even more profound is that in CJD genetic information can be passed on through protein conformation alone (via prions, from protein to protein). I just think that is so cool and really shakes things up in the scientific world! Anyways, enough of this scientific garble, I did a whole presentation on prions in undergrad and I don't need to rehash the whole thing now. Seriously though, I think that if I hadn't been accepted to medical school I'd want to be doing my masters in biology alongside Stanley Prusiner, nobel laureate, discoverer of prions, and coolest man alive.

Anyways I should be reviewing more prevalent things like strokes, epilepsy and psychiatric conditions now. It's just when one has been studying 5 hours straight everyday it tends to nerdify you. For instance, when a bunch of us went out for sushi today the only topic of conversation seemed to be if there was a difference between scintillating scotomas or fortification scotomas. Also, you tend to replace everyday words with really nerdy ones, like instead of crossing the street, you decussate it. Likewise, when you have no time to buy groceries and you have no food in the fridge and thus must eat out all the time, one suffers from "wallet stenosis", a.k.a. when your wallet is stuck in your purse because it subconsciously does not want to be emptied.

1 more hour to Grey's anatomy (a.k.a 90210 in a hospital). Woohoo!

p.s. Scintillating scotomas can precede the onset of a migraine and can evolve into fortification phenomena.

Today's newly discovered medical diagnosis: I don't think you'll find this disease in any medical book yet (maybe I should "discover" it!) and it's called squirrels-are-freaking-scary-and-they-freak-the-crap-out-of-me-syndrome. In the summer one of them squirrels got into my basement and made a big ruckus and scared the crap out of me and thankfully it ran out the side door because it was smart enough to. Also, squirrels like to crawl through holes in roofs and run around and scare the crap out of people. One time, when I was sleeping, the squirrel was fighting some other animal in the roof, tossing each other around and making tons of noise. Then all of a sudden it was shrieking in pain and started whimpering and I was so scared and it really and truly traumatized me. Then, when I was walking to school about two weeks ago, I crouched down to tie my shoe laces and when I looked up, not even half a meter away from me was a GIANT, FAT, DEAD squirrel. It must have gotten electrocuted on the power lines and just fell, 'cuz it didn't look like roadkill. If all these stories are not scary enough, this other time I was taking a peaceful walk through campus when all of a sudden a squirrel just JUMPED out of a garbage can right beside me. That's just freaky and now you know all about squirrels-are-freaking-scary-and-they-freak-the-crap-out-of-me-syndrome.

These very scary and very true stories are dedicated to my little sister Rose.