Oh hey there! I’ve imported all of my posts from Skinny Sushi and Dr. Girl. Maintaining more than one blog was just getting to be too much. One day, a million years from now, when I have time and money, I’ll redesign the blog so that it’s got a separate page for each of the three blog topics, but for now everything is done by author, so the Skinny Sushi posts (health, weight loss, recipes) are all written by skinnysushi, and the Dr. Girl posts (pre-med, med school) are all written by Dr. Girl.

The summer is… insane, so I think a weekly post is about all I’m going to manage. So here’s the update on everything that’s going on this week, all of it dealing with how I must GROW STRONGER!

source: explorativeapproach.com

Thanks, Mr. Banderas. The 13th Warrior (an awesome movie) is a lovely analogy here. I’m the underdog. I’m unexpected. I’ve got to find a way to WIN!

Now on to the recap.

Health & Weight Loss:

The whole health and weight loss thing? Down the drain. Seriously. I barely have time to function, let alone cook, and I’ve let the stress of my schedule and workload turn into an excuse to eat whatever. I’ve had poptarts for breakfast every day this week. I’ve eaten candy bars as a morning snack. It’s not making me feel good, and it’s not helping with my energy levels. My stomach hurts a lot. I’m gaining weight. I’m really struggling, and I just don’t know how to get back to healthy eating. I don’t have the time or energy to cook. I can’t bring anything to school that required refrigeration or heating things up. I thought about doing the once a month cooking thing, but even that just seems like too much right now. I don’t know what to do.

So… I’ll try to GROW STRONGER by getting back to 5-10 minute workouts at 4am, adding in 5-10 minutes at 9pm, and hoping for the best. I’ll get back to packing my lunch (and, potentially more importantly, eating what I pack) and I’ll just get through the summer.

Personal Life:

Bwahahahahaha!!!  What personal life? I’m lucky my husband and kid still remember what I look like. I had social plans last weekend, and a few hours of social life planned for today, and I feel guilty about both. My workload is such that I honestly should be doing NOTHING except homework. All the same, I have to look out for my own sanity too, especially when I’m getting four hours of sleep most nights. So this weekend I’ll spend a few hours with a rediscovered friend and her awesome kid while talking about premed programs and her current med school applications. I’ll spend some time with my awesome husband, making sure he remembers how much we adore him on Fathers Day. I’ll blog. I’ll sleep. I’ll recover, and I’ll start all over again.

In Evi news, she continues to be ridiculously awesome. She’s smart and funny and happy. She loves to sing and dance, she (mostly) sleeps like a champ and will ask to go down for a nap or bedtime. She’s a teeny tomboy, loves daycare, and thinks pirates and robots and dinosaurs are the best. She’s learning to dress herself, has a scary vocabulary, is oddly well spoken and annunciates better than kids twice her age, continues to be as tall as most 3-4 year olds, loves spicy food, and is still maintaining only a passing, casual interest in the potty.

School:

Thank God for some seriously awesome classmates and lab partners. I have study partners, support from people going through the same class (and with similarly insufficient sleep patterns), and people who meet me for coffee and hugs. I love my fellow post-bac kids!

I’m actually sort of enjoying the lab section of chemistry. It’s fun to play with chemicals and watch reactions and try to understand the why of it all. It’s also fun to know that if you crush up Total cereal with water, you can pull iron filings out of it with a rare earth magnet (which, incidentally, is why the cereal contains 100% of your recommended daily intake of iron for the day, but you don’t actually process the vast majority of it, thus making it sort of worthless in terms of iron).

The lecture section is harder, of course. The workload for both is pretty insane. I get up at 4am. We leave the house at 5:15 and drive to the bus stop. I get on the bus between 5:45 and 6am, and I spend the time reading, doing worksheets, doing homework problems, and prepping for labs. I get off the bus at 7:30 and walk to the shuttle. I get to school at 7:45 and study/work until class starts at 8:15. I take notes during lecture and I also record the lectures, which I listen to on the bus on the way home. I do all of the required homework on time. I get 8/10 or better on the quizzes. I get 90% or better on the labs. I work on the bus on the way home, from 3:45 to 5:15. We drive home and get here at 6pm, when I get back to work in a halfway, distracted way while trying to simultaneously hang out with the kidlet while Aaron makes dinner. We eat together, and then I put Evi to bed with a story and a song. It’s the best part of my day.

I head to bed at 8:30, where I read and study and work until 11pm. My busy, stressed out brain means I toss and turn until midnight. I do it all over again every day and night until Thursday night, when I finally get some more sleep.

Long story short slightly less long? I’m working my a** off. I’m doing everything I could possibly be doing. And?

I got a C on the first exam. By med school standards? That grade SUCKS. I freaked out. I got depressed. I took control. I met with my professor…

…and there I learned that I am the ONLY student in the class who has never taken chemistry before. (Sidenote: why would you take it twice???) She also told me, as kindly as this could be said, that statistically speaking I’m destined to fail the course. It’s no reflection on my intelligence, my abilities, or my work. In fact, she specifically said that more work is not the answer. It’s simply fact, and her fifteen years experience teaching, that tell her that a grade that “poor” and a student with no prior experience WILL result in continuously dropping grades. She said I should just plan to retake the course a second time.

That had me reeling pretty badly. I freaking out. I got depressed. I seriously questioned my med school path. I briefly considered that I just might not be smart enough to do this. And then I talked to my lab partners.

God I love them. The pair that share our lab bench are some of the smartest, sweetest (and incidentally most gorgeous) girls I’ve met, and they were both quick to offer tons of support and smiles. They both said I’d be fine, that I’d get through. But the biggest help? Totally came from a sea turtle.

source: denverlibrary.org

Meet my lab partner, Crush the sea turtle. Oh wait… that’s not really his name. But he is a Los Angeles based surfer who came straight to the program from his time off to surf in Hawaii. When he talks, I pretty much hear Crush, which makes me smile, so thus he is dubbed Crush for blog purposes.

Anyway, Crush had this advice:

“Okay, you have three choices. You can go home, have some beers, and give up. You can go back to doing what you were doing before.”

In case you’re wondering, this sentence made me want to stab my eyes out. The thought of giving up offends my personal streak of extreme stubborn, and the though of going back to office work made me want to curl up and cry. So I really wanted to know what my other choices were.

“Your second choice is to drop this class but keep up in the program.”

Okay, this is a better choice, but still offends my stubborn streak. Besides, the class is already paid for, and dropping it now would mean a less than 50% refund. So what’s my third choice?

“Your third choice is to say F.U. and prove her wrong!”

You know what, Crush? You have an excellent, oddly surf-adjacent point. So I need to GROW STRONGER! I got a tutor. This weekend, I’m headed out to find some chemistry flashcards the tutor suggested. I’m spending the weekend buckling down (minus some family time) and getting a ton of work done. I’m going to keep trying, keep fighting, and finish the course. And hopefully, I’ll prove those damn statistics wrong.