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Today was my oldest daughter’s eleventh birthday. I was ready to leave the house for the gym by 6:00 AM but I wanted to give Morgan her birthday gift, so I picked her up out of bed and moved her to the couch. She groggily opened her new Game Boy and Frogger game and happily dozed back off as I left home in the dark. One thing that I got into in the summer is audio books on my MP3 player. I am listening to Michael Connelly’s City of Bones right now and listening to it helps me keep my mind off the drudgery of the workout. I was in my seat by 7:45 for my first taste of Intro to Clinical Medicine. This class is really going to be a lot of fun. We will be assigned an MD preceptor in the hospital and have to do histories and physicals under their watch this year. We are required to have an ophthalmoscope, otoscope, stethoscope, and blood pressure cuff. I will be cruising eBay this weekend looking to pick up some on the cheap.

Next came Biostatistics. Being a math guy, I am expecting to jam in this course. I also had my first note-taking job of the year. I only charged the guy half-price, because all of the lecture was introductory and didn’t require much work. The main hassle will be getting the copies made and distributed. We all have a mailbox and the note-taker is responsible for getting copies made at a nearby copy shop and distributing them to each students box.

Two hours of pharmacology followed that. The first lecturer is a gray-haired bearded man with a real peculiar British sounding accent. I’ve got to ask him where exactly he is from. I had kind of dreaded Pharm as I envisioned it being just memorization of enormous lsit of drugs and their pathways. I am sure that is to come, but we are opening with pharmacodynamics – the actions of drugs on the body. There were lots of graphs and log scales, and equations so I felt better.

The two afternoon hours were microbiology. This is the course that has taken off the quickest. Already in two days we have had five hours of lecture material. The guy is just careening on out of control. I will definitely be studying it hard this weekend. Our first exam of the year is in micro and will be on September 9. After that, we have an exam on almost every Monday morning for the rest of the year.

I got home at 3:30 and just chilled for a while. The girls had a scrimmage soccer game at 5:30, so the whole family went, and I worked on the Biostat notes on my laptop. The stifling heat we have been having had broken, at least for one evening. The night then brought pizza and the first college football game of the year. I guess, I’ll hit the books tomorrow!