Going home for the weekend

The weather is still kind of sketchy and I hope that the trains will go as scheduled.
Last time I travelled the train home to Gothenburg was running 2 hours late and the one back towards Stockholm three days later went cancelled so I had to take the bus for 7 hours.
No fun at all.

This time, thou, I didn't book a X2000 ticket since I knew they had problems with that type of train. It was the right thing to do because today when I checked with the crew they said that all those trains have been cancelled for some time to come.
My Intercity ticket was still valid thou and the train will leave tomorrow at 7:07am just as planned, and if everything goes well I wont suffer any delays.

Coming home to my beloved west coast is always a relief and it's going to be kind of relaxing even if I have pretty much studies to go through.
Dinner with my family and some running around with the crazy cats at home is a treat for the soul and then I can get back to the studies with full potential and with a big smile on my face.

Looking forward to get home for an energy recharge...

Test, confusion and beer

The atmosphere in the class before the test was kinda tense. Everyone had some nerves even if we knew that the test only was a diagnostic test to check our current knowledge.
It was composed of 90 questions in Biology, Anatomy and Chemistry.

I had some apprehensions about the chemistry part and all the pH calculations since it turned out that I messed up a lot of the clacs just the day before.
My misgivings turned out to be just ridiculousness in the end.
We could all agree that the test was composed a bit badly and a lot of the questions were pretty much incomplete, lacking crucial info or stating really weird things that we didn't even recognize.

Even if it felt pretty awkward after the test right before the correction of it, it went rather good. I was amazed to find out that I failed the most answers on the biology part which is, in my opinion, the most basic one. I blame the fact that it was so long since I repeated that. I honestly put more effort in understanding the more recent thermodynamics than repeating the basics of biology, my bad and I lost some points there. After all a total score of 86% is nothing to cry over when the pass limit was set at 60%.



I feel pretty confident and think I can enter the second part of the course with a sigh of relief, concentrating on the next difficulties.

We went out after the class to take a beer and chat about everything and nothing, after discussing the recent accident in the subway (a boy jumped down onto the track to get his lost mobile back and got killed) we changed back to talking about studies and such.

Tomorrow is a new day and I offer a silent prayer for not another day filled with rather boring organic chemistry...

Study group the day before the first test

Tomorrow is the day of the first diagnostic test in the PreMed course.
We'll write tests of all the material we've learnt so far and I can honestly admit I'm a bit curious to finally get results of the many hours of studying.
Today me, Maja, Charlotte and Amanda got together to repeat chemistry and anatomy. It went pretty well and we straightened out some question marks.

Since I was sick this week I missed some rather crucial material called Thermodynamics. I worked it through thou, thanks to Maja and her splendid notes. I remembered some of it from the days back in high school but creds to Maja - our thermodynamic queen.

After we finished we went to Max and bought a couple of burgers to eat while going through our quiz cards. Repeating the old stuff is important and now I feel that I closed some gaps, both in my brain as well as in my stomach - those burgers were well spent money.



Now I'm off for some sleep and animé series watching,
just got hold of a new series called O7-Ghost.

One night of proper sleep

Ah, what a feeling. To wake up thoroughly rested is pretty awesome.
What's really strange is that my headache and fever was gone. From not being able to leave the bed to up jumping in less than 9 hours. I guess the sleep did what it's supposed to do.

Yesterday wasn't much of a productive day, other than me finishing the last season of Dexter.
Now I'm ready for some get together with my friends for some studies with Fireflies in my headphones.

Headache and fever

Just woke up with a major headache. It feels like my head is going to explode and paint my orange room red.
I have a rather high fever too, I'm hot and cold at the same time, just as Kate Perry once sang.
I guess that all I can do is to sleep it off - I'm not much for taking painkillers, they only inhibit the symptoms.

Hope I'll be able to sleep properly tonight...

Presentation of the GI

As I mentioned before we began with oral presentations of different systems.
Last week some guys from the course made it through their presentation just fine.
Big applause to Jackie that made a thoroughly splendid presentation about the cell and its organelles. She was just incredible and really raised the bar.

I was given a tough task: the GI-System or in other words the digestive system.
It's a rather complex system and I had to spend much time in order to learn every component by heart.
My big day was yesterday and I can honestly say that I did great. It was kind of awkward at first and my voice sort of trembled in the beginning. It took me about two minutes to cut off my nervousness.
Even if I failed a bit on Dr. Moshes questions he though that I gave a calm and professional impression and that I had great knowledge and pronunciation of the medical terms. That made me really happy and I proved to myself that I can handle these kinds of situations.

I have to apologise for the incoherent posts lately.

I'll get it together soon enough, that's for sure...

Freezing point decreasing

The weather is really going crazy. It's the coldest winter in many years and the traffic is left suffering.
The trains are not leaving when they're supposed to, some are cancelled and I had the worst day of waiting this weekend.
I went home last Friday and had a really good time at home even with the blizzard raging outside.

But when I was going back to Stockholm all the trains we're cancelled and I had to change my travelling schedule. I booked a bus instead and got back one day later.
I missed some pretty crucial lessons in electro chemistry but my friends will pass me the notes so I'll do just fine.

Instead I could spend the time travelling preparing for my presentation tomorrow.

I'll be fun...

Note to self

I have not been around for a while so I'll write a small summary.

The weeks pass so quickly, and I don't have much time to spare.
The course is going really great, I'm up to date and going along well with my new mates.
The last weeks we sort of formed a study group in order to help each other out, read, discuss and calculate together.It's a really good thing we got going there, meeting in the library almost every day at 1 am, going out for lunch before the class begin.
We've found this small and clean sushi bar that cook absolutely delicious yakiniku.
It's a traditional Japanese dish, kind of a bowl of rice with entrecôte and soy.
The sushi was good too but the yakiniku - totally splendid. I have to have one of those at least once every week - it's like a new addiction.

Moshe had to fly back to Israel and work, but he left us in good hands.
We were introduced to four new teachers during the second week; Claudia, Anna, Sandra and Moshes brother Dr. Uri Cohen.
The ladies mentioned above are on their third year of medical studies here in Stockholm and I really couldn't believe it when Claudia said that she was 22 years old. We almost lost it there for a second but to think of it, it's not impossible at all.
If I'd began my studies directly after high school I'd be there by now too.
It's not as if I regret it, it was never an option for me and I've been up to some great things meanwhile. The military, the ER practice, the work at the paper etc - totally worth the time.
Anyhow, one day we finished the class earlier than expected so Claudia organized a game in order to trigger our knowledge and the facts we learned so far.
After that lesson we all got sort of a wake up call because we really failed a lot of her questions.

Someone in our group got the idea of making small quiz cards and we played them all through the next day - what a great idea. It's both fun and it really help with the repetition of all the material.

I've got plenty more to tell but I've got to go...