Who cares?

I'm drunk and it's normal for a premed student who just took the MCAT. Yes, I am checked-in at the Treasure Island at Las Vegas and I am abusing the unnecessary brain cells utilized during my MCAT review, So yeah. F yeah.

MCAT day tomorrow...I am counting exactly 8 hours 45 minutes before I click "start" and take the dreaded exam.

Am I prepared? Yeah. I am aware that although I couldn't stash every bit of information and every bit of test tactic in my limited brain, I can still score great on this exam. Rational optimism is key at this point. I've spent the entire summer preparing for this exam and I have absolutely no plans on retaking it.

So for now...chill.

Tomorrow...KILL.


rest assured more sensible blogs detached from inner emotional predicaments will be posted in the future, after tackling the hurdle that is the MCAT and after settling the ever-apparent heart-mind discourse on that person that has definitely struck me hard in so many ways

Lesson From A Kid

A 32 y/o lady was brought in to our ER via advanced life support ambulance. She had a blood glucose level of 51. It was a really crazy night- all our nurses were busy and the priority at the moment was not this patient. I helped the medics unload her into the gurney and I started taking her vitals and started the history for the nurses. She was not that sick sick but boy, she really was in bad shape. 203/105. 102bpm. 96% sat. 96F. She was diaphoretic and very cool to touch. I had everything ready when the nurse came in and I then stepped out to get her warm blankets.

"Who called the ambulance?" I thought to myself. Obviously there might be family members around. Such a dumb question to myself. Why that question popped up- I had no clue.

"Hey Jasmine thank you for calling the ambulance, okay?" The patient uttered with a heavily-detectable hispanic accent. Who is Jasmine?

I turned to her bedside. Jasmine is her 10-year-old daughter.

Tonight, my greatest mentor and teacher wasn't Dr. Shapiro, MD, nor the ER Nurses, nor my MCAT textbook and flashcards. It was a ten-year-old girl. She taught me presence of mind- the ability to act deliberately and correctly given the circumstance, however pressing it may be. How amazing is it that a child like her can be taken for granted and blatantly overlooked, yet the same child could teach you a very important lesson that you'd only expect from seasoned adults.

"Good job!" I told her. She had the biggest smile I've ever seen in such a long time. And I know that it stems beyond my adulation to her. It saved her mom...The only one she's got.

Blog Hiatus

Looooooooooooong time!

Finals are over, but the actual work has just begun. So I started studying for my MCAT and it's been frustrating. The material is okay, obviously, but what is killing me is the verbal section...I just couldn't make the connections between the passage and the questions...the process of elimination is very helpful, but I can't solely rely on that.

Ugh.

At this point, I'm really burnt out. Not just from MCAT stuff, but also from the recent semester. Everything's taxing heavily on me, at the most inappropriate of times.

5.0 quake

After getting saturated with a crapload of diuretics while studying, I felt the natural urge to empty my bladder. I went to the Student Union restrooms and did my thing. While I was keeping my kidney, ureter, bladder, and urethra happy, I felt the room shaking...

Hmmm...the walls look like they're moving

And why is this going on for forever?

Holy cow! An earthquake!

I stayed calm and finished my physiological response. Damn. It's still shaking.

I let the shaking settle, and I ran outside the restroom. Everyone was up from their tables and were uttering WTFs.

Scary.

dive into hell week

Coffee
Red bull
Smart water
textbooks
whiteboard
markers
laptop
practice tests

library basement or student union

get to campus by 7:45am. get off class by5. study til 2am every damn day. all week.

welcome to hell week

Annoying Sorority Girls

I was walking towards the Horn Center (place on campus where you print your stuff if you're too far from the library) when these two weird-looking girls came up to me. Looks like they were part of a sorority and they were handing out pamphlets for an event. They smiled and popped the most random question I've ever got:

"Are you friendly and outgoing?"

Stunned, I thought to myself "what the hell kind of question is that?". I opened my mouth and these were the by-products of that thought percolating in my head:

"uh, NO."

Equally stunned with what I said, I walked away like nothing happened. I think the last words I found audible from them were "asshole" and "jerk"...

I laughed.

The Pen Transplant

"Dr. Wetzel, would you be interested in speaking at one of our club meetings this fall semester?"

"Huh? Like what do you mean?"

"Oh it's because you came from a Cal State too and here you are, an ER doctor...you'd be a great source of motivation for us students"

"Uhm...haha"

"Well you can violently decline doc, but..."

She laughed and left her seat to go check on one of her patients...

Although she seemed reluctant to the idea, I knew that she wanted to do it. Earlier during the shift, she agreed to come help out with the health fairs and eventually, the free clinic that me and my buddies were planning and working on launching this fall semester. So why wouldn't she come speak to one of our meetings?

A couple hours and a gazillion ER scutwork later, she called me.

"I have a mission for you, Reinier!"

"Yes ma'am!"

She took out a retractable green ballpoint pen from her pocket. It was one of those freebie pens from annoying medreps.

"You see, I love this pen, but it ran out of ink. I want to use it again. Do a pen transplant! If you do, I'll come to your meeting!"

I took the pen and smiled. What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Is this a joke?

The ER wasn't that busy so I had the chance to employ my analytic skills, manual dexterity, and fresh knowledge of biochemistry, biology, calculus, physics, chinese swordsmanship and astrogardening to this critical case. This is ballpoint pen surgery. I am pioneering the pen transplant. The first of its kind in the world. No it wasn't being done at Harvard, Stanford, or Hopkins. It was here at Anaheim. And the primary surgeon was me. I call the shots. The fate of Dr. Wetzel's charting delight, the premed club meeting, and the pen relied on me. I was the- what the hell?

I analyzed the pen. Is this fine point or medium point? Hmmm...oh it has a spring mechanism. Oh cool. So I stole a bic pen and another freebie pen similar to hers.

Cool. I took the other freebie pen since it shared the same spring mechanism and parts. The bic pen was extraneous to the operation- discarding it was imminent and inevitable. As heartbreaking as it is, I had to let it go. It served no purpose. I took the functional clone, dismembered it, took out the vital ink-containing component of it which I have labeled "spine" plus the "cervical support" that employed Hooke's law (spring, idiot! F=kx^2), cut it down to size, and "transplanted" it to Dr. Wetzel's pen.

The great pen surgeon has delivered. Another first. Another breakthrough operation. It was a complete success!!!

"Here you go doc!'

"Hmmm...let's see (she scribbles TCA on my biochem pathways cheatsheet)...oh it worked!"

"So you're coming to our meeting this coming semester?"

"Yeah!"

"Suh-weeeeeeeeeet!!!"

reinier's screw moments 1

Me and two buddies just decided to screw studying that night, relax, and have fun. All in the interest of "prepping' ourselves up for the last stretch in school. Yeah, we won't have any fun time for three weeks since finals week is fast approaching. Plus we're all taking the MCAT on the same day a couple months after. So this is the only time to chill.

As with most male college students, beer was the standard. Given that we were all tired after a 12-hour school day (that's actually less than the usual) plus we had more studying to do and more assignments to worry about, we weren't in our fun mode. This yields horrible consequences, especially when it comes to pickup lines and creating conversations...

J doesn't drink a lot. So he had just a glass of beer and A LOT of water. He wanted one more glass...of water. He called the server, Mary.

"Hey can I get a glass of your delicious water?"

Mary gave her a WTF look and laughed.

"Thanks you're the best!" J followed up.

The screwup highlight:

This girl had two rings. I got curious. So I asked her what were those rings for (like, what the fuck are you doing in a bar with a wedding/engagement ring?)...she said "Oh this is from my mom and this is from my brother, blah blah blah"...

"Oh cool. I cut rings in the emergency room."

"Oh okay"

As soon as she left, it all sank in. My buddies laughed their asses off and I just realized-

"What the fuck did I just say?"

Damn. Might as well told her that I can describe the TCA cycle to her in detail. Or maybe offered her my leftover fried rice that was sitting in my car. Crap.

To this day, that line has left an indelible stigma. My buddies couldn't wait for that day when we're all in medical school doing our rotations and one of them will effin call me just to tell me that they had cut a ring in the ER for the first time. The bastards are looking forward to that.

Game Time!

This is it...the final stretch...
MCAT this summer, more tutoring this fall, more ER work, more upper-division science classes, then the AMCAS.
Bam! Let's slam this!