February 28, 2007 7:37pm

Weekend was nice. Mom visited. We did the whole mother-daughter bonding thing.

This week has been uneventful, except for that my sorry ass overcame it's needle fear and.....



Okay, that's not entirely true. After being badgered and made to feel like a piece of shit for never giving blood in my life, I went down to the blood drive being held at school today. Oh, I was chickenshit for sure. I tiptoed in, refused to sign in right away. Insisted on watching what happened to others first. After deciding that it was too humiliating to turn back, I sat down in the chair to go through the pre-blood letting process.

Turns out, my iron is too low. There is some irony (pun intended) in this because I eat a very high protein, high whole grain, high vegetable diet.

My Iron wasn't so low that I'm about to die from lack of hemoglobin or anything. In fact, it's perfvectly normal. It's just too low for the Red Cross. Whatever those vampires do with the blood lowers the iron in it so mine has to be higher.

Well shit!

At least I tried.

February 22, 2007 7:46pm

Happy!

Mom is coming tomorrow. We're going to get pizza and chill tomorrow night. Saturday AM, I have a review to go to for pathology, and mom said she'd come along. 3 hours of histopathology? Hmmm.. She wouldn't rather sleep in?

I washed my Uggs tonight. It's one of those things that has been on my "to do" list for so long that I just stopped writing it each week. Well, I finally cleaned them up. There's a few more things on the forgotten "to do" list that I think I want to get on soon. First, is to get rid of all the damn cardboard boxes in my apartment. Second, I need to remove all the Internal Medicine Club junk over to the storage closet at school. Third, I need to organize my CD's, which are in a giant pile of mess right now.

I really love being able to mark things off lists. It gives me a sense of closure and completion (is that even a word?).

I also like my pill box. I only take a few prescription medications every day, but I take a load of assorted vitamins and supplements. Don't worry, I'm not mixing anything dangerous or taking anything bad. At worst, they're doing nothing. At best, I am now protected from heart disease, cancer, Alzheimers and Diabetes. My educated guess is that their true effect lies somewhere between those extremes. Anyway, I bought a pill box from Wal-Mart that has really deep compartments. This is great for me because I take some really huge pills. I have pills for Morning, Noon, Evening, and Bedtime. I am a regular senior citizen! I really feel like I have accomplished something when an entire day's worth of compartments is empty and I know I took everything I was supposed to take.

Alternative medicine and natural remedies have become my new obsession. I've always really loved preventitive medicine (ie hurry up and make the vaccine rather than pussying around with treatments), and I'm really interested in how to incorporate "alternative" medicine into that.

So, right now, I take:
1000mg of Niacin (lowers cholesterol really well and doesn't have the dangerous side effects of statin drugs....yes, this is proven. Ask your doc. He'll give you a Rx for Niacin. It's cheap, cheap, cheap)
2400mg of Omega-3 oils (Heart Healthy! And may or may not help maintain BP)
1 Multi-Vitamin with Folate (cause I don't want a kid with 3 heads one day)
400 IU of Vitamin E (antioxidant)
1000mg of Cinnamon (improves your metabolism of sugar to prevent and/or control Diabetes....yes, this is also pretty well accepted)
4 Tums/day for the Calcium

I am ALWAYS on the prowl for a new, fun vitamin to try. I get giddy when I get my JAMA and see an article about a vitamin or herbal study.

So, if you have any suggestions for how to protect myself from a meteor falling on my head by taking Vitamin A, let me know!

February 17, 2007 10:30pm

An exam on Monday....

Mom is coming to visit on Friday.....

That is my upcoming week.

I have a mess of books around me. It's completely disorganized, yet I feel smarter just having them open to random pages.

For those of you who need a visual.....


Please note that the printer/scanner/copier also makes a very handy stand for my Diet Pepsi bottle. If I left it on the desk with the computer, the lamp makes it warm.

I also discovered that my shower is harboring some nasty mildew.

Another visual....


WTF is this stuff?

My shower curtain got some nasty nasty stuff growing in a fold of it.....


It got so out of hand, that it grew legs and ran out on me.....




Honestly, I'm not a slob. I don't know what happened with this bathtub, but something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I got some cleaner today from Wal-Mart, but it didn't remove the mildew. I can't find anything to remove mildew, just soap scum. Am I the only person in the world with the crud growing in their shower??

If anyone can identify the mystery mold, please let me know what you think it is.

In other news, I was recently informed that I must stop trying to rescue people from their own mistakes. Even when I'm seeing someone about to do something terrible to their life, I must resist the urge to swoop in, try to stop them, and then get upset when they don't listen to me.

Easier said than done. Having been through some shitty stuff, I feel like it gives my experiences some purpose if I can serve as a warning to others.

"Don't do it! He's immature! You're never going to change him."
But, he's come so far and...
"No! He's never going to change. He's always going to be an unmotivated, directionless child."
You're right. I shouldn't marry him. I need to break up with him.
::beep boop::
"What's that?"
I have a text message. Oooh, he's so sweet. He loves me soooo much!

Sigh.


On one hand, I want to warn my friends when I see disaster approaching. I want to tell them what I see in the tea leaves. I hope I can save them from the same struggles I've had.

On the other, I feel like a hypocrite. Who am I to tell someone else what does and does not make a good relationship? I cringe just thinking about someone making that connection one day and reminding me that I haven't managed to keep a relationship together successfully, so how can I tell them what to do?

I have also recently come up with a brilliantly simple business opportunity. An internet friend matching site. Just hear me out, now. It seems to me that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of internet dating sites. Eharmony, Match, Yahoo Personals, AOL Personals just to name a few. Then there are those for looking for romance within a specific race, religion, political view, occupation, or special interest.

Wouldn't it make sense to have a way to make friends this way as well? If it's so difficult to find a date, isn't it equally (if not more) difficult to find a good friendship? A pal? someone to go to lunch with?

I have looked and looked and can't seem to find any such program. It's so brilliantly simple.

Most people make friends through work, school, or their neighborhood. Well, I live around old people, I don't get along with my classmates, and I have no job right now. So, FindAPal.com would be my perfect option!

Much like my vertical hospital evacuation system idea, I'm fairly sure it is another idea that will go unnoticed until someone else makes a million dollars on it.

February 11, 2007 1:13am

The idea of having to take an anti-depressant for the rest of my life doesn't scare me.

The idea of never being able to sleep like a normal person and always having to take something to sleep, however, terrifies me.

When I tell someone that I don't sleep at night or that I don't sleep well, I don't think how serious this is or how much of a problem this is for me really gets through. It sounds like a simple enough issue. Hell, there's that cute commercial with Abe Lincoln and the groundhog in it about this very problem.

But it's not all dead presidents and garden critters. I can't sleep. I can not sleep. I lay in bed until the sun comes up. I am tired, but sleep does not come. My mind is so shot that I can't do anything but lay in bed or watch tv.

Oh I do eventually get some rest. If left on my own, I would fall asleep around 9am and wake up about 3pm. It isn't just a problem of reversing my wake-sleep cycle, though. Even on days when I'm awake at 8am, I'm still not sleepy until sometime the next morning around 7 or 8.

Even when I do sleep, I don't sleep well and I feel very tired when I get up.

So, I must take my coma pill to get any sleep. The problem here is that I feel somewhat drugged.

I just want to feel like a normal person again.

February 7, 2007 12:22am

Headache. Headache. Hurts!

I hate folding laundry. I love taking dirty laundry and putting it into the machine, watching the water fall onto it, putting the soap in. I even like throwing stuff in the dryer.

I hate folding laundry.

As a result, I've been living out of a laundry basket of clean, unfolded clothes.

The tricky part is that the laundry basket is in the living room. This means I have to parade around naked every morning. Good thing I live alone.