a fair trade

I’m [in]famous at school for always having (or eating) food, so while I was at church yesterday, my friend texted me to see if I wanted any vegetarian chili. (Who am I to say no to free food?)

Her boyfriend had made a gargantuan vat of it, and apparently likes to cook but doesn’t like to eat (?!) or wash dishes.

K: Andrea, can you wash the dishes?
A: No.
K: Farrah, can you wash the dishes? (is clearly expecting me to say no)
F: Sure!
K: :O! What!?
F: Well, you cooked, so you shouldn’t have to wash em’. I’ll do it.
K: :O!!!

While I was working on the pile of dishes in the sink, I heard them squabbling over something in the background that went something like this:
K: You ask her! If I ask her, it’ll be weird.
A: No, I’m not asking her that.
K: Ask her!
A: No!
F: What’s going on?
A: Now you got her curious!

Basically, he was wondering if I’d be willing to take out the trash for him. He recently sprained his ankle (we’re not sure why since I’ve heard opposing stories involving him looking at a pretty girl and tripping into a pothole, or being abused by Andrea and falling), so he’s been milking it for all its worth. We’ve been calling him a useless cripple because of this (only because he’s been trying to pass off everything he can to us because “he can’t walk.”).

I did indeed take out all the trash for him, and in exchange, I got a giant vat of vegetarian chili and a huge thing of spicy cornbread, which I brought to school to share the wealth/foster good relations. Twas worth it. :D I look forward to further transactions. :D

Yeahhh spicy cornbread!

Vegetarian chili! :D!

 

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Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

It was our friend’s birthday and we managed to glean the fact that she loved carrot cake (especially with cream cheese frosting), so we gathered around in the middle of a blizzard to make this for her on the last day of spring break (amidst games of Big 2 and shoveling lots of food at me; my taste buds were very happy).

For the record, grating baby carrots by hand with a tiny grater sucks. ;_; The food kept me going though, haha. The recipe was adapted from allrecipes.

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:
(Cake)
-2 eggs
-1/2 cup + 2 tbsp vegetable oil
-1 cup all-purpose flour
-1 cup white sugar
-1 tsp baking soda
-1 tsp baking powder
-1/4 tsp salt
-1 tsp ground cinnamon
-1 1/2 cups carrots, grated
-1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
(Cream Cheese Frosting)
-4 oz. cream cheese, softened
-2 cups confectioners’ sugar
-1/2 tsp vanilla extract
-1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

Instructions:
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2) In a large bowl, beat together eggs, oil, white sugar + vanilla extract. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt + cinnamon. Stir in carrots. Fold in walnuts. Pour into pan.
3) Bake in oven for 40-50 minutes, or until it passes the toothpick test. Let cool.
4) (Frosting) In a medium bowl, combine butter, cream cheese, confectioners’ sugar + vanilla extract. Beat until mixture is smooth + creamy. Stir in chopped walnuts and frost the cooled cake.

This is about 1/3 of the food my friends fed me while we were making this. :O They are awesome.

This was part of our dinner. :O

Pasta with eggplant!

More 芥兰!

Birthday girl!

a new addition

I probably mentioned a couple of these guys before, but lately, I’ve been hanging around school more often (more specifically, with them, because we all study in the same place, albeit all in different rooms) due to the fact that I…
a) have taken to studying alone
b) use less electricity/resources/things I have to pay for if I spend more time at school (yes, I really am that cheap)

Anyway, I’ve been hanging out with them a lot more recently because they’re hilarious and really fun to be around. I love how they interact with each other, and whole-heartedly believe that it’d make for an awesome TV show. (We cast each other off as different characters from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia today, which I’ve really only seen one episode of thus far. Sean is Charlie, Isaac is Dennis, Mike is Mac, and I’ve been defaulted to Sweet Dee by virtue of the fact that I’m the only girl.) Our hypothetical show is “It’s Always Sunny in Lewisburg” (except this is a lie; always snowing would be more accurate) and/or “HBLers + 1” (Isaac is the only one that actually goes to class).

One of them (Isaac) graduated the same year as me back in Davis. We were actually also in the same major, volunteered at the same hospital, and had common friends, but somehow never spoke to one another until we saw each other at the gym during orientation last year.

I met Sean at my interview (as far as we can remember, we’re the only two from our interview group in this class) and remembered him because he was the first to interview and pretended to cry when he came out, but I’d called him out on it because I saw him walk into the admissions office to ask for a tissue with a huge smile on his face.

Mike is the one that I’ve decided will hopefully elevate me to my next level of badassery (I like to set arbitrary and random goals of badassery from time to time, if you couldn’t tell). If I can successfully choke him out one of these days, I’ll consider it a win. :O He admitted yesterday that while I “was hanging onto his neck like a leech the other day,” he briefly contemplated whether it’d be worth it to (a) keep his pride and stand up to body slam me into the ground, thus risking several broken ribs on my part, or (b) lose said pride and allow me to choke him out.
F: What!?
M: Luckily, I didn’t need to make the decision, because I turned my head.
F: I can’t believe you even considered that! ;_;
M: But what matters is that I didn’t do it!
F: …
M: If you were ______, I would’ve done it without second thoughts, because she’s a lot more manly.
F: Somewhat of a backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it.
M: It wasn’t backhanded! It was a compliment! I’m saying that you’re a lady. That’s a compliment, right?
F: Holy crud, no one has ever told me that before. :O My dad tells me I’m too mannish.
M: So what I’m saying is, if you were to try to stab me with a knife, I’d probably be like, “Oh no! She’s trying to stab me! …But she’s so pretty, I guess I’ll let her do it.” But if you were _______, I’d just punch you in the face.

I’ll take it.

Mike’s been trying unsuccessfully to scare me for the past couple weeks, but recently stood in the darkness outside the window of my study room and scared the crud outta me, so I retaliated by sneaking into his room while he was out and returning the favor. (I also changed his background to a whole lot of My Little Pony, but he blamed Sean.)

The other day, we gathered around and prank-called Isaac about counseling and potential lawsuits against a pharmaceutical company for the drug he was taking because he recently found out he has psoriasis and has been referring to himself as “the face of psoriasis” (made himself a yellow paper ribbon and everything, to raise awareness).

We’re also starting a band, which I think will consist of Adam (guitar), Isaac (guitar, singer), Derrick (bass?), Sean (drums), me (keyboard, backup singer, assistant security), and Mike (head of security). I guess I may get to live out my pipe dream of becoming a rock star after all!

Just kidding. I don’t actually want to be a rock star. I’m really not kidding about the band though; we’re hoping to do a benefit concert next year.

Green Berry Smoothie

I didn’t want to have to wash my food processor twice after making the green muffins, so I decided to make a smoothie while I was at it. :D

Green Berry Smoothie

Ingredients:
-1 large bunch of spinach
-blueberries
-1 banana
-flax seed
-vanilla soy milk

Instructions:
1) Throw everything into a blender and blend until smooth.

review of systems

Advance Warning: This post is an epic mass of text. (For the record, most of my future posts labeled “School” will be epic walls of text unless it’s anatomy-related. If you’re completely uninterested anything to do with the medical field, for future reference, skip these. :O )
We had our “Review of Systems” lab yesterday, which basically consisted of us interrogating the patient and then writing down all our findings. I say interrogate only because we were given 12 minutes to obtain their past medical history (PMH), family history (FHx), social history (SHx) and a review of systems (ROS), which is practically an absolute minimum of 50 questions. We’re still graded on being nice people, so you can’t [and shouldn’t] actually interrogate them. Welcome back from spring break, kids!

At our school, we go by the mnemonic, “MIIMASH” for PMH. (Going to med school generally means you get to learn all these fancy abbreviations to make your life easier + so no one else will know what you’re talking about.) Luckily, we didn’t have to also obtain a history of present illness (HPI; yay for OLDCAARTS!), or that would have required even more writing and my hand would likely have keeled over in protest and died. We are lucky in the sense that they’ve drilled taking patient histories into us since almost-day-1, so that part is pretty darn easy now. The rest of this post is kinda like a review for me so I’ll have something to look back on. I’m tradin’ away all my doctor-in-training secrets! :O!!!

Anyway.

M: “Medical Illnesses” (Any past history of medical illnesses [e.g. diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, heart attack, etc.?])
I: “Immunizations” (“Are you up to date on your shots?”)
I: “Injuries” (“Have you had any recent injuries?”)
M: “Medications” (“Are you currently taking any medications? What medications? Do you take any vitamins? Herbal supplements? Anything that you buy over the counter?”)
A: “Allergies” (“Is there anything you’re allergic to?”)
S: “Surgeries” (“Have you ever had any surgeries?”)
H: “Hospitalizations” (“Have you ever been hospitalized for any reason?”)

(Obviously, if they were to say yes to any of the above, you’d ask them to elaborate. I just didn’t want to write everything out.)

For FHx + SHx, we kinda conglomerate that into “FSHORES.”

F: “Family History” (“Can you tell me about your family? Are there any medical illnesses that run in your family [e.g. mother, father, grandparents]? Do you have any siblings? Children?”)
S: “Safety” (“How is your living situation? Do you live with anyone? Do you feel safe? Do you have people you can talk to who are supportive?”)
H: “Habits” (“Do you ever smoke or use tobacco products? Are you around anyone who uses them? Do you drink alcohol? How many cups a day? Do you use any illicit/street drugs? Do you drink anything with caffeine in it? How’s your diet? Do you exercise? How many times per week?”)
O: “Occupation” (“What do you do for a living?”)
R: “Religion” (“Do you have any religious preferences that might interfere with treatment?”)
E: “Environment/Education” (“Are you exposed to any dangerous chemicals where you live or work? Are you in school?” etc.)
S: “Sexual History” (“Are you currently in a relationship? How’s that going for you? Are you sexually active? [If applicable, aka if female and pre-menopausal, when was your last period?]”)

(We also try not to just straight-up ask all of this so as to prevent it from being an onslaught of endless questioning. I like interjecting with comments [e.g. positive reinforcement for if they don’t smoke or if they exercise, condolences if their parents are no longer living, etc. Basically, be a nice person with some common sense, be able to pick up on nonverbal cues, and try to make it a little more conversational if you can.].)

And for the newest one that no one in my class paid any attention to until…uh, today… (We backburnered it because there were a billion questions involved. ;_; ) Basically, for our OSCEs, we apparently only need to go through 11 of the 19-ish systems and ask at least 3 questions from each. We’re graded on our efficiency and critical thinking rather than for perfection on OSCEs, which is awesome, but I still don’t think I’m anywhere near the point where I could write an entire SOAP note in 9 minutes. (It took me 7 minutes today to finish just the “subjective” part, and I was one of the few that actually managed to finish [only because I finished my patient interview 2 minutes early, since we were only supposed to get 5 minutes]. ;_;)

I got this down by picking my 11 “favorite” (read: easiest to remember) systems and remembering 3 questions from each, but I’ll go ahead and list them all here, just because. (Bolding my go-to ones. Some are interexchangeable with each other because I sometimes forget one over the other, so I memorized a couple back-up systems too. :x )

• General: fever/chills, unexplained weight changes, fatigue
• Head: headaches, nausea/vomiting, visual changes
• Eyes: diplopia (double vision), blurry vision, glasses/contacts
• Ears: tinnitus (ringing in ears), hearing loss, discharge
• Nose: congestion, epistaxis (nosebleeds), rhinorrhea (runny)
• Mouth/Throat/Neck: hoarseness, sore throat, swelling
• Cardiac: palpitations, murmurs, chest pain
• Resp: shortness of breath, coughing, wheezing
• Breasts: masses/lumps, skin changes, self-exams
• GI: constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain
• MSK: joint pain, range of motion, muscle pain/weakness
• Neuro: numbness, tingling, weakness
• Vascular: edema (swelling), claudication, varicose veins
• Skin: changes in skin/hair, dry skin,
• Urinary: polyuria (increased frequency of urination), dysuria (pain upon urination), color
• Endocrine: heat/cold intolerance, polyphagia (increase in appetite), excessive sweating
• Heme: easy bruising/bleeding, fatigue/feeling faint (to check for anemia), blood transfusions
• Genital:
  Male: discharge, hernias, pain
  Female: period regularity/frequency/duration, pregnancy, miscarriages/abortions
  General: STD history/treatment, sexual fxn, contraception methods
• Psych: anxiety, depression, memory