Achieving at What Price

I wrote this while watching a movie called, "The Doctor" filmed in 1991 for ethics class. I finally had time to stop and think... and here is what I thought...

With all this achieving in medical school, which is amazing... I have one sadness... I forget to see the stars; the moon. I spend all my time inside studying things that are completely enrapturing. Yet I don't see the flowers blooming by the road, the rabbits on the lawn and the trees turning their flaming yellow. I don't see the mountain range I love looming in the morning sky when I drive to school because my mind is focused on von Willebrand and the coagulation cascade.

And that's what's hard to lose. Somehow I'll have to find it and not let 4 wonderful years of my life go by. They say it's a snap and it's gone, they mean that in a positive way. Funny, that's what I fear. Life is too  short anyway.

An interesting dichotomy, I'm in medical school because life is short, too short to not do, be and experience everything I want to and I'm sad because this experience could make it feel shorter.

So on top of all the things I'm learning and the many things I'm adjusting just to survive, I'll have to figure out how to step out of the doorways of my artificial world, breathe in a quiet breath and see again.

Life is not simple.

But that's what makes it worth living.

Fun Fact: Hedgehogs cause Cyclops

We have a subfamily of pathways that is active during the fetal period called Sonic Hedgehog. If there are mutations in it, it can cause babies to be born as cyclopses. This is common in mt goats & sheep in the west because there is a plant Veratrum californicum/Corn Lily/Cow Cabbage that if eaten around the 14th day gestation and it causes the mutation in the Sonic Hedgehog pathway & the babies can be born as cyclops. And yes, it's named after the game, Sonic the Hedgehog.

Fun Fact: Sun Made Dimers

I'm learning all sorts of fun things so I thought I would start putting up fun facts. Here's the fun fact for today:

For every second of sun exposure 50-100 dimers are created in your exposed skin cells. These are caused by two base pairs or nucleotides (nobs that code for your proteins) on your DNA covalently bonding (sharing electrons) and causes a problem in DNA a big chunk has to be cut out by enzymes, unzipped from the double helix, removed, and then put back together and the DNA backbone taped up with the tape enzyme ligase.

So when those errors become more than can be fixed you can have skin cancer.