Medical Student Syndrome

My months of medical school hypochondriasis have finally paid off—at various points in this year's curriculum,  I had convinced myself (with varying degrees of certainty) that I might have tongue cancer, a MRSA infection on my arm, meningitis, a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I can't even remember what else, but fortunately, I've been very wrong each time. But today I was going over a lecture about sleep disorders and realized that for the first time, I actually meet the all diagnostic criteria for something real! Apparently I have restless leg syndrome! Um, I do not plan on seeking treatment, considering it's never actually bothered me; I never even knew it was weird until I got married and Michael started making fun of the way I have to kick my legs sometimes at night, . I'm very pleased to find that even the paranoid, diagnostically blind medical student sometimes finds a nut!

Med School

Ok, I just wanted to say how happy I am to be in med school. I can't believe the stuff we're learning. We spent a few days last week learning how vision works and how an incredibly complex system of neurons manages to translate photons into meaning. It is just incredible how complex we are. And today I was watching a lecture (every lecture is podcasted, woohoo!), and some of the stains of cerebellar neurons were just breathtakingly beautiful. Like, I almost got a little choked up looking at the pictures and thinking about what they mean. And you guys, I don't even really like neuro that much. But I just feel really grateful (a) that we as a human race get to know all this freaking awesome stuff and (b) that I get to dip my toes in the fountain of knowledge. So, so cool. And next week when I'm starting to freak out about our test and how unprepared I feel (side note: I ALWAYS feel woefully underprepared and full of doom and gloom the week before exams, and I'm pretty much always wrong. The last exam, I was seriously crying my eyes out the day before because I didn't know how I could pass the test, and I ended up pulling a 97. ANYWAY), I can look back at this post and remember how happy learning makes me. Also, this is one of the pictures that I thought was amazing:

Isn't that beautiful?

P.S. I was telling Michael about some of the stuff I'm learning, and I mentioned the word glutamatergic.
His response: "That's an awesome word. Is that like a liturgy about glutes? A butt sermon?"