...and crash.

So I've been kind of busy lately. That whole Relay for life thing is kicking my butt! I've been so busy for the past 2-3 weeks that I haven't had time to eat dinner (or almost anything, for that matter) most days and I've lost enough weight to go down a belt loop. But now its spring break and I'm going to sleep for about 18 hours/day. Allow me to recap:

• Relay: We had our kickoff on Feb 5. A surprisingly large amount of people showed up. We have over 10 teams signed up. Yay, surpassing goals! And are pulling in about $100/day on the online donation site. Of course, we had to change the date again because Duquesne is mildly retarded. If you were in charge of reservations for something, would not the first thing you did after receiving a request be CHECK AND MAKE SURE THERE IS NOT ANOTHER EVENT?!?!? Way to go, Rec. Dept. man, Apr 5-6 was looking good for like 3 wks before he realized there was already something. So now we Relay Apr 11-12. But whatever, at least Duq's food services have actually turned out to be pretty awesome. We met with them yesterday morning and they're probably going to give us a crap load of stuff. And the nursing school is getting majorly enthusiastic: staffing a first aid tent, holding an advocacy rally and survivor workshop and registering multiple teams!
• Tutoring: O-chem and Gen Chem test weeks were back to back. I was in high demand and Dr. Paterno likes to make unnecessarily complicated problems. At least I'll get a big check.
• Shadowing: For the past two weeks, I shadowed Dr. Tersak, one of the oncologists at Children's. Awesomeness! I went on Tues/Thurs mornings since I don't have class and did rounds with her and the resident team. If it weren't for lab, I could have gone to clinic, BMT team meetings and tumor board. How awesome would that be?!? Yeah, ok, maybe one person reading this would be enthused but thats about it. I, however, was very enthused. It was definitely emotional--inpatient rounds have a disproportionately high number of the sickest kids. In fact, the first patient of the first day was a 17 month old with newly diagnosed neuroblastoma. Stage 4, of course, so she's fairly screwed. And on this past Thursday, she had to get rushed to the PICU because her tumor was bleeding into itself and crushing so many of her organs that she was just a mess. Poor Gogo. (Yes, that's her name.) But we did end the day on a happy note... well at least the ped-onc equivalent: The new leukemia girl in the ICU has pre-B ALL. We all did a happy dance and went to visit her. She was getting pheresis because her white count was ridiculously high (500,000+...normal is about 5-10,000). My favorite patient, though, was Kaley. How do you not love someone with the same name? She's 8 and has osteosarcoma and is soooo cute and hilarious. She's the happy kind of oncology kid that everyone needs to meet so that they see its not all death and sadness. In a related story, I gotta say one of the best parts of the shadowing was talking to the fellow and Dr. Tersak about wanting to do their job. Its so nice to have someone actually understand what I'm saying about how much I want to do that and not think I'm insane or setting myself up for a depressing lifetime. The most depressing part of the week wasn't seeing all the sick kids, especially Gogo and another kid, Ahron, who are both almost certainly going to die, but it was trying to tell people about my day and getting the glazed over "omg, I don't want to know about this stuff... lalalala, denial" look from just about everyone. Sigh. Why can't people try to understand?