GOOD TIMES

Just to add a little more chaos (in the absolute best of ways, of course!), I spent the weekend in San Antonio for Kelly's bachelorette party. We had SO much fun! I picked up Cat (Andrew's little sister) and we drove in from Houston. Ashley flew in to Austin, then she and Kelly drove in together. Amanda came all the way in from Laredo and just met us and Shannon (Kelly's little sister) in San Antonio. This was my first time to meet Cat or Amanda, so I was super excited to spend some time with them before Andrew and Kelly's wedding. We had lunch at Alamo Cafe (the best Mexican food in SA! Yum...queso...sorry, I got distracted!), got pedicures, then went to the Hotel Valencia on the Riverwalk. We got ready, then walked to dinner at Zuni Grill on the Riverwalk. Lisa and Anna (Kelly's coworkers in Austin) were so sweet to drive in and meet us for dinner, and we had a great time! Zuni was delicious...including the margaritas :) We went back to the hotel, threw Kelly a shower, played games and ate some yummy cake. Amanda was awesome enough to make Tshirts for us all with "Team Kelly" on them...they were super cute! The intention was to end the night with a chick-flick marathon, but we found E! and Keeping up with the Kardashians and The Soup were on, so needless to say, we never made it to the movies. We finally came back to life this morning around 11 and proceeded to go to breakfast at noon, then everyone parted ways. We had so much fun together! Congrats, Kelly...we love you so much! Here are some of the best quotes from the weekend:
1. Shannon: "...but you can call me Sunshine! And when the sun goes down, you can call me Starrrrr."
2. Kelly (as we are INSIDE the hotel): "Lauren, are we HERE yet?"
3. Ashley: "I almost flew fighter planes. Yup, they almost trusted me with multi-million dollar death machines. Then they figured out I was blind. So that's how I ended up in law school."
4. Me: "Well does it have wheels!?"
5. Amanda (to Cat): "Well, someone has come out of her shell! She's getting a little fiesty!!"
6. Cat: "NO! It's a mouse!" Followed by Shannon: "Whatever, it's some kind of rodent." They were talking about a stuffed animal. It got surprisingly heated! Haha
7. And of course via story..."TRAVIS!!!"

STILL KICKIN'...

Well hallelujiah! I'm still kickin over here! Last week was disgustingly stressful, but I made it. I did about as well as expected on my first test (Clin Med), and to my surprise, better than expected on my second test (Pathophys). And of course, this was only exacerbated by intermixed projects, homework, and working on my physical diagnosis which is an ongoing project. I nearly got beaten up by a few friends because I got 6 hours of sleep one night. To put this in perspective, they were upset because they only got 2-3 hours of sleep. Apparently I got to go to sleep somewhere around midnight, and that was unacceptable. We're a sad bunch, huh? It's amazing how you can learn to function on less sleep (and more caffeine) when it's just absolutely necessary. I used to be that person that "required" like 9 hours of sleep every night...PA school successfully shot that nasty little habit for me. I was reminiscing the other day...when I first got here, I couldn't wait for the next day! Oh yeah, I also had time for sleep and TV-yet another habit PA school has so kindly killed off for me. But the days seemed comparable to when I was working. Then, the pace picked up a bit. I was busy, but it was all manageable. Days (and weeks) started going by quicker and quicker...Now, I'm to the point where days literally come and go while I'm burried in my books. I can seriously look at my clock and have an "Oh crap, it's already tomorrow!" moment in the midst of studying. Sad thing is, I keep studying as if I hadn't noticed anything at all. Days are starting to blend together, and if it weren't for my planner and phone telling me where to go and what to do every day, I might just not get out of bed! I wouldn't know what to do once I got up! I can honestly say that this is officially the craziest thing I've ever done, but I can also say that it makes me happy :). Chaos and all, I'm still thrilled and so blessed to be here and be doing this. Here's to high hopes for week 5 in my sights...yup, week 5 is already here. Do you know what that means? Our semesters are 15 weeks long, so completing this week gets me 1/3 through my first semester! I'll keep up the hard work (and praying...) and yall keep up the prayers for me, please!

REALLY? WEEK 3 IS ALREADY GONE?

Ya, so Week 3 flew by! I can hardly believe that this week is going to be our first round of tests. EEK! To summarize what I've been through so far...Orientation was everything you'd expect it to be. Week 1 scared me. Week 2, I finally thought I was getting a groove. Week 3, everything I knew up til this point really just went out the window. I have no groove, I had no groove, and I don't expect to get one. This whole program will definitely by "fly by the seat of your pants" and a lesson in flexibility. The things I was scared of in Week 1 seem SO trivial now, and I have a whole new set of things to be scared of that will probably seem trivial in 3 more weeks. And oh ya, I think I've lost my marbles. If not, I'll be consistently losing them from here on out. Apparently that's normal and everyone else is also losing or has already lost their marbles...so my professors tell me. So this week I spent coming to terms with all that. I've entered this new state...I call it tranquil delirium. I'm here, I'm happy, and I'm certainly moving along at pace...but sometimes...well, ya just never know. :) Lindsay prefers the phrase "getting hit with a very informative freight train." It's great and we are really learning SO much, but it's still that getting hit with a freight train feeling.
My big accomplishment for the week was my first blood draw! Yay! It was my first attempt, and I nailed it! For those of you wondering, no, I did not have my usual adverse reaction to needles. Apparently that's only when I'm the one being stuck. I'm so excited and was so proud of myself! Thanks, Erik for being my pin-cushion!
I guess that's about it for now. If you don't hear from me in a week or so, you can most likely blame my Clin Med and Pathophys exams this week and my Physical Diagnosis exam check off. If you don't hear from me in 2 weeks or so, you may want to call Ryan and check in with him, as I probably won't be up for talking about how it went! Haha

A LITTLE CONFIDENCE BOOST

I was taking a mental break today and found this...check it out!
http://www.sahs.utmb.edu/pas/Prospective_Students/CLASS_STATS.pdf

The stats have been posted to the UTMB website for my class' admissions. It makes me feel pretty good that out of that many people, I'm actually here. It makes everything all seem SO worth it and really motivates me when I notice my ADD (and the pretty palm tree right outside my window) taking over my studying. Yay, it's like a fresh dose of focus and confidence!

Week 2

Wow, I can barely believe it, but Week two has already come and gone! And I must admit, it went much smoother than week one. Ryan came back into town Sunday, so I was very happy to get to spend some time with him. Monday was fantastic because we didn't have school for Labor Day. Yay, a day off school! AKA...another day to study. Tuesday was a little stressful because I had my medical terminology test. Everyone has to pass this test with at least an 80 or else you can be kicked out of the program. No pressure, right? Well, I got a 96, so I get to stay, yippee! I also got the rest of my financial aid, so I was just about ecstatic! Wednesday was mental overload as usual. I'm starting to accept the fact that Wednesdays, for one reason or another, are just pretty much brutal. Good thing Pappasitos is apparently aware of this and continues to have half-price fajitas ready for me and Ryan. Thursday was good, but a little stressing at the same time. I had a check-point that I had to pass regarding my physical exam procedures. It's quite a bit to remember, but I passed. Yay! I'd gone through it like a billion times at home (using Goosey and Mav as my test subjects) and run through it mentally, but I still got a little nervous knowing I was being graded this time. The bad news is that next week's check-point is all the stuff from this week, plus an entire new section. So it's twice as much to remember. That will be fun... Thursday, we also had a meeting about one of the clinics that the students have the opportunity to volunteer at. Yup, you read that right; I can go see patients now! Of course, I'll have a senior student that I get to shadow at first, and I'll always be under supervision-someone has to sign off on just about everything I do. But the main reason for my going to school to be a PA (patient care and interaction)...now I can go do it! I'm thrilled beyond words and can't wait to get started. I'll probably do my orientation and get started next week. They said this experience will also really help us with our classes because it puts all that text-book and lecture stuff into practice and it will start to make more sense. It also helps prepare us for clinical rotations next year. Plus, we get exposed to some of the top specialists in their fields, so we have the opportunity to learn SO much in addition to our classes. So that was all Thursday-definitely a GOOD day! Friday was the usual: class, study, lunch with Lindsay and Rachel, anatomy lab. Fridays are good days :) I've also started a tradition that I refuse to study on Fridays once I get home from school. First, anatomy lab is A LOT of information that I really need to let soak in. Second, it's the one time all week that I allow myself a little TV guilty pleasure. I'm dead serious when I say that I don't watch TV any other time during the week except maybe 30 minutes of news right before I go to sleep, so this is my little reward for making it through another week. I also keep candy in my desk drawer as a bribe to stay in one place and study, but that's another discussion! A few random things this week...my computer was at one point on a steady downward spiral into crap-ville and my phone decided that I couldn't use the earpiece, but instead that I needed to do everything on speaker phone. Both of these incidents were highly annoying and would have been expensive to fix, so I was quite displeased. After a stern talking-to, both the laptop and phone have decided to behave in order to evade my threats of demolition. I win!...for now at least.

HERE WE GO! WEEK 1

Week one was a series of ups and downs...
Monday went relatively smoothly. Got to the school in good time, parking was smooth, made it to the right classrooms, etc. I was extremely surprised (pleasantly) by the few classes we had that day-I really hate to say this in fear of what may lie ahead-but I was a bit underwhelmed. I left that day feeling like I had missed something. I expected to be nearly in tears, needing to study for 10 hours that evening, and feeling like I'd gotten myself in too deep.
Tuesday was a bit more like it. I felt challenged by some of the topics, but still not overwhelmed. I certainly needed to study, but it was all do-able. And to reflect on my previous post, at this point I STILL had not received any of my financial aid. Rent is due tomorrow. I think that was more stressful than the classes themselves.
Wednesday was bad. I was not happy. I threw myself a pity party. I wasn't to the point of crying just yet, but I definitely shut down. Thank goodness Wednesdays are half-price fajita night at Pappasitos, and you just can't leave Pappasitos without having had a margarita. I might have had no money, but at least the margarita provided some temporary sanity and made it bearable for a short period of time. It was especially nice to do something not school-focused.
Thursday was better. I finally got some of the financial aid money, and the classes didn't seem quite as overwhelming. I was still trying to figure out how I was going to study best and I still needed my routine, but it was at least coming in bits and pieces.
Friday was pretty good. Only 1 class and 1 lab, plus I got to relax and go to lunch with some friends. And I made it through anatomy lab! Yay! The smell was a bit intense, but I did better than I thought I'd do. As far as the smell goes, I changed clothes when I got out of lab before I drove home, changed again when I got home, worked out and ran for 45 minutes, showered with scented shampoo and body wash...and was still catching whiffs of the preservative solution that night. I'm going to have to find some mechanism to deal with that one...
Saturday I met with my study group for the first time. There is just so much material to cover, that if we tried to do it all individually and do it as thoroughly as we'd all like, we wouldn't sleep and we'd be eating apples while we shower like Holly. The point of the study group (as I learned...) is to help sort through the abundance of information and get it into some format that's easier to study, while still making sure you hit all the objectives. Getting it from paper to brain is of course still all on the individual, but this helps immensely. Plus, we're all as type-A as eachother, so it works out pretty well. I left that meeting really feeling like this might all be possible! Holy crap, did I really just have that realization!? That meeting made the weekend (a 3-day weekend thanks to Labor Day, I might add!) much less stressful. I honestly think I was way more productive than I'd have been without that meeting-I'd have simply been overwhelmed.
So the good news is...I made it through week one and I'm fairly optimistic! Yay! I don't really have any bad news about that week, but the ugly news is that it's only week one of fifteen. Oh well, one week at a time. :)

ORIENTATION WEEK

So the first week, yes this was an entire week long, was all orientation. It started on Saturday at 8 AM at Moody Gardens here on the island, and Ryan got to come with me! I'm still not sure he was all too pleased with that. It was orientation for the School of Health Professions, School of Nursing, and School of medicine. So all those entering students with their parents or significant others-quite a crowd! It's always comforting to walk into a room of like 800 people and know that you don't know a single person besides the one you came with. Can we say intimidating?! I have to admit that by the end of the day, I had found another familiar face. It was someone that went to Concordia with me back in 2007. I think we were both relieved to see eachother if for nothing else, because it was a familiar face! So we listened to a bunch of people from different areas of expertise, then the students went to a community fair while the parents/spouses went to a little meeting of their own with some of the faculty. The community fair was pretty interesting-different organizations from the school, local restaurants, and other "local" businesses like banks, churches, etc. The best part was that everyone was giving away free stuff! Goodness knows that regardless of how useless it probably is, if it's free, I need it. I'm such a sucker. So after that, the parents/spouses got to leave, and the students had lunch and listened to more speakers. After that, they had a pretty useful session where the incoming students got to have some peer-to-peer time with the students in the class ahead of us from our particular program-no faculty, no family, etc. Just newbie student to experienced student so we could ask just about anything we wanted to and get an honest answer. Good idea, UTMB, good idea. Anyways, the rest of the day was ice-breaker activities with students from other programs...they made it decently fun, but I haven't seen any of those people since, so I'm not really sure why we didn't do that activity with people from our own program. I know they'd love me to say that I have "synergy" and am always interacting with people from other programs, but I'm still getting to know all the new peeps in my OWN program! It's kinda overload to be trying to meet everyone here on campus... Anyways, then spouses were allowed back and we had dinner and casino night. I came home exhausted and with more paperwork then I knew what to do with...and a little overwhelmed to say the least. We had Sunday off-I guess to absorb and readjust...it's either that or to go home and have a panic attack...still not sure which one. Monday was a little better because we were on campus and I was with the School of Health Professions, so I could finally start to see some familiar faces. More speakers, ID photos, etc. Tuesday and Wednesday were more speakers and some sessions specifically for PA's. Those days, I also managed to come to the realization that I was about the only one who had not received any of my financial aid. Oh ya, and I needed to get all of my equipment and books-about $1500 worth-by Thursday. That was a big HOLY CRAP moment! Needless to say, I spent a few hours in the financial aid office having panic attacks, but they really helped me out and we got it situated. One of the highlights of this week was a little party at the school called Plazapalooza. Everyone gets to come-all classes from all the schools, and many of the married students brought their spouses, too. They had dinner, a mechanical bull, rock climbing wall, games...it was pretty fun! It was also nice to get to socialize with some people outside of the classroom/lecture setting. The best part-I survived the "first week" and managed to get all my supplies in line. Ya hoo! I call that mission accomplished. That WAS the hard part, right? HAHAHA

WE MADE IT!

In classic "Lauren" fasion (I love a little chaos every now and then), we got moved into our apartment on a Thursday evening, and started orientation on Saturday. Wa hoo! Told yall this would be an adventure. And yes, Ryan was supposed to be joining me at orientation, so it's not like I could go to school and he could stay back and unpack. We hired movers to unload the moving truck, which was a first for us-we usually hire family and friends! :) The guys were awesome! Those of you that have helped us move in the past will be especially amazed by this-they had the entire truck unloaded and everything upstairs in 45 minutes. I was speechless-another first.
The drive down here was pretty interesting as well. We loaded the moving truck on Wednesday and decided to just wait and drive the next day. So Ryan drove the big moving truck towing my SUV (a sight in and of itself) for the 5+ hour-long trip through downtown Houston. We decided to tow my car instead of try to drive it because it is 11 years old with 160,000 miles on it...we were afraid that when it saw we were going to Houston, it might just roll over and die. I drove Ryan's truck with Mav, Goose, and Tig. Tig hates car rides and proceeds to meow the entire time-about once every 5 seconds. He kinda sounds like those toys that kids often play with-it's a tube and if you tip it one way, it makes a noise going one way on the music scale (almost an extended "whoop" noise), and if you tip it the other way, the noise goes the other way on the music scale. Well, whether you know what I'm talking about or not, please trust me that it's extremely annoying! Then, the cat starts thrashing around in his crate. The dogs have settled down in the backseat, but the cat is just going nuts in his crate in the front seat, and I had no earthly idea why. He's been on car rides before and didn't attack his crate! Oh, that was another thing, if I tried to put my hand in his crate to soothe him a little, he'd bite me. Jerk. Well come to find out, he needed to poop. And he did. In his crate. We still had 4 hours of driving ahead of us, and my crapped-on cat is sitting in the front seat with me. Isn't that just precious? So I immediately pull off at the next exit and into a Dairy Queen so I can brainstorm on how to get my crapped-on 20-pound cat out of his dog crate without letting him out of the truck and without getting poo on myself, the truck, or either of the dogs who think this is the most interesting thing they've ever seen. My plan of attack was to pull the crate, cat, and all out of the truck and put it all on the ground right next to the truck with the door open, open the crate real quickly, grab the cat in the cleanest spot possible, toss him in the truck, and shut the door real quick. Don't laugh...it made sense at the time. Surprisingly, it worked! And the cat wasn't even a mess at all. However...yall KNOW there had to be another part to that...while I was trying to get the cat out of the crate, my 90-pound Maverick leaps out of the back seat, out of the truck, and right OVER me to escape the truck. Now, my dog is running around the DQ parking lot just steps away from the highway. FREAK OUT TIME! That was one of the few times I used my "mom" voice, heard it, and didn't care. "Maverick Miller, if you don't get your...back in this truck right now!..." Sad day-I'm getting old. But hey, it worked. He came back and jumped right back in the truck with that "I'm sorry, mom..." look on his face and his tail tucked between his legs. Ok, so we are all back in the truck (except the crapped-on crate which got to take a joy ride in the bed of the truck for the rest of the trip), and the cat apparently got his wish to ride like the pups-not in a crate. It was circus.
The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful until we got into Houston and my GPS took me some stupid round-about way to get to the apartment. I'm sorry, I thought this was simple...exit the highway, turnleft, apartment complex on the left. NOPE. We sure did exit and turn left-at the wrong road, followed by a right, followed by missing my next right, some street in an alley of some sort, another right and my GPS told me I had "arrived" at some intersection-no houses, no apartment. Grrreeat...but nonetheless, we all made it safely, and we love the new apartment. I'll get some pics loaded once we finish decorating it.

TEARFUL GOOD-BYES

Having to tell my boss that I'd be leaving my job to go back to school was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do...I honestly think following through with it was even harder. I loved my job, my coworkers, and my patients, but Christal and I both knew that this is what I needed to do. God wouldn't have given me this awesome opportunity otherwise. Being a PA is of course what I so badly wanted, but having to leave was extremely difficult...and tearful to say the least. I didn't take any pics of my last day (probably because I couldn't stop crying-thanks Tisha!), but here are some of the pics from when we went out to celebrate.

The whole gang: Christal, Sheran, Micha, Lucy, Me, Dee, Portia, Shenique, and Jasso.

Me with my Tisha. I love her!

Tisha, Me, and Shenique

Tisha, Jasso, and Me

Jasso, Tisha, Sheran and Me

Me with Portia

Me and MICHA, MICHA, MEEEECHA!

I love all these girls and am going to miss them more than words can express.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

So as many of you know by now, I was accepted into PA (Physician Assistant) school at UTMB in Galveston-YAY! I was accepted after my interview in January 2010 and started school in August 2010. Since I couldn't bring all of you with me, I hope this blog will help you keep up with what all I'm up to these days. Hopefully you'll also get a laugh out of some of the stories...goodness knows I have a knack for getting myself into some interesting situations. Holy Guacamole, Shennanigans, and a whole lot more to come! This is definitely going to be an adventure...:)