This is what makes studying bearable:

Our second exam of the year is this monday. I have now been in the library, at the same wooden cubicle, for over five hours. My back hurts, I haven't eaten anything in eight hours, my carpal tunnel is flaring up, and I am literally itchy all over (study-induced pruritus, probably).

That being said, the soon-to-be-tested-upon material is, by my estimates, twice as cool as anything we learned last year and an infinite amount of times more useful because last year we didn't learn anything clinical. Last year was just cram, cram, memorize these dumb facts about obscure biochemical pathways.

How helpful has this year already been for me? I'll tell you:



First exam's pharmacology portion was on antihistamines and NSAIDs. This coincided nicely with allergy season, as two weeks into school I developed my seasonal allergic rhinitis (it's supposed to be called hay fever), that loves to remind me that I'm atopic. Studying for the exam, I noted that I owned a lot of the drugs we were talking about in class. I own the generic forms of claritin, zyrtec, and allegra. I also own nasonex. I take one form of allergy medication (I've found allegra (fexofenadine) works the best, although that could be a placebo effect because it is also the largest pill) and a spritz of nasonex every morning. But the benefits of these antihistamines wore off fairly early during the night, so I'd wake up dyspneic. I am always tired when I wake up, but to wake up with shortness of breath and hypoglycemia does not make staying awake for an eight in the morning class bearable. Or even possible.

That's where clinical science comes in. I was taking these drugs in the morning because I assumed that they worked like sudafed. Sudafed is an upper because sudafed is in crystal meth. Or rather, crystal meth contains sudafed because sudafed is an upper. Whatever the reasoning, I assumed all allergy medications were either uppers or downers. Uppers being sudafed and fexofenadine. Downers being benadryl and doxylamine succinate. But this isn't the case. The symptoms sudafed and allegra treat may be the same, but they go about their biochemical business in completely different ways. Claritin, zyrtec, and allegra aren't uppers. They just block histamine receptors, but only the ones outside your brain (unlike benadryl and doxylamine which target your brain and make you go to sleep).

Finally, nasonex, sweet and delicious mometasone furoate monohydrate, is not an upper. It's actually a steroid that inhibits inflammation by inhibiting the immune response. It won't affect the way you sleep, so you can take it at night.

BAM. Been taking nasonex at bedtime and sleeping like an angel ever since.

Improved sleep makes studying for five-odd hours every day so much easier. What makes studying this much fun is the fact that I can now help myself and others with a handful of commonly occurring medical issues.

What helpful clinical knowledge did I gain from my first year of medical school curriculum? Practically nothing. In fact, before I could use medical biochemistry to help me with a personal problem, I had to create a personal problem by giving myself an obscure, yet entertainingly-named, disease. But that story will have to wait until later....