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Friday, February 26, 2010

A sigh of relief

I've never been so happy to hear about vaginal bleeding. That is all.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Planning

I have found that whenever my life deals me a hefty dose of stress I tend to completely shut down and think out every single option I have and mentally travel through each option.

Notice I said "life." Not work or school. When work or school throw stress at me I start working faster and just power through what usually amounts to a bunch of repetetive tasks done on autopilot (counting pills, taking notes). My brain is completely focused on one thing: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30; "children taking steroids can experience slower growth." Ok - Got it.

However, when life throws me problems my mind goes everywhere. Life isn't black and white, there are so many shades of grey they turn into colors, and my brain wants to know every color, now.

Anytime I have to make a big decision I talk about it with everyone I trust in my life, but in my head. I don't actually speak to them, but I definitely have conversations with them; they just don't know it. My parents and sister have given me an insane amount of advice that they never actually gave, and it seems to always lead me in the right direction.

Sometimes, if I have a seriously big issue, like "oh shit my girlfriend might be pregnant," I'll end up working out solutions in my sleep. I kid you not. I'll plan and figure out exactly how I'm going to solve each problem, all while I'm asleep. It's not a very good sleep; I constantly wake up and rehash things in my head, but I usually wake up in the morning feeling... great.

Not because I'm refreshed and ready to face the day, but because I've figured everything out. No situation is hopeless, and it seems like my sleeping brain can figure out the simplest solutions to the toughest problems.

Last night, I woke up around 15 times between midnight and 5am, and each time I seemed to have another piece of the absolute worst case senario worked out. If she is pregnant and if does does decide to keep it (which is completely her decision), I have a battle plan.

If I'm a father in 9 months, I know I will be prepared for the challenge. I know my parents, grandparents, and friends will help me in every way they can (because I asked them, in my head), and I know my kid will grow up right.

Of course, there are 1,000s of variables I can't even begin to identify, but if we keep the kid and raise it ourselves, I will know what to do. At least my brain thinks I do. I'll always be thankful that my brain can make quick decisions without me even knowing it.

Incidentally, sometimes my brain figures out plans of action to problems I didn't even know I had. One night, I jumped out of bed at 3am with a strategic plan with one end goal: buy gas. The gas station closest to my house was closed but the Holiday just a few more blocks away would be open. I threw on some clothes and was opening my car door before I realized it was 3am and I could literally buy gas at any other time of the day.

I can only hope that this pregnancy scare is exactly like my gasoline situation. Just a made-up problem my brain decided to fix on its own.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

I'm worried

If there's one thing that scares me the most, it's having a kid.

Don't get me wrong, I want to have kids someday, but just not anytime soon. I want to be able to go out to the bars or go to a movie whenever I want to. Once I graduate, I want to become some sort of pharmacist (not retail) and have more money than one person from a frugal background like mine could possibly know what to do with. I want to take vacations and see parts of the world I've always wanted to see (Ireland, London, Seal Island off South Africa).

I'm still young; I have plenty of time to raise kids.

Right now my girlfriend and I are having a bit of a pregnancy scare. She was supposed to have her period 2 weeks ago, but she started birth control 3 weeks ago. As a pharmacy student, I know that it can only take a couple days for birth control to be effective, but it can also take up to a month. Consequently, I have used condoms each and every time we've had sex.

It would seem that we did everything right, but last week she started having some pretty bad cramps, and she's been nauseous for the past couple days. I know all of you are thinking that these two symptoms don't mean jack, considering both are very common side effects of birth control. I agree, but they are also two very common side effects of being pregnant.

What makes it even worse is that I know the timing of periods can get a little funky once a woman starts on the pill. This means we might possibly have to worry about this for the week for even longer.

Everyone I have talked to told me not to worry about it. I've told myself not to worry about it. With birth control being around 95% effective (due to noncompliance) and condoms being something like 95% effective, the odds are absolutely astronomical that she's pregnant. My best pharmacy friend, who's a P3, told me she's had this same exact scare more than a few times with her husband. I shouldn't be worried.

But put yourself in my shoes. I've got 3.5 years left of school. Expensive school. I work 20-40 hours a week (depending on the weekend schedule). I don't have the time or money to raise a kid.

I shouldn't be worried, but my girlfriend is having bad cramps and puking.

I'm worried.

Friday, February 5, 2010

IPPE

As part of the pharmacy curriculum, we have to do 100 hours of Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experience (IPPE) for the first two years of pharmacy school. This involves us students getting matched with a contracted practice site by some crazy algorithm program that not a single professor at our college can accurately describe.

The program allows us to choose which sites we want to go to in preferential order, but the problem is there's only a total of eight rotations in my college city. That means that less than 10% of my class will get to do their IPPE in our city this summer, which, if my math is correct, means over 90% of us will have to go out of town.

Not that that's a big deal, many of the practice sites are in or near our respective hometowns, but what peeves me is this - they asked us to tell them where we wanted to go, and that they would do everything in their power to get those sites available to us. They didn't though. The list of practice sites are the same as they were last year. Not a single new site was added.

Unfortunately for me, my hometown isn't one of the towns that was on the list last year. I told them about four different sites near my hometown that I would be willing to do my IPPE in this summer, and not a single one became a site that's available. This seems to be a tad bit insane, considering there really isn't another pharmacy school near my hometown, so it's not like those places need to reserve spots for other colleges. I really, truly think that the professor that was in charge of contacting these places really just didn't care one way or the other.

My guess would be that she sent an email to the HR department or something and then just waited for a response. If she didn't get one, oh well. If she did, cool. I'd be willing to bet her total amount of time and effort put into getting us practice sites amounted to the same effort I put into this blog.

It looks like I'm going to have to battle for one of those eight spots in my current city, and if my luck in the past is any indicator of how that will go, I'll end up in East-Jesus nowhere.