Week 5: Cougars, Badgers, and Bears?

The second week of the didactic core was rather uneventful - oh wait, except for the two hundred or so pages I had to read and digest for this week spanning such topics as multifactorial inheritance, epithelial tissue, cell division and chromosomes, population genetics, connective tissue, cartilage and bone? - I guess that's uneventful. More of that in the next entry since I'm writing in retrospect and there's even more to add to that list following week 6.

Week 5 finished up our introduction to the patient experience for a little while as the course only meets intermittently through April 2008. My second patient experience this time had no camels involved, but was rather a portrayal of an old woman with her grand daughter who felt faint and dizzy after riding the roller coaster at the state fair. There was not anything too spectacular with the patient's medical history, or rather me taking that history so I guess I could call that progress from last week.

I took Friday afternoon off after we got out rather early which was something that we enjoyed this week (getting out Tuesday, Thursday, Friday). Carolyn decided it was time to visit the zoo closest to us in Oxbow Park. Seeing that I had nothing better to do than to study on a beautiful Friday afternoon, we decided to go and Mikey loved it: sorta.

The zoo is fifteen minutes outside of town is situated in a state park (Oxbow), situated around corn fields and soybean. What started as a collection of injured animals now is a semi-grassy oasis in the middle of nowhere with caged animals such as otters, badgers, owls, a pair of bald eagles, a cougar, a wolf, a black bear, and even a petting zoo of cows, goats, and chickens. It just seemed to be an anomaly to be in the vast surroundings of agricultural Minnesota and suddenly see a wolf running laps in its cage, or see a cougar eating a big chunk of steak on a fake tree limb. Welcome to Rochester I guess. Mikey loved the waterfall in the bear cage - no the lumbering multi-hundred pound flesheating beast didn’t deter him - he wanted to play in the water. I think we have a ways to go with Mikey still.

Week 5 segues into week 6 which ultimately was the relative calm before a before a secretly brewing storm.