How to Ruin a Celebrity Sighting

Warning: This post contains some general spoilers for last season's Grey's Anatomy. 

I was on the train with a friend a while back when all of a sudden, she pulled out her cellphone and mumbled, "Here, I want to show you something."

Since this usually meant she had something to say that she couldn't voice out loud, I went silent and waited.

Her thumbs flew over her qwerty pad for a bit before she showed me the message: Doesn't that girl sitting across from us look a lot like Reed from Grey's Anatomy? 

First thing that popped into my head: Sure, celebrities on a train. Yeah, right. 

So ...

"Who's Reed?" I blurted out loudly. 

My friend gawked at me, her eyes flickering over to the girl in question, and she covered her face in mortification. "You know ... Grey's Anatomy!" she hissed.

"I don't know. I don't watch much Grey's. I only caught part of the season finale when most of them were dead or shot already. So ... she died, right? Like ... on the floor?" I asked, not bothering to whisper since there was no way the girl across from us could possibly connect the fact that we were talking about Grey's Anatomy in reference to her so-called resemblance to one of the characters. So what if she looked like this Reed character? It's not like she's actually Reed. "She must have been one of the first ones dead, right?"

Friend stares at me, speechless.

"So who is she exactly? Did you like her character?"

"Well, yeah ... she was ..." My friend gave up. "Google when you get home."

So I finally turned my full attention to the girl across from us and since her eyes were cast down, I helped myself to an unhealthy amount of ogling. Memorizing her face so I'd remember her features for googling purposes later. Admiring the knit hat she wore over her short pixie cut. Eyeing the black Chanel bag resting on her lap. Sighing over her knee high brown boots. Ogle ogle ogle.

But while she was very chic and pretty with this slight smile playing on her lips, she seemed like a regular rider blissfully unaware of the silent scrutiny from the strange girls across from her.

Later, when I got home, the first message I received from my friend was: GOOGLE REED! NOW!

Then she immediately followed that up with a link to the Google images she'd already pulled up. Reed a.k.a. Nora Zehetner.

 tvguide.com

Oh. Wow.

Reed from Grey's Anatomy was sitting on the train across from us.

Reed from Grey's Anatomy was sitting on the train across from us!, I typed to my friend.

Friend: yeah, it was totally her because when you said who's reed so loudly, she laughed a little when I looked over at her. thts why i covered my face!

Me: what? really? dude, i kept staring at her! i thought i was being so stealthy.

Friend: omg rofl.

Me: no wonder she kept smiling.

Friend: haha

Me: and there I was ... just leering at her.

Friend: lol it was totally her. i just can't believe you said who's reed so loudly.

Me: well ... i didn't believe you. 

Friend: i'm good with faces!

Me: i just thought you were one of those sad people who think they see celebrities everywhere. like elvis.

Friend: What??

More recently, a summary: School. Got dragged to one of those haunted attractions thingies by friends for Halloween; don't ask me to describe what happened in there because I came out in a bleary daze. School. Had Thanksgiving dinner at cousins' place where we roasted a whole turkey for the first time in our lives (we were more of a chicken family before). School. Had rounds shadowing doctor for chest pain and renal failure patients. Wrote a paper on pros and cons of TOLAC (trial of labor after c-sections) and had a workshop presentation debate on it yesterday. Exams on path and pathophys still coming up.

Question in a previous post comment from Anonymous: Can you please blog about your pre-med and med school experience in general? Like how hard it is? :O 

Sure! I'll try? Haha, I'll attempt to write some slightly interesting posts soon but sometimes, it's hard thinking of a good topic since not everything is cool and all shocking medical cases like you see on House or roller coaster drama like Grey's Anatomy or something like that. The life is more like ... a whole lotta studying. And running on little sleep. And trying not to give wrong answers to the doctors who point you out in your small group. Boring and a little sad. If I really write what goes on usually each day, you'll probably pass out asleep by the first paragraph.

But if you want to know a little about what I did yesterday, it went something like this:

9am: Trying to print paper in computer lab before workshop starts. Classmate runs up begging me to print two copies of his paper too. REJECTION! New cheap-ass environmentally friendly limitations on printing page quota means hell no, classmate should must log into his own account to print his own mess. He continues to beg, unwilling to deal with the hassle of logging in and out due to the time, and then offers an I.O.U. for double the pages on his account. Alright, fine. I will collect.

10am-noon: Workshop debate on VBAC versus C-sections. Doctor's wisdom: EBM ≠ CYAM. (Evidenced Based Medicine ≠ Cover Your Ass Medicine.)

12pm-1pm: Lunch from the nearby deli. I'm all sandwiched out. :(

1pm-4pm: Lectures ... oh my god ... must ... stay ... awake ... Oh, hey, crossword in the newspaper.

4pm-6pm: Small group on chest X-rays. Gets called up to the front of the room to point out what's abnormal. "Err ... look at the lines ... the EKG leads ... is this AP*? No? Okay ... well ... the heart is, um, pushed toward the right." "Yeah, good, sort of ... the patient has dextrocardia." "Right, exactly. ... I'll just go sit back down now."

And this has mostly been the general routine of my pathetic life, rinse and repeat. Now I just need to get through a chest x ray assignment, two more exams, and then it should be winter break! Where I'd then have board exams to prep for. Yippee. But I'll try to fit in some writing time too hopefully. Until then, please bear with me for my slow responses and updates.

TM Chapter 29 Status: 11 pages in

*By the way:
AP = anteroposterior (X-ray beams pass from front-to-back)
dextrocardia =  heart is located in the right side of the chest instead of the left

Where Are The Sheep?

Catching the view from the Top of the Rock with a friend a couple of weeks ago:

Me: "Hey, the map points that out as the Sheep Meadow."

Him: "Yeah? Oh, so those blobs must be sheep!"

Me: "Hmm ... no, I think those are people ..."

Him: "But they're not moving."

Me: "Sunbathers?"

Him: "They seem like they're all the same color though. They're all ... brown."

Me: "Brown sheep?"

Him: "Maybe."

Me: "More like tanned people, I think."

Him: "Alright, hold on, let me look this up on my phone and we'll settle this once and for all."

Him: *fiddles with phone*

Me: *fiddles with map*

Me: "Oh, hey, look here, the map also says sheep grazed there until 1934. Hmm, what year are we in again?"

Him: "Yeah, well, wiki says ... okay, fine. You can wipe that smirk off your face now."

Other recent happenings: My cousin's first born was born - it's a girl! I had to bring my notes and hunch over to cram for my neuropsych final at her one month banquet, but she's absolutely adorablicious. And the food was great. I also went out to celebrate a friend's birthday and we had Venezuelan food. Guacamole and arepas with pork brisket, yum. My other cousin coincidentally had his birthday around the same time and we feasted on pasta and tiramisu for dinner. (My life revolves around food.) His sister later surprised him with an iPad! Dude, she should be my sister haha.

Yet another friend's birthday is coming up so we just went out last night and tried Ukrainian food for dinner, where friends claimed I took my time pondering over the menu just to have an excuse to repeat borscht a gazillion times. Well, borscht turned out to be pretty yummy. So were the pierogies. The stuffed cabbage ... not so much. We also demolished a whole cheesecake topped with berries. Restaurant rejected our surprise cake from outside so we made do with just forks from a nearby cafe and sat in the outside seating. There is something strangely satisfying though about just forking into a cake, civilized pieces be damned. (Indeed, my life revolves around food.)

Otherwise, life has been pretty boring ever since I got back to school. The workload has been seriously picking up its pace. I just had a subject board exam last week and more weekly exams lined up for this month (clinical epi, systemic path, pathophys, and so forth). Sighs.

I am about 9 pages in for TM Chapter 29 so please bear with me. Hopefully, I can squeeze in some writing time one of these days and finish this once and for all. Thanks for understanding, everyone.

Mockingjay & Sailing Away

School recently started and work's been picking up. There's a midterm and a group powerpoint presentation on the neuroscience of sleep creeping up next week.

I did manage to fit in some last bit of summer fun.

Finally read Mockingjay! I enjoyed it for bringing closure to this epic series. While it didn't quite match the way I adored book one, The Hunger Games, it was a bittersweet ending that at least made me go "Ah ... hmm ..." rather than "Ah! Blargh!"

Suzanne Collins sometimes tend to brush over certain death scenes of her characters or Katniss is too busy escaping or passing out to really allow us to linger on what just happened - which I can understand as a stylistic choice: high paced action punctuated by casualties, no time to breathe, fear, think. Death? It happened. So it goes.

Still. I just wish we could have dwelt on certain moments, certain characters just a tad longer. Some parts left me in such a dazed funk, I was still trying to get my mind to wrap around it three pages later and barely processing where Katniss was running to.

But all in all, I loved the characters and the world Collins set up and it was an utterly awesome trilogy.

A few weeks ago, a friend invited me out sailing on his uncle's boat. I'd never been on boats and yachts before, not even a cruise; the closest thing I had going for me was a ferry ride. So yup, it was fun. Nice sunny day, gentle waves, and then ... beers and wines were brought out.

Each person got a beer bottle to him/herself and as I slowly worked mine down, my face reddened its way to tomato status. I am truly the cheapest of all cheap drunks.

He joked, "Hey, after some alcohol, the waves start feeling pretty steady, huh?"

"Yeah!" I agreed a tad too enthusiastically.

He eyed me. "You're starting already, aren't you?"

I clapped my hands to my cheeks. "Yeah ..." I mumbled. "It's a sunburn?"

He ended up finishing both of our cups of wine so I wouldn't over-enthuse myself off the side of the boat.