The Hurricane Saga

Whew! It has been a LONG 5 days of travel! It all started on Saturday evening (Aug. 28th), when I left Fort Smith for DFW. Spent the night in Dallas and got to see a good friend one last time before she gets married.

Following a very short night of sleep, I arrived at DFW airport around 4:15am to check in for my flight to St. Maarten. I'm pretty sure I scared a newlywed couple in the airport that morning too. They made a comment that they were going to Anguilla thru St. Maarten. And I looked at them and said I hope that we can make it to St. Maarten because of the hurricane... At which time they look at each other and say "Hurricane??" HAHA! Oops... hate to break it to ya, but yes, there is a category 1 (soon to be category 3) hurricane headed straight for St. Maarten.

So, I make my flight to St. Maarten and the boat from St. Maarten to Saba has been postponed until further notice. Little did I know that "until further notice" meant tonight (Wednesday, Sept 1).

For the last 4 days I have been sitting in a hotel room watching Shrek 2 and Garfield on the hotel TV. They barricaded the doors so we could not leave the hotel and posted security guards everywhere! Riding out the Hurricane, which was a Category 3 by the time it was pulling out, was fun. I have some cool pictures and video that I will post once I get to Saba and have some decent internet.

After the worst of Earl leaves and we are doing just fine, that is when the power decided to go out. We lost it over 3 times that day with intervals of about 1,2 and 3 hours long respectively. The worst part was not having air conditioning because it was sooo hot in the room that I was sweating just sitting in the room talking. We had fun playing games by candlelight tho!

So, Earl is gone.. we are ready to leave and surprise, here comes Tropical Storm Fiona right behind Earl. It keeps the Dawn II from making a trip to pick us up, but luckily she wasn't bad at all and the boat is making a trip tonight!

This trip back to school has been fun, overwhelming, exhausting, relaxing, hot, boring, exciting, and hopefully will soon be OVER!

Pictures to come soon!

Procrastination

It is, what it is...

Finals are upon us. Studying is starting to drive me crazy! Had our final lab exam yesterday... SOOO great to be done with that! It went pretty well. I made some stupid mistakes, part because I didn't think a couple ?'s thru well enough, one or two because the second question threw me off. Overall, I passed it (I hope anyway) and that takes a lot of the pressure off for the theory exam for Anatomy. We have Anatomy on Monday from 3-5 (cumulative... with an emphasis on what we just recently completed and haven't been tested on) and then we have our cumulative Histology exam from 6-8 on Monday.
Yes. The admin must hate us for scheduling our exams like that. Same day and one from 6-8?!?!? Really?

I'm worried about Histo. Everyone keeps telling us that this final is a sleeper test. Its 50 ?'s from the block 5 material and 50 cumulative images where we have to answer questions from the pictures. Sounds easy enough, but apparently it isn't! Sooo, I'm devoting almost all of my weekend to Histo... focusing mostly on the new material because that is half of the test.

I am so sick of Histo slides and the weekend isn't even half over yet! (Which is a good thing and a bad thing all at once)

I've studied hard for Anatomy all last week, so I'm not focusing on it as much. The Anatomy exam is 16% of our grade and then on Thursday morning we have the NBME shelf exam which is 20% of our grade and is supposed to bump everyones grades up because they prepare us sooo well for it. Basically we learn everything so in depth that each individual class has consistently scored multiple points over the average for US med schools. I guess that is the reason that we have been pushed sooo hard over the past 3 months!

Speaking of which... I better get back to studying! 1 week from today I will be on my way HOME! Can't wait to see my family and friends! That is gonna be the shortest 2 weeks of my life!

P.S. This is what I have been looking at for the past 3 weeks... fun stuff!

Down Under The Sea

So, I have finished going over today's lecture and I'm having a hard time motivating myself to do more work. I figured that I would blog about the recent past then!

Hmm... let's see! Well, last week was the 3rd block of exams for Anatomy and Histo. They went pretty well for me. Did good in the Anatomy lecture test and just like everyone else, bombed the lab exam. BUT got a decent grade overall for the block so I am happy. I'm not sure why our class is having such a difficult time with the lab exams.. they are just killing us! We have not had 1 lab exam where the class average was a passing grade. Come to think of it... we haven't had an overall exam where the average was a passing grade. There were 100 students who took the first Anatomy exam and 45 failed the whole block. Second block yielded 2 dropouts and 56 failed the whole block. This is where the chains fell off the tractor... We were down to 89 who took the 3rd block exam and still had 40 F's. As we currently stand, approximately half of the class is failing Anatomy and that's just no bueno! We all have our theory's as to why this is, but I'm glad I'm not one of them! *knock on wood*

After blocks, I went with a few friends up to Queens Garden (a small little hotel overlooking The Bottom and the ocean) and we had lunch then hung out at the pool all afternoon! It was soo great to relax with nothing to do! Problem was... I continued to relax the next day... and the next.... and the next... and then went Scuba Diving on Saturday. We will pick this up in a few.......

I am working towards getting my scuba diving certification and started it this past weekend. It's really cheap for students here and after diving twice on Saturday, it is my new favorite activity on Saba! We met at a pool at one of the hotels in the morning and did some of the confined water skills and went to the ocean in the afternoon to do open water dives.

We went to a place on the west side of the island called Torrens Point. It was about 30-35 feet deep and had a sandy bottom. It was really awesome to swim to the bottom and go around and above all the soft coral and cool fish! We didn't see a lot of big, exotic fish like sharks and eels, but we did see a squid and manta ray. I have completed 2 of the 4 dives required for my scuba certification and hope to get those done soon... latest will prolly be after 4th block (which is only 2 weeks away - yikes). 

So, here we are... almost 11 o'clock on Monday and I need to finish catching up from my previous week of relaxation and I'm having trouble motivating myself to do more than just today's work. I'm gonna try to get a little in, but the bed is calling my name and I don't like to disappoint it by not going. We shall see who wins out!

I leave you with a picture of The Ladder. This used to be the only entrance to Saba until the Cove was built. The house you see about halfway up the picture is the old customs house. Everything that came on or left the island had to go up those steps to the customs house... then up a big hill after that!