Winter Break Highlights and First Day Back

Annual Baltimore Christmas Party(bonus: with family) - Hutchinson Christmas Celebration and making Luminaries - Babysitting Juliana all day - Skiing with Matt at Holiday Valley and getting down the diamond - Family frosting Christmas Cookies - Catching up with the Olean Girls - Babysitting the puppy - "Back-to-School Shopping" with Mom, Bridge and Mals - Christmas Eve and Day with the Family and awesome home cooked meals - Competing for top Wii scores in skateboarding, table tilt and obstacle course - Reading by the fire - 5' x 5' painting purchase in Ellicotville that we can't fit in a car to get back to Baltimore - Staying in with my husband for New Years Eve - Friends and Catch Phrase + Sleepover @ Erin and Rubin's - Rereading the Jan. 2nd email from my future husband - Organizing all first semester notes!

A two week break from school is just what the doctor ordered! I was rested and ready to start learning Immunology at 8am! Then the new terminology started and I felt like I had fallen back into the alphabet soup of metabolism. But I refuse to get the least bit worked up or frustrated. So I spend the afternoon reading the lecture notes for 1 of 3 lectures from today and pre-reading both of tomorrows lectures. Do I understand how antibodies work? Not yet. Do I know that another word for antibody is immunoglobulin (abbreviated Ig) and that there are 5 classes: IgM, IgG, IgA, IgD, IgE? YES!!!

And I can also tell you that antigens are foreign things (like viruses, bacteria, pollen) that are recognized by antibodies causing a immune response to save the body from whatever problems the antigen might cause.

But the BEST thing I learned today was the CBC: Complete Blood Count. As in a line from every episode of House like: "We did a CT, MRI, CBC, Chem-7 and chest x-ray. All the tests came back normal. There’s nothing to explain his symptoms." On Christmas Eve my uncle was giving me a hard time about what I had (or had not) learned in my first semester... and I came up blank when he asked what a CBC was. (My standard answer to random health/medicine questions over this break was, "Oh, we're learning that next semester.") Then he rattled off a line just like the one above and said something like, "You should watch House, see, they teach you more on that show!" So I texted him while in class "First day back and we're learning the CBC." I guess I was right about the next semester thing :)