Spring: Birthdays,Galas, and maybe some studying

We finished our first CP113 midterm on friday and are going to begin a two week series of midterms for all our other classes. Time to start cracking open the books...

A good number of pharmacy 1's headed downtown to attend the Red Hot Black and White Gala on saturday night. I personally did not attend, since I was working at Walgreens. But from the pics on facebook, it looked like the high school prom all over again except without parental chauffers.

Instead, I spent all friday baking a strawberry vanilla cake for my high school friend's 23rd birthday. I can't believe that we are almost crossing that mid 20's crossmark. It seems that this year especially is passing by really fast. We made bellinis, 1 to 5 peach puree to sparkling wine and watched that Emilio Estevez movie "Bobby."

The movie featured a star studded ensemble including Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Heather Graham, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Anthony Hopkins, and Helen Hunt. I thought it was a little slow for me since there was a lot of extraneous content, like LSD trips and merely mediocre acting failing to meet all the hyped expectations from such a prestigious cast. The scenes that previous conversations were leading up to, like the Americans revering RFK, Virginia Fallon's stage performance, and Stone's character confronting William H. Macy about the affair, contained more or less trite dialogue and inexperienced direction. Estavas essentially handicapped "Bobby" into a made for TV movie than the real piece of cinema that it could have been.

My innovative pharmacy practice experiences elective CP152.07 is turning out to be the highlights of my week, besides my other favorite class Intro to Drug Metabolism and pharmacokinetics. The pharmacy practice experiences exposed us to a range of different fields that we can specialized in. Last week, a vetanary pharmacist showed us the fruity or meat flavored chews and gels that he compounds on a daily basis. Apparently, pet owners are more than willing to pay a pricey amount for compounded medicines out of pocket as long as they do not have to deal with chasing and forcing the pet to take the medication. Essentially, it is like working in a retail compounding pharmacy except that you typically do not deal with insurance. This week, a transplant pharmacist gave a presentation on her inpatient experience treating transplant patients. Given the increasing demand for pharmacists to make recommendations, serve as a drug information resource, give lectures to rotating students, and prepare specialized therapy regiments for patients, the field can only grow as a potential area for pharmacists. Transplant patients are typically on 15 different meds: immunosuppresants, insulin for prophylaxis of diabetes, antimicrobials, antihypertensives, and lipid lowering agents. Pharmacists need to modify drug regiments with physicians to avoid toxic levels of unmetabolized drug when the body is attempting to eliminate all these meds at the same time. Renal and liver transplant is much more developed field than Lung and heart transplants. Therefore, there is a need for case study publications and expanding research for Lung and Heart transplants.

First UCSF Leg Day ever!

APhA-ASP held its first ever whole day event to increase UCSF student political involvement by exposing them to legislative issues pertaining to their profession. We called it Leg Day. Dr. Lorie Rice, who taught Law and ethics last quarter, was able to get Assemblyman and 2008 State Senate Candidate Mark Leno to speak on Universal Health care. A group of class leaders from the pharmacy school was able to explain to Leno about what pharmacists can do for the community: medication therapy management, taking medications correctly, avoiding adverse drug reactions, clinical pharmacy, and be involved in clinical research especially through the research projects in the Health policy and management/ Pharmaceutical sciences pathway.

During his talk, Leno rightly stated that as the baby boomer population ages and live longer, they will develop more diseases and increase health insurance costs for everyone. He argued that the costs of health care are astronomical and the privatized insurance system is only becoming more complicated to understand and often standing in the way of physicians trying to give their patients the proper care that they need. By throwing out the privatized insurance system and rebuilding a socialized health care system, the government could administer health care more economically and efficiently. The debate is still ongoing about whether single payer vs. employee based health care is the way to go.

He also addressed how families in low income neighborhoods are surrounded by liquor and convenience stores. How is it that we cannot give many of these communities access to healthy foods despite our nation's wealth and status as an industrialized superpower? Well, the fast food and snack industry have been expanding their low-cost products into every street corner and successively hooked Americans at a young age to foods concentrated with sugar and fat. Leno boldly linked the inaccessibility to unprocessed natural foods rich in antioxidants, high in fiber, and slowly absorbed complex sugars to the obesity and diabetes epidemic in this nation. In the pre-meeting that we had with Leno, he quoted a staggering 1 in 5 ratio of the population have diabetes, which will jump alarmingly to 1 in 3 by 2020.

If the source of the problem is in fact access since we as Americans are embracing fast food culture as part of our busy lives, then we need to increase access of fresh, healthy foods especially to children so they adopt healthy eating habits early. Leno's plan to combat juvenile obesity/diabetes is his healthy fruits initiative. The bill would provide the training and equipment that would allow storeowners to store and sell fresh fruits and vegetables. in low-income neighborhoods to maintain refrigerated systems to store and sell issues relating to politics and health care. Afterwards, he invited us to visit his office any time.

The city hall health fair was pretty awesome. A lot of us P1's took the muni to city hall and donned our white coats. I got to counsel a few city employees on sources of calcium for osteoporosis. It was pretty slow but we got a large class turnout.

I had to rush back in order to prep for the Leg Dinner. Kieran Flaherty, a former Leno staff member, along with some pharmacy faculty members gathered to facilitate discussions on some key legislative issues. Basically, 25 pharmacy students helped to draft their stances in breakout sessions on medical marijuana, Universal health care, and Medicare Part D. We all generally supported Universal health care, medication therapy managment, and thought that greater research was needed to substantiate a bill to legalize medical marijuana and industrial hemp. We decided to hand them over to Lori Rice, who would forward them to Leno so he can better represent UCSF in the assembly.

Relief

I think I worked harder this week than during finals week last quarter. I never realized how much work went into planning these school events: contacting all the participants, arranging set-up, arranging food, coordinating who does what, learning how to utilize the resources in the university, and all the while trying to have a good time. I am referring to the Tabula Art Show 2007. Calculating the top scores is actually quite difficult and making sure you instruct someone else to announce it correctly is a lot harder than it sounds when you're stressed out.

It was like working with one person then another, and constantly being able to shift your focus. Time just flies by even though you are not prepared for what came next. I was learning how to effectively adhere photos onto non-art walls one minute, then another minute, I am assembling a wooden easel because we used up all the ones that the MU loaned us. I think the worst moment was when I got the cork stuck in the wine bottle opener! Obviously, I don't drink that much...Thanks to Chris Cullander who gave me some tips about how to do it correctly.

My focus has been completely off school this past week and I hope I can make it up since it is still early in the quarter. The day after the art show, I had to coordinate the Patient Counseling Competition banquet. I sat next to the Dean of the Pharmacy school, Mary Anne Koda-kimble. She's always really modest in person. You can't tell that she is the one who sits on the board of the United States Pharmacopeia. She said that she was impressed with our class and that the students get smarter and nerdier every year. I am a nerd, so I couldn't really disagree with her.

I had to cram for the pharm calc quiz today by staying up last night until 3am. I don't know why I had to stay up so late just for a quiz. If this was any other week, my brain might have been in at least a semi-solid form to actually process information more efficiently.

I don't think I can do this again next year.

I might co-coordinate but I was taking on way too much. Especially since I had the patient counseling competition banquet the day after the Art Show. But I will have to say it was awesome seeing the finished show with all the pieces coming together. It was a success and I look forward to seeing it grow.

I visited my resident Robert for the first time since last quarter. I strolled into LLH this afternoon about 2:30pm and found him playing his video games in the lobby. I feel like he wears the same thing every day, but I'm not complaining cuz this way it is easier to find him in a crowd. He needed to ask me my name again this time, but he was able to remember it throughout the hour when I was speaking with him.

He repeated his life story to me again and reiterated his love for motorbikes. Heroine. Cocaine. His old apartment at 5th and Irving. This time he spoke about when he flew in an 3 seater airplane once. I'm not sure what he has not done throughout his life.

I brought him grapes I originally bought for the art show but we didn't need. He dug into the in-season ripe fruit quite happily; he seemed to appreciate the offer. And the whole exchange reminded me of the kind of simple, kind gestures people made in the past. It could have been triggered by the context of the constant references he made at the time to God, mary, and Jesus Christ.

Back to basics

The past week and a half seemed to have flown by without me realizing that I was on spring break. I spent 6 out of the past 7 days working at walgreens. When my manager asked me to pull the night shift at a 24 hr store and get paid overtime, I really had to refuse. In between lunch breaks, I would race over to the art store and prepare all the the events that I am throwing this april.

I also got all these supplies for the art show coming up on the 11th. Not only did I pre-order 50 matboards to be shipped to my apartment from their warehouse in illinois, but I bought 5 canvases for myself discounted for bulk orders. I am rather enthusiastic about starting this new painting of venice, but at the same time, I do not have enough time to devote to a new painting since I am tied up with this art show. I really should be settling down and devoting more attention to my classes instead of delving so deeply into my extracurriculars. I don't think I will ever learn. I am definitely going to have to go on a trader joes run to load up on traditional gallery style refreshments.

I got these translucent invitation paper and printed invites for the patient counseling competition banquet on the 12th. I still have not confirmed the final guest count and menu with the restaurant that I am organizing the banquet at. It seems like people just RSVP at the last minute.

This seems like a common trend to deal with people who procrastinate whenever you take on these leadership roles. Another good example is waiting on some of the contestants in the Tabula art show for their artist statements. It seems to be a good skill to know how to handle situations like this.

This makes me think of my UCSF pharmacy school interview when a professor asked me what would I do (since she knew I edited for a paper in college) if writers would not submit their articles to me on time. I think my response was that I would find out about their situations and develop a plan with them to get the job done. In other words, you have to be accomodating to other people's circumstances because they change all the time. And if you don't learn this skill sooner or later, then you will not be able to work in teams. With the greater sophistication of products and services offered by American companies, having the patience and communication skills to collaborate seems almost essential.