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.