A Trip to the Dentist & 2nd Day of Board Reviews

Tri-7 Wk7 Day 431, Friday

As has become more and more typical over the preceeding months (years?) I continue to end my days remembering less and less of what's transpired over the course of my day. Remembering what specific things I've learned in any one class has taken a back seat to simply trying to remember what classes I've had. Many times the first question I have when a class starts is "what class is this?" I ask this to myself even though our teacher is present and I should know what class I'm in but, often I don't have an answer to my question until I look up at our over-sized schedule posted at the front of our classroom.

Isothenuria may provide an insight to my current memory issue. If a person gets a UA (urine analysis) and their specific gravity (SG) is checked say, once an hour for 3 or 4 hours and doesn't drink any fluids during the time they are being checked then that person's SG should increase which, is an indication that their bodies are retaining more fluids to help maintain homeostasis. In short, if you don't give your body the fluid it needs then the body says, "alright, no problem, we'll just conserve the water we have on hand until you drink some more" Sometimes the body isn't able to conserve water as it should and in these cases a person's SG will stay the same test after test. If the SG stays the same, instead of going up then this is known as isothenuria.

Isothenuria was an answer to a question on our first GIUG exam. I have not consulted a book or any of my notes but, I know the answer now. I knew the answer after I left the class room but, I could only come up with the prefix "iso" during the exam. (I better Google to make sure that really is the answer and not just what I think it is) Yup, that is the correct answer.

I am becoming more and more sensitive to the role stress plays on my physical and mental conditions. Oh, and maybe I should have said this before but SG of urine is an indication of whether urine is dilute or concentrated.

The fact that the answer of isothenuria came flooding to my mind after the test was over but not during the test I see as a symptom of stress. I know I have a great ability to put things together. To mentally and intuitively put things together but this process doesn't or isn't working optimally when stress is part of the environment. And, to be a little more accurate, I would say my performance is hampered with chronic stress, that is stress that has been ongoing for a significant amount of time. For instance; weeks, months & years as opposed to days which would be indicative of acute stress.

....insert yet another major tangent here ......

With many of these blogs it's like I'm getting only four bricks from an entire wall of bricks actually written down and if each wall were to represent a complete set of thoughts then there are several walls of thoughts where only a few bricks from each wall are actually conveyed.

It's a little after 6 a.m. Saturday as I enter Friday's blog entry. I've been up since about 3 a.m. but, I fell asleep last night around 6 p.m. so I've gotten plenty of sleep.

Rest, exercise and nutrition are the main treatment (Tx) plans I can avail myself to be able to improve myself in order to get through school and life. I've improved both the exercise and nutritional aspects greatly since being assigned the St Peters outpatient clinic location.

There is a pretty basic concept of surviving and thriving. For the most part, I've been trying to survive Logan however, to better care for my patients, I really need to thrive. I've been seeing a lot of the thriving and surviving concept as of late but the first time I recall seeing it was from a small sign which used to hang from the rear-view mirror of an ex-girlfriend which said, "Surviving is Essential but Thriving is Elegant". I can't say I've been thriving too much. I suppose there would be a ratio of surviving to thriving and I would probably put the surviving number in the denominator of the fraction since it is essential. (I guess this is my mathematical background coming into play...)

On a whole, we have 100% of our life to consider. If I'm spending 30% of my time thriving and 70% surviving then I'm looking at a fraction or ratio of 30 over 70 (30/70) or, more simply, 3/7. Whenever we are spending more time surviving than thriving then the bottom number of the ratio will be greater than the top number and if we divide those two numbers we'll get a decimal answer less than 1. So, 3/7 is equal to 0.43 which, is less than one.

If we are spending 50% of our time surviving and 50% of our time thriving then we have 5/5 or 1. If we are thriving more than surviving then our numerator (the top number) will be larger than our denominator. Let's say I'm thriving 60% of the time and surviving 40% of the time then our ratio of thriving over surviving is 6 over 4 (6/4) which is equal to 1.5

I'd conclude that having a number greater than 1 is where we would like to be. This reminds me of Steven Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Where do we get the time to thrive instead of simply surviving? That would come from those things which are not important and not urgent. Steven has a quadrant set up using Importance and Urgency as two criteria and either of those items may have the word "not" in front of them which gives us

Important & Urgent

Important & not Urgent

not Important & Urgent

not important & not Urgent.

I think the notion of Thriving would have to do with engaging in activities which are Important and not Urgent. Studying for an exam which is three weeks away would be an example of something that is Important but not necessarily Urgent. Buying health insurance may be important but not necessarily Urgent.

Surviving would be engaging in task that are both Important and Urgent. I have a test tomorrow - Important and Urgent.

The phone is ringing ...that may not be important but may qualify as Urgent since it demands immediate attention as whether to answer or not. Writing in my blog may be important but not necessarily Urgent.

not Important and not Urgent ...probably playing a game on the Internet would qualify.

The overall concept is pretty simple. Is life pushing us or are we pushing life? The more life is pushing us, the more we are in a mode of survival and higher stress. The more we are pushing life, the more we are in a mode of thriving and less stress. That is how I see it.

I suppose I write this blog not only to track the number of days it takes to become a doctor but also because I generally don't have anyone else to talk with. Living alone has it's pros & cons and one con is the lack of someone else to share things with. In talking through these notions I'm looking for answers.

Emotionally, I feel as if there's an avalanche of things hanging over my head and pieces of that important mountain of things are continuously falling on my head. How I deal with those things is going to determine the quality of my life.

If I let time pass by and am not actively engaged in facing that mountain the the passage of time will cause things on that mountain to be pushed onto my head, one at a time, maybe a few items one right after another, maybe 4 or 5 items at a time ...this has been happening a lot lately.

If I'm letting time pass and these items get pushed then I can either try to catch the item and deal with it in as effectively a manner as I am able or, I can try to shield my head and duck. I see shielding my head and ducking as doing anything to avoid dealing with the issue that's falling on top of me. It's avoidance. I could go out and get drunk or immerse myself in a movie. This avoidance is probably a root cause of many of our so called bad habits. Clearly, in order to thrive, I need to catch as many of these items as possible and actually deal with them instead of shunting responsibility.

Now, there is time that's available to me when nothing is being pushed on top of my head. Times when nothing would be imperatively urgent. We might call these times, the weekend or early mornings or end of the day or end of our work or school day. It is in these times that I need to face the mountain of task and choose and pick amongst the myriad of opportunities and issues that confront my life. This is a part that can get confusing. It isn't always a matter of picking from a mountain of things that are getting ready to fall on my head but there also seems to be a mess around me of things that have already hit me on the head and are now scattered about me on the floor waiting to be picked up.

I'm guessing this is the most round-about way of simply asking the question, "What am I going to do this weekend?" I don't have too many weekends to avail myself with. I have a graduation ceremony this morning and my parents will be attending and picking me up in a little over an hour ...thus, getting ready becomes more and more urgert ;)

Have I laid the groundwork for any great breakthroughs? I'm not sure. I've certainly thought things through but, what am I actually going to do?

The task currently at hand are more than I can come up with off the top of my head.

....insert 20 minute gap here as I get ready to leave this morning ....

There is one basic concept that could round up the reason for much of this writing. It's the same reason that millions of people will buy things for reasons such as losing weight, quitting smoking, regaining lost hair, get rich quick or anything else people wish to change in their lives. The reason so many of those commercials can sell a product whether the product is worthwhile and real or not. The one thing that precipitates everything else before a call or purchase is made is, quite simply, hope.

Hope is a fundamental concept and one I've delved into many times before. Hope is inherent in the forgiving nature of having multiple days or a future of any sort. I imagine hope is the last thing lost when a person commits suicide. No hope for anything better in the future. But, hope is also what propels us to move forward. Hope is what allows us to keep trying time and time again regardless of the number of failures we've had previously. Hope that our future can be brighter than our past.

My mind is constantly referring back to my patients, both the ones I have now and the ones I'll have in the future. I would wish for them, Hope, Health and Happiness. Maybe that would be a good name for a chiropractic clinic.

...I don't really have time left to continue with these current lines of thinking. As an ending to this current blog post I'm thinking that Love & Hope would seem to go together although I'm currently inclined to see them as separate, high level entities which may or may not be related. When it comes to hope, I am currently inclined to relate hope to beliefs which elucidates previous thoughts on the matter of hope. Beliefs are an interesting concept. Beliefs tend to be related to patters that we find in the world. Patterns of outcomes. An interesting concept pertaining to beliefs is that, as people, we will tend to see patterns more often, even if no such patterns exist, more frequently when we are feeling out of control with out lives. A prime example of this can be seen with baseball players. There is little superstition related to a ball palyers performance when it comes to the task of fielding however there is, relatively speaking, a much greater preponderance of superstition when it comes to hitting.

Now, here we will need to be clear on what is meant by superstition and, in this context, superstition refers to seeing patters of behavior that will produce a certain outcome when there isn't necessarily a basis for believing the pattern we are referring to as superstition.

If you've got a handle on that last paragraph then also keep in mind that the more out of control we are, the greater the tendency to see patters (have beliefs) that don't really exist.

Baseball players who are playing in the field have a success rate of around 90 to 95%. However, a successful batter, say someone with a 0.300 batting average (which is successful) means that they are failing 70% of the time. This would correspond to a situation where they are out of control since the failure rate is so high. This relates to the fact that, when it comes to hitting, there is much more superstition (seeing patterns where there are non) related to hitting than fielding.

Time to get ready. We'll conclude these thoughts after my graduation today :)

Apparently, I've been doing something right to make it to Trimester 7 at Logan and have a graduation today for some BS degree. LOL I'm not even exactly sure what the specific degree is, something like a bachelors in Human Biology or Life Science or something like that. Not that I'm underestimating or don't appreciate the degree but, the main degree we're after is the DC degree. However, this will be great practice and aid in visualization in walking across that state in the Purser Center for the real thing. :)