i know, I promised

Okay,

I've been chastised enough. Today is the day.

A brief recap: Montreal was spectacular. I will always love that city, at least until my liver tells me that enough is enough and shuts down my fun zone. As expected, the summer was amazing with friendly people coming out of the woodwork for a whole plethora of good times.

But that is the past. Now is medical school time.

I arrive back in Vancouver just in time for a torential downpour. Not an auspicious beginning, but I powered through. Settled in at Azim's beautiful house (right next to the ocean! I took my mug and book to the beach yesterday to "study"!) and almost immediately started school.

Orientation week was a lot of obvious stuff mixed in with invitations to drink. 256 med students plus 50 odd dental students makes for a massive class with plenty of people to meet. Three weeks on and I am still struggling with names (and faces). Friday of orientation week we were thrust into action: Gross Anatomy lab.

You could see the fear on almost everyone's face as they prepared to enter the lab. It was a low lying fear and I think for most people the excitement was overcoming any anxiety, but the fear was there. Inside the lab were 50 bags, one for each group of 6 students, zipped up though the outline of the body was obvious. These bags contained people who had given their bodies to science and to medicine and who knew that they would be dissected by first year students with no idea what they were doing. I still struggle with faith and belief and all that and I have great respect for these people who, in the face of the unknown, were willing to put their faith in science.

The professor opened his bag and, while our bags remained firmly shut, began his lesson on the dissection. This was the hardest part of the whole lab. The fumes in the lab were extremely strong but I think it was the anticipation of how one would react to seeing and touching their first cadaver that got to most people. I felt a few times like I was getting light-headed and had to hold on to the wall. Then the lesson was finished and we were invited to see our cadaver.

It was a pretty intense moment, one that I am not likely to forget. After the initial rush, we got down to the dissection and really never looked back. I don't want to go to much into it here, mainly out of respect for the person and their family.

The following Monday the lectures started for real. The lectures are fascinating, of course, though I am already amazingly behind.

No inadvertently funny profs yet, though most, if not all of the profs are hilarious is they want to be.

And UBC is really pushing the wellness front. They have about 40 of us doing yoga and mindfullness meditation. But they suckered us it - they presented a scientific paper that said we would do better in school if we meditated. They know our only weakness ... marks.