Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 5:17 pm (Just An Update, Yabaadabadoo!)
Aloha! I’m back. To stay.
I’ve missed blogging ever so much, but I think I really needed to take a whole month off – not that I had planned it or anything – but I think blogging just kept reminding me of a segment of my time here that I’ve finally left behind. I’m so done with studying for med school exams – the reality took a while to strike… that I won’t have another important exam for the next couple years now. Pheeeeewww. I’m done.
So what’s happened since I last blogged? For my sake as well as yours, I’m going to recount the highlights of the past month since that exam.
So stay tuned…. updates galore for the next few days… 
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Monday, August 28, 2006 at 11:07 am (Two Roads Diverged, Yabaadabadoo!)
I’ve decided! 
I’m going to go the pediatric oncology route… it’s a really cool set of projects – a fair blend of clinical trials as well as lab-based research – and I’m going to submit my final decision tomorrow and start the day after that. But wait – let me tell you more coz I’m super-duper excited! (The following explanation should cater well to my medical and non-medical audience, but let me know if it doesn’t.)
There’s this new drug that’s come out in the chemotherapeutic world – it’s pretty magical since in the first set of clinical trials itself it’s brought about amazing cures in people with certain advanced stage leukemias. It targets a specific site that’s very common on certain leukemic cancer cells (CD-22) and it’s attached to the toxin that belongs to a bad bacteria called pseudomonas – so that’s kinda how it specifically targets and kills off the villainous cancer cells and spares the other cells.
So… the lab I’ll be working in is the lab of the guy who invented this drug – he’s simply amazing. I typed his name in pubmed the other day – his name’s on 1048 papers, the first of which was in 1957! So I didn’t even know that was possible. Now he’s invented another even better version of that drug and I’m going to be working with that one too. Lots of cell cultures, specifically looking at patients’ cells and figuring out what combination of chemotherapeutic drugs will kill off the cells best.
On the clinical front, I’ll be making clinical protocols for trying out these two new drugs in the pediatric population. If all goes according to plan, we’ll start enrolling patients in a few months and sooner or later there’ll be data to analyze and see if the results are just as amazing in the kiddies. The guy I’ll be working with on the clinical front is sooo excited about the whole project and I guess it’s kinda contagious coz now I am too! The nice thing is that he’ll be the pediatric oncology attending this week, and he wants me to spend the first two weeks shadowing him on rounds, just so I get to see how everything works here and get to meet the patients – kinda get a good feel for what I’m going to spend the year working on. (Note: this would give nerdy me time to study during the rest of the day - yay!)
So there you go – final decision. Thanks for listening to me whine while I was still in the decision-making process. I guess the answer really was staring me in the face. I think whether or not I choose pediatrics as a career in the end, a year spent working on cures for diseases that affect kids is definitely a year well-spent!!
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Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 3:04 pm (Just Do It!, Yabaadabadoo!)
Just got done watching Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Never Say Goodbye) starring Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta, Abhishek Bachchan, and Rani Mukherji. At the library at my workplace (off the internet!). Prior to this I had been going through severe Bollywood Withrawal Syndrome (BWS), which includes most of the following symptoms: sadness, emptyness, blueness, feelings of waiting for someone in your immediate surroundings to burst into Hindi dialogue, feelings of wanting 20 similarly dressed people to jump in front of you in the hallway at your workplace and start dancing to instant loud catchy Bollywood music playing over the overhead speakers “Where’s the party tonight? Sapnon ke din hain, sapnon ki raatein!”, also compounded with withdrawal symptoms from the lack of new hindi music to get your day goin’, lack of new wallpaper for your laptop, etc etc.
Suffice it to say…. this felt like a chocolate bar I’d been holding onto for ages and finally got round to savouring.
I’ll have some of the music up on my blog soon. In the meantime……
Tumhi dekho na, yeh kya ho gaya, tumhara hun main aur tum meri! La la la la la la la la la laa! *me in a flowing golden gown with long flat-ironed hair, twirling and singing through the hallways of this building full of formally dressed research people*
And then I guess I *trip* back into reality. Darn. Time to study. 
La la la la la la la la la laa!
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Monday, August 14, 2006 at 9:32 am (A Bolt of Insight, Yabaadabadoo!)
I’m so excited! I signed up for Punjabi lessons yesterday. Yup yup, I get to learn the coolest language in the world! (I mean if Bhangra is the coolest music, then by extension, Punjabi’s gotta be the coolest language. Ok ok, it’s my mother tongue, so I have that sense of overwhelming pride.) Lessons start on Sept 10th, a couple days after the date that my usmle is currently scheduled for. Only thing I worry about it that the age range in this class starts at age 5. And they give us My Khalsa School school bags and IDs…. hehehe… I will laugh out loud if I end up being that one goofy 24-year-old amongst a huge class of 5-year-olds.
Yesterday was a fun day, I also had a mini-med school reunion with two other med school friends. We ate dinner at a nice Italian restaurant and then watched an outdoor movie sitting on the grass. Familiar faces of the past… it meant a lot. How often do I come by familiar faces each time I move on in life? I’ve yet to meet even one of the friends that I left behind in Singapore six years ago!
I went to the Sikh temple yesterday – the Gurudwara. What a perfect way to start the week! The nice thing about religion (or indeed, my own interpretation of all religions that I know of!) when it comes in the AM is that it makes you start your day with a huge reminder of how there are bigger forces at work in this Universe. And how the world doesn’t revolve around me me me. And how I’m one amongst billions. And how I need to really focus on my goals if I want to make even that tiny speck of difference that I’d like to make in the history of the Universe. I repeat, what a perfect way to start the week!
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