Carrot Cake

Yesterday I went shopping with my friends and bought me a small piece of carrot cake. As I sit here right now, I am munching on it and slowly sipping my coffee and man the feeling brings me back to that starbucks by the library...I used to take everything for granted but that will have to change when I go back. I have to start appreciating things around me.

Food here tastes very different. Fruits and veggies are a lot more flavorful than they were back home. Dairy products are good too (and cheap) but everything else is super expensive and tastes different. The carrot cake that I'm eating now for example tastes like gum lol. I don't know what it is and I sure hope and pray to God that they didn't add any alcoholic substances to it but it just doesn't taste like cake :/ I spent my first few days here translating the labels (Dutch to English) and second guessing myself a lot. Even food that I made from scratch, I wasn't very comfortable eating it...not because it didn't taste good but because I had my doubts about their meat or about their milk. The way they store their dairy products is just beyond me. Everything is kept outside! The locals' bodies are used to it, their bodies are more immune to the bacteria that may develop in such cultures than my body. It was terrifying. But you can only read/translate/second guess yourself about goods you buy here for so long--especially if you're in med school.

Med school med school how I heart thee! Things just keep getting more and more interesting as we explore different parts of the body in Anatomy and Embryo! It is fascinating and truly a faith strengthener. I am 100% certain that we couldn't have just been created by an accident like the BBT. There's a greater power building this body.
Everything in medicine makes sense and everything connects and I love how I don't have to worry about the respiratory track of a dolphin or the anatomy of a cockroach's leg and wing or how a plant makes their ATP. We are only learning about humans. Humans!

Speaking of humans, I dissected my first human cadaver on Wednesday. It was such a great feeling. I wanted to blog about it but I was so tired, I went to sleep when I came back. It was very intense. I went in thinking that the smell would be terrible (I have dissected pigs and cats in the past and the formaldehyde smell was unbearable). I got to dissect his shoulder and I held his head. He looked more like a hippie...pony tail, tattoos, ear piercings etc....
I just wish we were given better dissection instructions! It was more like "This is a scalpel, this is a blade, those are the scissors and the pickup is right over there, oh and that's a human body. You have an hour". We did the best we could considering that we had no prior experience, most of us anyway. I very much enjoyed it. We had another lab just yesterday but the cadaver was starting to smell real bad. I felt like I was going to faint but I put it together. It was starting to get very messy because we dived into his upper limb muscles and nerves and of course fat in the process.

I have my Block1 exams next week! I am excited and scared but everyone says that those are the easiest...I have to get back to studying.

God is the best engineer.

Till next time,