Almost 1/3 of the way through Quarter 1

Coming to the end of week 3 and still busy as ever! I'm actually writing this Thursday night as I will be driving down to Tucson Friday and will be down there the whole weekend, so I won't really have much of a chance to whip anything up.

Nothing super exciting happened this week. Monday we spent our two hour business management class editing each other's resumes, etc. Tuesday we had our second big test, which also happened to be my birthday. So that was super fun. My parents came down for the day so I got to hang out with them and they took me out to the Olive Garden for dinner and everything.

I had also put up a picture of the gift they brought me that my grandmother had given me on Facebook (which blew up with likes and comments), but I will go ahead and add it here again too with the description.

My grandmother put together this shadow box containing old pairs of prescription glasses that span over 7 generations in my family. Grandma, I was so touched when I opened this. I'm sure it will follow me wherever my job as an eye doctor takes me.  

The pair in the upper left hand corner was mygreat great great great grandmother's glasses from around the 1870s. There are glasses from my great great grandmother, my great great aunt, my great grandmother, my grandmother (who gave this to me), my mother (her glasses from high school) and finally the pair in the lower right hand corner are a pair of my old glasses from elementary school.

I may or may have not been singing Taylor Swift's "22" randomly throughout the day, because, well, I did indeed turn 22 this week. This probably also makes me one of the youngest in my class (if not close to the youngest), but hey, I've been used to that almost my entire life.

(Here's a youTube video for your listening pleasure)

This week's Basic Science material has been a lot easier to handle. We've been studying epithelium, connective tissues in general, and blood. Fortunately I've seen the majority of this stuff before, so it's not as overwhelming as last week's stuff was. But as usual, we already get to have another test next Tuesday.

And Friday (tomorrow/today), we will be learning about visual acuity in our methods lab, which I am actually super excited about as it's the first lab where we will be getting to work with our equipment and practicing with the eye charts.

Our professor has also requested that (if we wear them) we not wear our contact lenses to lab and instead wear our glasses. Which will be super fun for me (note: sarcasm). For those of you that haven't read my first post about why I wanted to get into optometry, I am very very (VERY) nearsighted, which means I can't see anything far away...and actually because of the severity of it, I can't see anything clearly beyond 6cm from my face (which is actually a legit optical calculation, not an estimation :P)

So you can probably imagine what my glasses look like. They're pretty thick (even with my 1.74 hi-index lenses, the thinnest plastic lenses you can get today on the market) and my vision becomes very minuscule because of the way the lenses work (i.e. my world shrinks to about 2/3 of its normal size, which kind of messes up my depth perception).

On a more fun note, as I mentioned before, I will be heading down to Tucson tomorrow for the weekend and am SUPER excited. My choir director of the last four years at U of A has invited the Symphonic Choir alumni to sing the national anthem at the UA vs Texas San Antonio football game this Saturday night. So, really wanting to see some of my old friends again, I jumped at the opportunity and will be staying with some friends this weekend. This probably also means I'll be doing nothing but studying Sunday and Monday, but I think its WELL worth the sacrifice.

And that's about it. Until next week!

Optometry Fact (Learned this week, was told about them at my last eye doctor appointment)
Hybrid Contact Lenses (I really want to try these)

Like normal contact lenses, these hybrid contact lenses are worn directly on the eye, but are slightly different then your "average" contact lens. The center of these lenses are made of a hard, gas-permeable material while the outside of the lens is similar to a soft contact lens, made of silicone hydrogel material.

The cool thing about gas perms (hard lenses, I wore them as a kid for 2 years and for about half a year last year) is that they give you very crisp and clear vision, more so than what a soft contact lens can give you. The only thing is, they are a little hard to get used to because of the hardness and having to get your eyelids "callused" and used to blinking over the small pieces of hard material.

But with THESE lenses, the outer material is basically like a soft lens...so you get the comfort of a soft lens and the visual clarity of a hard lens (from what I've read you still have to get used to them, but that time period is much much shorter)

I am required to get an eye exam by the end of the quarter at our Eye Institute (our clinic on campus) and really want to ask about these, since I know it's a specialty that they offer. I have no idea if they can be made in my prescription or not or if I'm a good candidate, but I just thought they sounded like a cool solution to my vision problems :)