Non-School Related: How I lost 40 pounds

So, if you're Facebook friends with me or follow me on Instagram, you've probably seen a couple of posts updating people on how much weight I've been able to lose in the last several months. I've had several of people message me like "Hey, what are you doing to lose weight??" so I thought I would write out pretty much everything I've done so far to get to where I'm at.

I kind of officially started all this about 11 months ago in mid September after seeing some of the photos of myself from vacation and what not.

As much as I want to make an excuse for myself as to why I was the heaviest I had ever weighed, there still really isn't any good excuse for it. Yes I was going to school full time and yes I was working part time during the week and on the weekends. And because of that, I had allowed myself to eat fairly unhealthy and had pretty much zero exercise. The end result being my gaining an additional 10 pounds my last year of college. Not accounting for the extra I had already gained the previous years of college.

I was really unhappy with where I was. Growing up as a kid, I would say I was always on the border between whatever "normal" was and being overweight. I never considered myself skinny by any means and that's just how it was. I was okay with it. What I was not okay with was how all that weight had crept up on me while I was studying my little behind off at school. I mean, it makes sense now that I look at it. I'd be at school all day, come home and study or do homework the rest of the night, eat junk, do no exercise. Duh, of course I was going to gain weight.

So a couple weeks into September last year, I decided I was going to make a change because I was tired of seeing that number on the scale as well as myself in pictures and in the mirror.

I bought myself some desperately needed new running shoes (my previous shoes were over 4 years old) and probably splurged a little more than normal and got the ones I really wanted in hopes that it would motivate me to do more. I also used some of my birthday money to get myself a polar heart monitor watch that would track my workouts with how many calories I burned, etc.

I also started to change my eating habits. I stopped buying the sugary "little kid" cereals that I loved so much. I stopped buying the stupid amounts of soda that I would drink. I didn't really have a specific diet that I stuck to, but my overall effort was to just to eat less.

I then started using my new shoes and heart monitor to go for short runs. I got started by using a Couch to 5k app on my iPod. For those that don't know how those work, it literally starts you running maybe just a minute at a time and then will have you walk a few minutes, then run another minute, then walk and so on. With every week of progress, it slowly increases your running time to 3 minutes at a time or 5 minutes at a time with the idea being at the end of 8 or 12 weeks (however long your program is), you should be able to run a 5k without stopping (or 3.1 miles).

That was rough getting used to. Being at my heaviest, I'd never gotten so tired so fast. Even a couple weeks down the road, after I could tell my lungs were starting to get used to it because I wasn't breathing so hard, my legs would just hurt and hurt while I was running because they probably weren't used to the extra weight I was carrying around.

At my white coat ceremony at the beginning of October
I had lost around 7 pounds at this point.

And that was basically all I did at first. I lost about 11-12 pounds within a couple months. Nothing super drastic, but it was certainly a start.

Then I plateaued. I think part of that was due to Thanksgiving and Christmas. That and winter quarter of school was a lot harder than our fall quarter and I had kind of stopped my exercise routine because I was so stressed out over school. 

At the end of February over our spring break, I decided I was going to start again. I fortunately had not gained any of the weight back that I had lost previously, so it was like I was picking back up where I left off. But I picked it back up with a little more intensity this time around.

I started calorie counting. I know, I know, it seems like over-doing it to a lot of people and seems like its tedious. But, it wasn't until I started doing this that I realized just how much I was overeating. I limited myself to 1200 calories max a day. Some days I'd barely break 1000. I used the MyFitnessPal app to count everything that I ate. And wow, did it work.

As far as food goes, I started using protein shakes and protein meal bars as meal replacements (each about 200 calories). I'd have a small banana and protein shake for breakfast. A small snack before lunch. A protein meal bar for lunch. A small snack when I got home from school. And then a Lean Cuisine frozen meal for my dinner.

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't hard. But unfortunately that's just part of it. For the first month or so, I often went to bed hungry. It wasn't comfortable, but I knew it wasn't supposed to be so I endured on because it was helping drop that number on the scale.

Left: August 2013
Right: March 2014 about 19 pounds lighter

In addition, I picked up running again. But this time, instead of using my Couch to 5k app, I just started going for longer distances. There's a nice 5 mile loop trail very close to where I live. I started jogging it/walking it/jogging it or whatever I could do. As long as my legs didn't feel like they were about to fall off or that I was going to collapse because I felt like I couldn't breathe, I was running. And when I needed to stop, I stopped and walked. This would usually take me about an hour to do and I was doing it at least 4 if not 5 times a week. My heart rate monitor told me that I would burn somewhere between 600 and 700 calories each time.

Once I started this combined with my new eating plan, the weight literally just started falling off. I'm pretty sure I lost another 10 pounds in the course of just 2 to 3 weeks. By the time the school year was done, I was down a total of 30 pounds.

It's been almost 3 months since then and I've dropped another 10 pounds since. I'm not quite as strict on my diet anymore but instead have tried to maintain the mindset of "everything in moderation". Like, yes, I do want that ice cream when I'm out with my family or friends, but I'm going to order the small size and enjoy it. I figure if you let yourself have small treats every now and then, you're going to be less likely to binge later and eat everything in site on account of going crazy from restricting yourself so much.

Another mindset I've been trying to adopt lately, and as cliche as it might sound, is "Eat to Live and not Live to Eat." I'm pretty sure I've always been an emotional eater since the start and I was definitely the type to grab something to eat if I was "bored". Now, simply I'm just trying to eat for the purpose of sustaining myself and keeping my energy where it is needed. Again, it's not an easy thing to adapt to, but I am leaps and bounds ahead of where I was a year ago and because of that, I am super happy with how far I have come.

One more comparison
Far right: About 38 pounds lighter than from the far left

I'm still running a lot when I can. I did a 10k (6.2 miles) at the start of July and finished it in just barely over an hour at about a 10 minutes a mile pace. It was a pretty tough course with running up rocks/jumping over water/etc. so I think that time was pretty decent considering where I was at 6 months before that even. However, right now, I'm just ready for cooler weather! The highs are still well in the 100s in Phoenix, meaning that if I want to run, I have to do it super super early in the morning when it's still only in the mid 80s. I am SO ready for fall! Haha.

About a mile into my 10k race in all my sweaty glory, haha

And that's about it! I am still working at dropping my body fat percentage just a little bit more and attempting to build up some more muscle. Easier said than done because in order for muscle to be gained, you need to eat more, which is the opposite of what I've been doing. It's a learning experience for sure.

Left: White Coat Ceremony October 2013
Right: Friend's Wedding Reception August 2, 2014

If you're reading this for the purpose of wanting to lose weight yourself, then I hope it helped! I know that everyone's body and metabolisms are different and what worked for me might not work for you and vice versa, but this was my own personal story of what worked for me. Honestly, it's a lifestyle change overall. You have to be able to be okay with the fact that it might take a little while to get to where you want.

It might be hard, but trust me when I say that it was all worth it in the end. I honestly have never had so much energy and have never felt so good before which makes me just want to keep it up.

Longest Overdue Post Ever: 1st year = Check

So...you might have guessed it, but grad school is pretty busy. And hectic. And just everything. I was pretty much way overwhelmed with everything the entire quarter and was still just as much even once I was done with my last test. Which...might explain why the last thing I posted was in February. Sorry about that.

I actually might have gotten something written and posted, but the end of the quarter ended up being a little crazy for multiple reasons that I won't dive into. Ultimately in the end, I passed all my classes and am officially considered a 2nd year optometry student now. PLUS I had to hop a plane to Iowa literally the day after my last test to see family and help celebrate my grandma's 80th birthday. So all of that = no post from Sherah.

But! Here I am in the end.

So! What all has happened in the last 5 months? Glad you asked.

As far as skills and practice go, we learned a couple more crucial ones this last quarter.

1. Keratometry

This was a pretty quick one and we only spent one class period and lab learning it. The thing above is called a keratometer and we use it to measure how curved a person's cornea is. This gives us pretty important information for things like contact lenses. It was a little tricky to learn at first, but by the end of the one lab, we all had it down pretty well.

It basically just looks like a miniature telescope. This is what we're looking at when we're doing the actual "measuring" in case you were wondering.

2. Retinoscopy

This might have been one of the hardest things to learn, but is ultimately one of the coolest things (I think) once you start to get the hang of it.

Despite it's name, a retinoscope is not a scope that directly looks at the retina - that would be an ophthalmoscope. I bring that up because we had exam questions written by our basic science faculty (non-optometry of course) that would give a scenario where an optometrist was performing "retinoscopy" and noted certain findings of the person's retina that would indicate (insert whatever eye disease we learned here). So wrong. So! Here's what it REALLY does!

This is how we can estimate someone's prescription without the patient telling us anything. This piece of equipment shines a long narrow beam of light across the patient's eye and we move it back and forth and side to side over the person's pupil. Based on the optics of the person's eye and how light travels itself (which is a whole entire optics lecture in itself that I won't go into), the light will either move in the same direction as you move the scope across, or it will move in the exact opposite direction. What we're looking for is no "movement" of light ultimately and that the whole pupil simply lights up when we move the light across.



We do this by adding lenses in front of the person's eye. Once you get the correct powered lens in place, the whole pupil will simply light up and the power of that lens will be roughly what the person's prescription is. AND they didn't have to tell you a thing. Cool, right?

Side note: This is what is used for small children or babies that would be unable to physically tell you what looks clear or not in the event that they need some sort of correction for their eyes.

I pretty much just made it sound really easy. This took a lot of practice to get used to and to be completely honest, I would only consider myself semi-ok at it. Our professor ensured us that this skill would be something we'd be perfecting pretty much all throughout school, so I'm not too worried.

And lastly...

3. Refraction!

This was the skill that the majority of us were sooo anxious to learn because it's what you mostly associate with optometry. I loved learning it because it's so cool getting to be the one on the other side of everything - helping the person in front of you go from seeing nothing on the chart to seeing 20/20 or better.

So! If you've ever been to the eye doctor before, you probably recognize that thing that's in front of my face up above. This is called a phoropter and it's an awesome tool. Within it is a huge set of lenses that we can control by putting them in front of someone's eye to simulate a pair of glasses.

A lot of times, the doctor will first do retinoscopy (what I just talked about above) and get an idea of where the person's prescription is, especially if they're a brand new patient and have no idea what their eyes are like. They'll then put that "ret" prescription into the phoropter and then somewhat "fine tune" it based on what the patient says that they like.

So this is where we get that whole "1 or 2" thing. We give the patient options with certain lenses. We make the changes based on what they say. If we can get them to 20/20 - great! We stop, write out their prescription, and that's it. Little bit more to it than that of course, but ultimately, that's what's going on.

Other Classes

So, all of the above we learned in just our theory and methods class this last quarter.

Adding to our ocular anatomy class that we took winter quarter, we had to take ocular physiology in the spring. Lots of rote memorization. For those that don't know, anatomy refers to the physical structure of something while physiology refers to how it works. I actually did better in this class than ocular anatomy and overall it wasn't too bad. Lots of studying, but what else is new, right?

We had another quarter of geometric and physical optics course this quarter as well. Basically a giant math based/physics class. These are the kind of classes I do best at (fortunately). It's one thing to be able to memorize a whole bunch of things, but I honestly do better when I have to apply information to a problem. So that class went pretty well. We will be moving onto ophthalmic optics this next year and will be getting more information that's a little more applicable :)

And lastly, we are DONE with our basic science courses, or as we called them Basi. I mentioned a little before about how they worked, but this class was literally the epitome of time consuming. Anywhere from 10 to 14 hour lectures a week (all on Tuesday thru Thursday) with a test every week Tuesday morning at 7 AM. This class was the reason why my weekends were gone. I had a huge test to study for every week, so naturally you have no choice but to use that free time on Saturday and Sunday to study because you HAD to, or you failed.

This class accounted for almost 15 credit hours this quarter for us (sectioned into 3 official classes that you got grades for) with the last one being the gross anatomy of the head of neck. This was the messy one because we had to spend at least 6 to 9 hours a week in our anatomy lab. Imagine a huge room with 22 metal tables, every single one containing a human cadaver. And they left all the dissecting to us.

We were assigned groups and one body for the remainder of the quarter. For whatever reason, I was the only girl in my group and was with 7 other guys - 1 of them optometry, the other 6 being dental students, and of course our cadaver was male as well. We used scalpels and other tools to cut through skin, muscle, tissue, you name it. My least favorite day was the day I stood there for an hour and a half straight just scraping and removing fat off of our person's shoulder region so we could get a nice clean look at all the muscles/nerves/arteries. I don't gross out easily, but that was definitely one of those days where I was glad I didn't eat much before hand in fear that it wouldn't have stayed down. I got a stronger stomach further down the road, but I definitely had trouble when we had to decapitate our cadaver. I'll just leave that at that.

This was a really tough course as we had practicals physically based on the cadavers. We would have questions where they might tie a string around one little artery in the cadaver's face and we had to be able to name the specific artery of the specific branch "x". They loved "higher end" questions that required you to know multiple things too where they might put a pin in a muscle, but instead ask what nerve innervates that specific muscle. So...you had to know what muscle it was in order to answer the question and then know the other information on top of that.

Tough. Really tough. Especially muscles and nerves in the face because they're tiny.

Anyways. After all that, I survived. Barely. I don't think I've ever been so excited to be done with a class. Ask me that again though once I am finished with second year, haha.

And that is my (very long) recap of our last quarter. School starts up again on August 25th and I am doing my best not to do anything these next 2 weeks, haha. Well, at least anything that requires a high amount of cognitive activity.

I will be doing a couple more posts here soon before school starts: one talking about the upcoming year and the other briefly talking about my weight loss journey and basically how I managed to lose 40 pounds in under a year, with almost 30 of those being since the last time I posted on here at the end of February (crazy, right?). So watch for those! I will be posting links to them as I finish them.

Until then, hope you have a great day!

Grades are all posted and Winter Quarter is Over! Recap

*Insert huge sigh of relief here*

Firstly, I know I've been slacking on the posts. Once we came back from Christmas break, we were immediately hit with multiple tests and practicals, and honestly there for a while, it was all I could do to get enough study and practice time and still manage to just get an okay amount of sleep. Most Fridays after class was done, I would just come home and sleep.

Looking at my last post, I almost chuckled a little because the big thing we were doing was learning to flip a person's eyelid inside out. And we considered that mildly invasive. Since then, we've come a very, very long ways on our clinical skills as well as what we now consider "invasive". And it'll probably just keep getting worse from here on, haha.

So, since it's been a while, here are the things I've learned how to do and have been tested over and considered proficient in thus far:

1. Slit Lamp

Late night practicing with one of my fellow classmates, Celine

I mentioned in a previous post that we were just getting into the basics of slit lamp when we first came back from Thanksgiving break. Now, I am able to perform an entire slit lamp exam on the anterior segment of the eye - meaning I know how to look at all the different structures of the front part of the eye like the conjunctiva of the eyelids (lid flipping), sclera, the cornea, the iris, the lens inside the eye, etc. Although it sounds easy to just "look" at something on the eye, each structure requires a different illumination technique in order to really get a proper look at it. For example, my left hand is on the illumination tower and it moves on a full 180 degree axis. I can create different widths of light with it too. Depending on what you're looking at, you need a different width of light with a certain angle of the illumination tower to look at the cornea as opposed to the lens. It was a little overwhelming trying to learn how to do everything, but with many hours of practice (and 2 practicals), I've finally gotten the hang of it.

When we are tested over the use of this in our practicals, our proctors can view what we are looking at through a "teaching tube", which you can actually see coming out the other side of the instrument right by my head.

2. Goldmann Tonometry

I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of this before school. I kind of knew the word "tonometry", but that was it. Tonometry is just the act of measuring someone's eye pressure. Lots of clinics will have the "air puff" machine that can do this (worst machine ever), but this is another way of doing it.

This also required us getting used to putting drops in each others eyes. Since this thing actually touches your eye, your eyes have to be numbed (otherwise it'd probably hurt a lot). Essentially, the tip touches the cornea and flattens it out with "x" amount of pressure. However much pressure it takes to flatten the cornea is said to be the intraocular pressure. We do this on the slit lamp and we're looking at something like this when we do it.

The half green circles show up when the tip is on the cornea and is made by a fluorescein (yellow) dye put in the eye (the yellow turns green because of the blue light we use). We know we have the pressure right when those circles are equal size to each other and they are just barely touching on the insides...as opposed to this.

Essentially, we have to move the slit lamp to vertically/horizontally align those circles. Then we make the insides "touch" my adjusting the pressure applied.

I know the tip consists of a type of prism that makes these circles, but I'm not entirely sure of how the light/optics work going through them to give us what we're seeing. I just know this is how we do it, haha.

This took a lot of practice to get good at. The thing that stinks about anything like this in school though is to get practice, you have to be willing to sit for other people to practice on you. So I had my eyes numbed plenty of times in order to get decent at this technique. It also took a bit to be "not afraid" of this, considering the nature of it.

3. Direct Ophthalmoscopy
Last one, I promise, for this quarter anyways.



This is something we learned pretty recently and had to get semi decent with because we had a practical over it 2 weeks after we learned it.

So this tool just allows us to look at the back of someone's eye through their pupil. So you can see the different parts of the retina and the optic nerve, along with the blood vessels and everything. The first time we worked with it, we all had one eye dilated to make it easier.

Once I got the hang of it, it was actually really cool. We learned how to asses the optic nerve, the blood vessels, and the background of the retina.



Essentially, we're looking at bits and pieces of the picture above. That round yellowish circle is the optic nerve. We all had these pictures taken of our eyes last quarter in the clinic.

Then, to test us over it, during our practical I had to look at my patient's optic nerve with my ophthalmoscope, get it in focus (the person's prescription will affect if it is in focus or not), and try and get a good look at the back of the eye eye. During the test we had to do this undilated, which is much much harder because the pupil is so much smaller and constricts a lot because of the light shining in. Once I was done, I was given 4 pictures that looked similar to the one above and I had to identify which one was my patient's. This was actually pretty difficult, but I did get it right, so woot!

My other classes for the quarter

So, everything above was just for one of my classes this quarter, which is my clinical skills and methods class.

We were still taking our basic science class (10-14 lecture hours a week) with our test every Tuesday at 7 AM over the previous week's material. I think we are all slowly burning out on this class. It's a huge time commitment itself between class time and study time, especially while trying to manage stuff for our actual optometry classes.

We finished our ocular anatomy class, which had a lot of memorization. Our tests were pretty tricky and long. Our midterm was over 60 multiple choice questions and the final that I had earlier this week was 105 questions. Not easy multiple choice questions either. Our professors love "which of the following is not true" type questions and will have 3 different answers for some followed by "all of the above" or "only two of the above". Sometimes one question will require you to know at least 3, 4, or 5 different facts about what they're asking. I hate those types of questions, haha.

And I just finished our geometric optics class yesterday. This class was very much like a math or physics type class, which are the types of classes that I actually like better, even though the tests were a little brutal. The picture below is our equation sheet from just this quarter. To be completely honest, after all the studying, I pretty much knew the majority of these and didn't really use it much on our final. But it gives you an idea of how much we covered in the last 10 weeks or so. Fun stuff.

And really, that about sums it all up. This quarter was definitely way more challenging than the fall quarter just with the amount of everything. Just in the last 10 days, I had 7 separate exams. A few weeks ago, we had a crazy 2 and a half week time period where we had 8 exams.

We actually had 20 exams just this quarter - over a 10 and a half week time period. That's not counting all the homework, assignments, presentations, and quizzes either. I've really had to crack down on how I manage my time because it really does matter. But, I'm still hanging in there. I definitely slept a lot yesterday and last night. I probably needed it. :)

And now we are off and out of school all next week for Spring Break. I think we're all relieved to get a little bit of time off and rest.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

So we learned how to flip each other's eyelids inside out...

Another week come and gone. And just another week until we get our second Christmas break. I'm already ready for it, haha.

My exam on Tuesday for basic sciences went fairly well, especially considering how hard it was. We had to know all of the muscles of the hand, the forearm, the upper arm, and the back including 4 different things about each muscle: the origin, the insertion, what nerve it is innervated by, and its action. So for example:

The Deltoid Muscle
It originates (where it starts) on the spine of the scapula (shoulder blade), the acromion (a part of the shoulder blade), and the lateral third of the clavicle (collar bone). It inserts into the deltoid tuberosity of the humerus. It is innervated by the axillary nerve. And it's action is to extend, flex, or abduct (move outward) the arm.

That's for one of the muscles. Did I mention there was a total of 47 of them we had to know for this test? Oh, and that only accounted for a little over 1/3 of our test. We were lectured on other material besides this that we were also accountable for. I think it's safe to say the majority of us would have rather been shot in the foot than study and take and pass this exam. It was rough. But hey! I passed and did okay, so I'm not complaining. We just have to retain that material for the next exam as well...Ugh

And I know, I'm in optometry school, right? So why do have to learn so much extraneous information that has nothing to do with the eye? We've all been asking ourselves the same thing. While one part of our boards are based on basic sciences, they will not be testing us to this detail. So...right now we're all kind of having to endure it and stick it out. If anything, we stay sane by venting to each other about it :)

On a more optometry related portion of optometry school...

Our optics class is really starting to pick up. Because we only have 3 hours of lecture a week, we are kind of forced to move really fast through the material to ensure we cover it all. Unfortunately, this means going over concepts I'm not quite able to grasp in class because of how fast we're going. I find myself having to figure stuff out later at home, when I'm going at my own pace. We already have our first midterm on Thursday morning at 7 AM for that class. So lots of studying for me in the next week between our two exams.

Methods was slightly terrifying today (see: title of this post), but still somewhat fun. We were still working on the slit lamp, but learning how to examine all the parts of the eyes including the eyelids, eyelashes, sclera (white part of the eye), and the conjunctiva (stuff that lines the inside of the lids and part of the sclera). But in order to examine all, we have to look underneath the eyelids as well. Not such a big deal for the bottom lid...you just kind of pull it down and push up. But for the upper eyelid...it requires you to flip the lids inside out to really be able to see that part of the conjunctiva. Here - have a picture.

Sorry to those of you that are squeamish about eye stuff. It honestly doesn't hurt...it just feels really strange. I think I was more scared to do it on someone though. I did manage to do it on 2 different people. It involves pulling their eyelashes out and using a cotton swab to kind of push the lid down to flip back up and over.

Apparently my eyes are extremely easy to do this on because of 2 reasons: 1) I have really big eyes and 2) I have really long eyelashes (good for grasping). So hey, whatever works.

We also learned how to measure the palpebral aperture of the eye, which is just the widest portion of the eye going up and down. Apparently I got pretty big readings (surprise, surprise). Because we're so used to classifying tests being normal or abnormal, one of my partners asked "...so are your eyes not normal if they're way bigger than what they're supposed to be?" I laughed.

Anyways, that was about it for school stuff. The dean of the optometry college had a big Christmas party over at his house last Saturday, which was super fun. Every inch of their huge house was decorated in Christmas decorations and they had tons of good food (and deserts). Here's some pictures from that.

Our Dean dressed as Santa :)

This ferris wheel was moving on their coffee table. Their house was beautiful.

And we took a class picture this morning while we were all in our scrubs. I liked it so much, I set it as our cover photo on facebook, but here's the full thing :)

And that's about it. Until next week! I'm excited for our break...

Back in the saddle and Busier than EVER! :)

Hello all! So, as you probably noticed, I took a break from blogging while we were on Thanksgiving break, (which was since November 6th). We were out a whole 3 and a half weeks and we just started back this Monday. It's a new quarter, new schedule, and just new everything pretty much. Lots going on and I'll be plenty busy this quarter until mid February or so.

So here we go! Here's a brief idea of what my schedule is like this quarter.

So...it's a little intense. We're taking about 25 credits this quarter and our BASI classes (all the blue ones) account for 15 of those alone. On top of that, I'm taking Ocular anatomy (lots of memorization), Geometric and Physical Optics (lots of math/physics), and our continued Clinical Service class and lab that I took last quarter. We also have more exams in these other classes and more practicals. The two weeks after we come back from Christmas break in a few weeks has four exams and two practicals alone. Which brings me to my next point.

We just started back, but we only have 2 more weeks until they let us off for Christmas and New Years, which is slightly exciting. We get the 21st of December off through the 2nd of January and then we have one day of class that Friday the 3rd before the weekend again. So if we can make it through these next few weeks, we get a short break again here soon. I'm more than okay with it.

This week definitely felt a little long (we have longer days now) and busy. We've already had an entire week of our BASI (basic science) lectures and have an exam this upcoming Tuesday again, as usual. We're starting to get into the anatomy systems more and more and actually Tuesday after our exam we have a 3 hour lab where we will be working on actual cadavers. This will be a first for me (I've only ever dissected a rabbit/frogs/etc. in college biology). I think I'll be okay, but it's more the smell of formaldehyde that bothers me and tends to give me a bad headache. So 3 hours of that should be great fun. 

This week we ended in our clinical services class and lab getting into the basics of the slit lamp (above). It's basically a glorified microscope that we can move around and see pretty minute details of the eye/lids/retina with a few different colored lights. My partner for lab today snapped this picture of my eye while she was practicing on me.

My iris up and close! 

We will be spending the next few weeks getting more familiar with this instrument since its a huge part of what we will be doing in the future, so for now we just barely got our feet wet today and learned what the different knobs and levers did and proper technique. The rest of the time today we spent doing full exams on our partners with the skills that we learned last quarter, so we can keep it fresh and because our instructor told us to. :)

And that was about it for this week. I rewarded myself with burger king chicken strips and a milkshake on my way home tonight after a long day/week at school (I know, healthy, right?) Which reminds me. Back a while ago I said I was going to be getting myself back into shape and working on losing some weight simultaneously (somewhere around mid September). Thus far I have lost a little over 12 pounds total, which I am pretty happy with considering I haven't done a whole lot different. That was just from running a few times a week and eating smaller portions of food. I stopped buying "junk" from the grocery store and stopped my soda drinking (almost entirely) and that's what's done it. I do occasionally allow myself a soda if I go out to eat with friends or family though, but that's about it. Before, I was drinking at least a couple every day.

So I'm happy with my progress AND I managed not to gain back anything while I was home over break and over Thanksgiving (which is an accomplishment...having all those good homemade meals that my Mom made :) ) And I'm still going at it, slowly but surely. Once I get into the swing of this quarter, I will probably work out a better exercise routine for myself so that I don't plateau at this weight  :P .

Until next week, that's about it! This weekend will be filled with studying and homework, and a little bit of extra sleep of course. I've slept probably around 12 hours total over the last 3 nights. Good times.

Hope you all have a wonderful next week!

P.S. Oh, and how could I forget? Here's my wonderful Christmas tree that is in my living room. :)

Decorating

Eyes a little crazy, but the tree is pretty at least! :)

Quarter in review

Friday afternoon! Oh where do I begin with the last couple weeks? Couple things went on that I didn't write about last week.

So my 5k was LAST Saturday that I ran. A few weeks prior I had seen that they were auditioning people to sing the national anthem for the event and thinking that sounded like fun, I recorded myself (I used to sing a lot for games back in high school) and I sent it in. Well about 3 days before Saturday, I got an e-mail back asking if I would sing. Haha, and so I did. It went pretty well. Although I hadn't done it in so long (and in front of a LOT of people) that I got pretty nervous. Then I ran the 5k.

It was a color run, so I got completely covered in colored corn-starch-based powder. While it was super fun, I don't think I will be doing any more. My lungs have been acting a little asthmatic lately to begin with and all that colored powder in the air aggravated everything. I was coughing the whole way driving home and still even when I got home, still found it a little hard to breathe! But it was still fun and I got to do it with a lot of my class mates.

Then this week was our last week of classes! Today we started with an in class lab exam where we had to watch around 11 different videos and analyze them and answer questions about each video. It was pretty tricky, especially since we could only watch each video twice with no repeats. The questions weren't exactly easy either, but I feel that it went OK for the most part.

Then our final lab proficiency was this afternoon. 10 of us come in at a time (we are assigned times) and are graded on how we perform each of the tests on a class mate that we had learned throughout the quarter. We had 20 minutes to do a case history on them, meaning introducing ourselves, asking them what they're seeing us for, their past medical history, blah blah blah. I didn't count, but I probably had around at least 30 different questions I had to remember to ask without having any paper to look off of.

I had to take the person's blood pressure (which is so great since we're all so nervous today and our BP is high), test their visual acuities (if they can see 20/20 or not) for far away and for up close. Then we had a special book with glasses that tests 3D vision, a few cover tests to determine how the person's eyes are aligned (which I think I described in my last post), a test to see how close we can bring a target to someone's face before it splits into two, testing the eye muscles and knowing what muscles are working where, testing visual fields (or the person's side vision), and finally testing pupils to look for appropriate constriction/dilation to light and no light and then measure the person's pupillary distance (or how far apart their eyes are). Alll of that in 20 minutes or less.

Mine actually went really well (my blood pressure was borderline Stage 1 hypertension because I was nervous today, haha). I'm almost positive I didn't miss any major points and was able to correctly identify almost everything. Such a relief to have it all done though!

So now! All that is left is 3 more finals next week: one Monday, one Tuesday, one Wednesday and then we are officially on break. I plan on heading back to Holbrook and spend some time with my parents as well as the dog and the cat :)

Last but not least, one of my classmates, who is now our historian, put this together for us. It has videos and pictures from the start of the quarter up until now of all of us. We all thought it was great! She only had it posted to facebook, so I screen captured it on my computer and added just a couple comments explaining some things in the video.

Enjoy!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMdqiAhAoeU&feature=youtu.be 

Is it time for our break yet?

Not a whole lot went on this week at school. We're down to only about a week and a half left of classes before finals start kicking in. Compared to other finals weeks I've had at U of A, this quarter's finals week really doesn't look too bad :)

After our test on bacteria/viruses/antibiotics on Tuesday (which went pretty well), I was pretty dead tired and went to bed early that day. I woke up the next morning (Wednesday) and felt like I caught some type of stomach bug, so I spent the majority of the day resting in bed and sipping clear fluids (I had no appetite all day).

Then Wednesday late afternoon I had to go take a 3 hour CPR training and certification class (that I had signed up for a few months ago) for school. I managed to make it and felt okay through almost all of it. They did make us do 6 full minutes of chest compressions to the beat of "Another one bites the dust"... haha. So if anything, keeping that up was a little tiresome.

I'm feeling much better now, but still very tired. And unfortunately I'll have to do a bit more studying this weekend to make up for all the class I had to miss. I guess these things happen though.

We studied vital signs in my methods lab and practiced taking everyone's blood pressure. My blood pressure had been a tad high a few months ago, but I'm pretty sure all the running I've been doing lately has brought it down to a relatively normal level, so that's good to know I'm doing something right. The weight loss is still going pretty well also. I backtracked a little when family was in town a few weeks ago (we went out to eat quite a few times), but I managed to get back where I was and am down a total of 7 pounds, which I'm still pretty happy with considering everything I'm trying to keep up with :)

And speaking of running, my 5K is coming up and is next Saturday. I didn't get a lot of running done this week with being sick and all, but I'm still looking forward to next weekend. Should be pretty fun since quite a few of my class mates are doing it as well.

And really...that's about it. Until next time, hope everyone has a good week! :)

Optometry Fact of the Week

Esophoria

In optometry, when we talk about "fusion", we're referring to how you just see one image even thought you're using two eyes. I'm sure most people have seen someone with a strabismus, or a "lazy eye", where one eye tends to turn in or out from the other, but there's also something called a "phoria" that most people have without realizing it (like me).

A phoria has to do with how our eye muscles work "naturally" and where our eyes naturally want to turn when they're not actively looking at something. Fusion is still possible (meaning anyone with a phoria won't see double), but when we just use one eye, the other eye will go to it's "happy place" and rest in its natural position. We detect this with an alternating "cover test" where we cover one eye and quickly uncover it and cover the other. In someone that has a phoria, the eye that was just uncovered will generally move either in or out a little bit to refocus on what they're looking at.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyIA-dl49Lg

This is a really good example of an "esophoria" (eso meaning inward). See how her eyes turn out a little whenever they're uncovered? Meaning her eyes naturally turn in when they are covered. (And actually, this girl has a tropia as well, meaning her left eye is like a "lazy eye")

Anyways! Esophoria is also what my eyes exhibit when only one of my eyes is covered. I'm only one of a few in my class. The rest are mostly exophoric (meaning their eyes naturally turn out) or they are orthophoric (meaning their eyes are aligned straight all the time). This isn't really a big deal or anything to be concerned about, but I find it interesting.

And I'm aware this is way more complex than what I usually talk about, but I find this stuff super interesting. And if I explain it out on here, it helps me study for my upcoming tests :)

White Coat Ceremony Shenanigans

Hey all, so I skipped blogging last week since my parents were in town and I was busy doing white coat ceremony stuff, but I am here now! And we only have 3 weeks left of this quarter before we get a little over 3 and a half weeks off for Thanksgiving!!! (Can you tell I'm excited?)

So yeah! Our white coat ceremony was a week ago today and what an awesome/fun experience it was. If you haven't heard of a white coat ceremony before, it's basically a small ceremony that schools will have for health-related professions to somewhat "signify" the student's transition into clinical practice (ya know, since lots of doctors wear white coats). So we all had our turn with our names being called to walk up on stage, have our coat put on us by the dean of the optometry college and some of the head faculty, and take lots of pictures with all of us wearing our snazzy white coats.

The entire Arizona College of Optometry Class of 2017

All of us getting our white coats!

So the picture above was put together by a brother of one my classmates who was kind enough to take pictures of ALL of us having our coats put on and then arrange it like this. We all thought (and still think) this is the coolest thing ever, especially since we're a relatively small class and are finally getting around to knowing everyone.

For my methods class, we had learned all about visual acuities and such (like if you can see 20/20 or not) and how to test for them. One of our assignments was to make our own visual acuity chart and bring them in the day of the white coat ceremony (we still had class that morning) so that we could hang them up in our lab so that all the parents/family could see them too. I decided on a music themed one, as seen below :)

"If music be the food of love play on" - William Shakespeare
20/20 (bottom) line: Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do

This was kind of a fun assignment, but I decided to make it hard on myself apparently and draw out all the letters myself. All of the sizes had to be accurate for a proper test distance (like 20 feet away), so I was literally using a straight edge ruler drawing out every single letter both to measure it, and to get the lines as straight as possible. So that took some time, plus doing all the math for the sizes of the letters and doing calculations to figure out the "critical detail" of each letter, which is optometry talk for "1/5" of the letter size (like the arms on the I are 1/5 as tall as the entire I itself). But I thought it still came out well.

My parents were able to come down as well and got to see some of our cool classrooms with all our equipment as well (which I have several pictures of up on facebook).

But yeah! We are literally down to only 3 weeks left, which means my "finals week" starts 3 weeks from today with my proficiency practical in my methods class (doing all the eye tests in front of someone) so over these next few weeks I will probably be spending some time in our lab practicing on people to make sure I have our skills down. I can't believe how fast this is going.

Classes are still going well! I've taken another 3 exams since my last post (2 basic science tests, 1 methods/theory test) and I did really well on all of them. I think I've finally gotten my study system down and know what works/what doesn't work for me. 

Until next week!

Optometry Fact

Snellen Eye Chart

This is the typical "eye chart" you probably see somewhere when your vision needs to be tested. Basically, the way it works is the lowest line you can read from a certain calibrated distance is your "visual acuity". So if FELOPZD is the lowest line you can read, you have a 20/25 visual acuity. In layman's terms, what you can see from 20 feet away, other people with normal vision can see from 25 feet away...indicating your vision might be just a little bit worse than normal.

This isn't the exact science definition of what 20/20 or 20/30 means, but generally is what makes the most sense to people when we explain it. If you're REALLY curious to what they mean, you can ask me and I can give you all kinds of definitions and words to explain the laws behind it. But....it might be kind of boring :)

Half Way Done

Today's post will probably be pretty short. Not a whole lot happening and I have 2 tests this upcoming Monday and Tuesday that I need to start studying for in about an hour and not stoping until both my tests are done on Tuesday morning :)

This weeks basic science test went really well. Had I not changed one of my answers going back through my test, I would have had an A on it. The test covered multiple lectures about cancer, pediatric diseases, multiple different types of inheritance, analyzing genotypes, and newborn screening. I did spend a lot of time studying last weekend, so I'm glad it paid off.

My theories and methods class today learned a lot about using prisms and how to diagnose different types of eye misalignments - and using prisms to correct the alignment. It was super interesting especially after a year at LensCrafters and knowing why we were putting prisms in peoples glasses and why I had to make sure they measured as the doctor's prescription ordered. Super interesting stuff and it made the 5 hours we were in lecture and lab fly by.

We all got to pick up our white coats on Wednesday and NEXT Friday is our white coat ceremony. If you've never heard of a white coat ceremony, it's basically become one of those things many medically affiliated schools do for their students that kind of officially marks our transition to the clinical health science side of things. We have to look nice and our names get called, we walk across a stage and one of the optometry faculty puts a white coat on us. Nothing too big, but it's one of those "one time things" that we get to do.

Last week, my sweet little betta fish, Zeta, passed away. I'd had him almost 2 years, so he did pretty well for a little fish. Over a week later, it made me sad walking past his empty tank, so I went and picked up a new friend.

His name is Delta. I've owned Betta fish for a loooong time now and I have this thing where I always name them after a greek letter (since Beta is a greek letter itself). Coincidentally, delta (looks like a triangle) is also the same symbol for prism in optometry speak. So it was very appropriate to get him this week as we were learning about them.

And my brief blip on my getting in shape/weight loss thing is that it is still going well! I lost another 2 pounds since last week (5 pounds total) and I'm still running. I'm up to 2 miles and am able to run the majority of it. Still walking a little, but I'm gettin' there. :) I've stopped drinking soda and am eating smaller portions of food, which I think is also contributing.

Aaaand now I'm off to study. My optometry fact of the week will have to be about optometry using prisms and that prism is represented by the greek letter delta. See, ya learned a little, right? :) Have a good week!

Week 4: Mixing it Up

So...not a WHOLE lot to report this week. I'm finally getting into the swing of things and am starting to get my time management worked out as far as how much I need to be spending on various things for school.

So last weekend I was in Tucson and had soo so much fun. I stayed with one of my previous coworkers from LensCrafters Friday night. We ate food and watched movies and woke up a little early to go have breakfast at IHOP before she had to go to work. I spent a few hours at the Starbucks studying and enjoying my first pumpkin spice latte of the season and then went to visit some of my old coworkers, which was super fun seeing and talking to them all again. Then, Saturday night, about 15 U of A alumni joined the Symphonic Choir (my old choir) and sang the national anthem at the football game that night. I didn't stay for the game, but we did end up winning.

I stayed the night with one of my friends from choir that I had a ton of my undergrad classes with. We were up until the late hours of the night singing/guitar playing/ukulele playing and making videos. Here was one of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jTu80_OCWk

(I can't get the small video to embed here, so here's the link)

So...yeah, I had so much fun and it was honestly just a nice break. I probably didn't get as much studying in as I would have liked to, but it was most definitely worth it.

In the realm of our Basic Science classes, we have officially finished course 1501 and are onto 1502, so we've already gotten one of our final grades for the first course and from now on, any other grades won't be factored into that score. It's kind of nice to start with a fresh slate again. Still lots of material though. 

Today in our methods lecture/lab, we learned about eye movements, the eyes working together, and how your eyes accomodate  (which is what people start having trouble with once they hit about 40 :) and they need reading glasses). So we practice on each other, getting their visual accuities (like if they can see 20/20 or not), moving objects around and watching their eyes move, etc. and we had to practice documenting everything as well. Eventually, at the end of the quarter, we will have a practical where we will have to perform all of these things in front of professors on someone and will receive a grade, so at least we are getting plenty of people to practice on now. 

Oh, and another un-optometry related note (because I feel like if I put it here and people can read about it, I'll be more likely to stick with it), I am officially back into working on getting into shape and losing some weight at the same time. Right now I am trying to run at least 5 nights a week (I registered to do a 5K run at the end of October) and while I am still in my first week back to running, I can tell it won't take too long to get back to a point of feeling like I'm not going to die while doing so :) I even picked up a fancy schmancy(?) heart monitor watch that keeps track of my heart rate while exercising and calculates how many calories I've burned (based on age, weight, height) and my average heart rate over the entire workout. I had it up to 196 beats per minute last night on my run and supposedly my max is supposed to be 198 (220 - your age). 

Below are my "weight" jars. An idea I found on pinterest. Each pound represents a pebble. So once you've lost a pound, you can move a pebble from the "Pounds Left" to "Pounds Lost" jar. I thought it would be a neat visual for myself to see how much I've accomplished as well as be a reminder to keep going :)

I figure losing weight and getting into shape is never going to get easier, so I don't know why I've put it off for so long. So I'm going to do it the long way and do it right by eating better and exercising a little more. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Maybe every 3 weeks or so, I'll post a brief blip of how I'm doing and how much weight I've lost. My goal is to get back to at LEAST my pre-college weight (haha) and then a little more, so right now my total goal is to lose 40 pounds and I've lost 3 so far this week. So...so far so good. 

And as another (minor) incentive, I've decided once I've hit 20 pounds lost (half way), I'll get my hair cut. It's very very super long at the moment and probably needs something to be done with it soon. Here's some pictures in case you haven't seen me recently. 

 It's long, right?

ANYWAYS...that's it for now. Cue the optometry fact of the week.

OPTOMETRY FACT

Your eye is controlled by 6 muscles (SIX!) all attached to the eye. The names (if you care) of these muscles are the Superior Rectus, the Inferior Rectus, the Lateral Rectus, the Medial Rectus, the Superior oblique, and the Inferior Oblique. All of these muscles work together to produce different movements like moving the eye up or down, from side to side, or when they rotate in or out. 

We made "eye models" of the attached muscles today in lab. How cool are these? Haha. The pieces of tape represent all of the muscles. The fuzzy fiber sticking out of the back in the picture on the left is the optic nerve. The toothpicks just allow us to "grab" the eye and pull on one of the muscles to see what its action is (if it moves it up or down or to the side)

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 :)

Week 2 - Let the overwhelmingness begin

So, week 2 just finished a little while ago and we are already about 1/5th of the way through the quarter. It's flying by, but that sure doesn't mean that we aren't busy.

Our first exam was on Tuesday, and I'm happy to say that the studying I did pretty much all weekend and Monday paid off. Our exam was at 7 in the morning and we had to be there by 6:40 to start "checking in" to the testing center...which is basically just a big room with a couple hundred computers on desks with separators between each space (which is kind of nice...no one looking off your papers, no distractions if you keep your head down). Since I live about 10 miles away, I left pretty early so I could get there in plenty of time to still look over all my notes one last time, so I got there before 6. Ugh.

And if having a test at 7 in the morning wasn't bad enough, we started another unit in the same class the same day with 4 hours of class. All of us were pretty dead tired and starting new material right after was the last thing we wanted to do.

So now, Friday is here and we're all gearing up for our next exam that is on Tuesday again (these tests happen every week). This is our exam over Metabolism and supposedly one of the hardest from what we've heard from all the upperclassmen. So guess what I'll be doing all weekend? Not relaxing, I guess. However, the test is on the morning of my birthday, so I plan on taking that night off from any studying/homework/etc. and just enjoy it.

We've all been busy making ourselves "study aides" too to help with this exam. Here's my laminated "study" board I made last night.

This is our "metabolic map" where we have many of the reactions going on throughout the body with your metabolism. We will be given this on the exam, but what's missing are all the "enzymes" that take place of the little arrows between each thing. So I have dry erase markers to practice filling them in over and over so that part of it will at least be a little easier next week.

I think we're all a little overwhelmed with this material, mostly because we've never gone over this stuff in this much detail even in undergrad, and there's so much of it (13 lectures over 3 days time). I'm also definitely starting to feel that feeling I had when I first started at U of A.

You know how when you first start high school and realize how easy you had it in junior high? And then you get to the college level and realize that you really didn't have to do much in high school? Well, the same concept definitely applies here I think too. I feel like I didn't have to do half this much each week at U of A. Just with how often our tests are for this class, we are pretty much having to study every night of the week just to keep up.

It's definitely a change. It's a change I was expecting though. But I still feel that you can't quite imagine what it's like till you're actually experiencing it.

On a more optometry related note (not basic science classes), we did learn how to ask patients about their health histories, whether eye related or medical related information. So we all took turns being both the patient and the doctor today in our Methods lab. From knowing how to deal with super anxious patients to angry patients to super obnoxious/talkative patients. We got to watch some amusing videos and a few of my classmates that were randomly picked had to demonstrate what we learned with some of our third year TAs (teaching assistants) who were playing the part of one of the said patient case scenarios. It ended up being super hilarious to watch, but I'm just glad I wasn't one of the ones chosen, haha.

Aaaand, that's about it for this week. We were done by noon today, so I picked up some Subway on my way home (for my lunch and leftovers for dinner) and am about to dive into some study time.

And since I haven't changed out of my "attire" yet...here's a silly photo shoot.

Scrub a dub dub

My new running shoes! Since everyone wears the same thing, it's nice to have
shoes that stand out. 

And the sides. I love them. A lot.

Until next Friday, have a good week!

Optometry Fact: (I learned last week)

Retinoblastoma - Rb protein: The Rb protein functions as a tumor suppressor protein in the cell cycle - i.e. it keeps cells from replicating if there's something wrong with the cell, like a mutation.

So, children that present with a retinoblastoma (a malignant tumor growing in the back of their eye on the retina) most likely has something to do with a problem with that protein in their cells and so a cancerous tumor develops since there is no Rb protein (functioning properly anyways) to tell the cell to not duplicate (since cancers are basically uncontrolled cell growth). 

As seen above, the tumor can be seen with a camera flash or light and will give their pupil a whitish appearance.