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.