When we plan, God laughs

The story of my life these days...............Let me see, where do I begin.....

I came home to Ga last week after learning from my mother that my step father who was Dx terminally ill last year, has had a recurrence with distant metastasis. I'll be here another 2 weeks helping my Mom and providing moral support. Unfortunately, this situation is complicated by things I won't discuss but lets just say that his illness isn't the only ugly thing going on.

In other news, it looks like I'll be returning to NIH to do my research after realizing that my current project is pretty much a dead end street. My advisor made it pretty clear that my talents would be better served in another lab where the expert on my subject didn't have conflict of interest issues that could prevent me from publishing (remember, the my research falls under Homeland Security). That and there's no identifiable expert in my area on campus. So the potential problem is that all that could equal BIG trouble when it comes time to defending my dissertation and getting my committee together. However, I blessedly have a golden parachute in the form of a solid, well published lab at the NIH and a salary of about 45K (I get salary "credit" for the time I previously spent there).

Schoolwise things are going great and I'm so amazed that how easily I seem to learn things thanks in large part to the steep learning curve required of my medical school courses. I want to reassure anyone who doubts how they'll learn so much in medical school to not worry about it. The mind really does have an amazing capacity to retain and recall a LOT of information. It's simply a matter of "training" your mind to do it, much like training for say a marathon, the more you practice at it, the better you'll get.