February 2007
The Dish
Running the dish is one of the rites of passages at Stanford, second only to full moon on the quad. Or so they say at least.
The weather was perfect today--sunny, but with a trace of the cool north wind licking through the hills of The Dish. In case you were wondering, the Dish is a route that traces the hills surrounding Stanford with a satellite dish on the top. At different parts of the path around the dish you get vistas of campus and even of the bay.
It was nice to be out in nature today. With the sun radiating over the hills and ground squirrels chasing each other through the dry grass, one feels that spring, although not yet arrived, is just waiting around the corner.
A funny thing happened on the way to my exam
As I was walking on the path between the Pediatric Surgery Research Lab and the CCSR, I noticed this crazy chattering.
Stanford is full of squirrels. There are your garden variety squirrels and then there are these random black ones that run around campus all the time. At any rate, I saw this squirrel a few feet away from me chatting like crazy and then suddenly run like the dickens up this tree. All of a sudden, this giant hawk comes out of nowhere (nowhere being the sky in this case) and swoops down no more than three feet over my head.
It was a fairly traumatic experience. Needless to say, I ducked and covered my face, not wishing those sharp yellow talons to rip me apart. Apparently, the hawk was going after this squirrel and the squirrel, being the clever creature that he is, noticed him coming and ran up the tree, at which point the hawk had to swerve from his dive in order to not smack into the tree. Since I was standing next to this tree he almost hit me as he swerved. I was afraid that since he was disappointed in missing his meal that he was going to eat me instead. Luckily, my cowardly ducking and hiding convinced him that I was not worthy enough as a meal.
The most embarrassing thing was that throughout this entire ordeal, there was this guy standing by the CCSR with a coffee in his hand laughing at the whole situation.
Of course, out of all the med students in all the med schools in the world, I would be the one to be attacked by a hawk on the way to my neuro exam and then be made fun of for it.
So I actually do manage to do a bit of studying at med school.
I'm taking a little break from studying for the neurology block exam on Monday. I'm learning delightful little factoids such as remifentanil has a short duration of action since it is rapidly metabolized by blood and tissue esterases and that trazodone has the not so delightful side effect of causing priapism.
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