We are swinging into finals!!! Students are all tired of writing and reading but must get through one more week before being able to fling ourselves into vacation! This last blog post before the break includes some of the mischief that we’ve all been up to in between flipping through chapters in our textbooks and cleaning out tracheostomy collars.
To address the subject line of this blog:
Any of you ever used the word GRUB to indicate food for yourself? “I’m hungry… gotta grab myself some grub…”
Well, during one of my classes this week, the concept of maggot therapy was introduced as an effective method of tissue debridement in the medical setting. Will any of you ever use the word grub in reference to your own meals? Maybe that word and food is just northwest slang….
Along with food… it’s amazing how many associations patients make between what is founnd in the food pyramid and symptoms in the human body. 
Orange-marmalade mucus, cottage cheese-like clumps on the tonsils, and walnut or almond sized glands in the genitalia are all pretty accurate descriptions, but have eliminated those foods from my diet. Needless to say, when the lump in the body closely resembles closely the food on a dinner plate, people look at their nutrition differently. When the fork picks at the clump of spinach on the corner of the plate, the mind can't quiet separate the similarities between the cecum and colon to that particular clump of green leafy nutrition. I’m already a vegetarian (anatomy and physiology restricted my meat intake) and my options for food are dwindling quickly. Carrots and oatmeal are still safe. Tofu, however, is very vulnerable to being compared to a venereal disease.
On a lighter note, Baltimore got some snow! A nice break in the action.
When only one person has gloves, be creative and share!
Even though the Nobel Peace Prize was recently awarded to Mr. Al Gore, the Johns Hopkins University has some incredible candidates with tremendous potential for changing the world and making a positive impact.
Two of my classmates who are returned Peace-Corps Volunteers are working with recent refugees from Uzbekistan and some of the surrounding countries to ease the process of assimilation and access to education and healthcare. They teach, touch, and connect with this population by utilizing their proficiencies in Uzbek and Russian. Preeettty cool, huh?
If any of you readers have an interest in Gerontological Nursing, look up the EXPERIENCE CORPS project on the Hopkins website. It’s led by some of the top researchers on aging at this university and is making a huge impact in the local schools and in the elderly population. It incorporates the aid of elderly adults in the local elementary school classrooms that are short-staffed for help. Children benefit with higher math and reading test scores and less detention time. Older adults are seeing an increase in physical, social, and cognitive abilities.
Just recently, a classmate and I put our minds together and created a class about Gestational Diabetes. The class was taught in Spanish for some of the Hispanic Women in the Baltimore Community that are at risk now for developing Diabetes Type II (speaking Uzbeck is pretty cool and more unique than Spanish, but it's hard to measure up to that standard!) We had a tremendous turnout and look forward to reaching out to this community in the future. In January, we’ll organize a class on Nutrition and the importance of physical fitness. The experiences that we have outside the textbook are what make this education extremely unique.
I'll be back in the beginning of January for more classes, so the next updates will come then.
For right now, I'm counting down the days to being back on a pair of skis in Oregon with my Dad!
