Life of a Kid

I had to attend a palliative care training course today, it was depressing, but also opened my eyes to how important the role of a volunteer can be for an individual at the end of life and for my volunteer situation, a family. I volunteer at a pediatric hospice, but its 80% respite care and 20% end of life. I haven't actually been there yet when there was a kid and family there for end of life care, I have just played games and done fun things with kids who have pretty severe and disabling conditions. Every kid that comes through the door (unless they are a sibling) are technically considered to be palliative meaning that they have shortened life spans, but are not necessarily actively dying.

Today also happens to be the anniversary of a pretty tragic death in my own hometown. On this day, 8 years ago, a boy named Chris, who was a year older than me, passed away from a quading accident. We used to play on the same soccer team every year and went to the same school. He was an amazing athlete and would have gone far in life. He was airlifted to Calgary, and stayed overnight in the ICU, and I can remember our principal the next morning going around to each classroom telling us what had happened. It was hard, at 11 years old, to wrap my head around somebody my own age dying from something that kids do everyday in my town, from something so simple as quading at the ski hill with some friends after school. Its hard not to think of who he would have become if the accident didn't happen.

I wish that these kids I play with on Friday mornings could have the chance to grow up to be something amazing, that they would be able to fulfill their dreams.Today was the kind of day that really makes you think about life, and instead of thinking about why bad things happen to people, I am thinking about why they didn't happen to me. Why am I so lucky to be celebrating my 20th birthday in a week when some kids don't even make it to their 5th, 10th, or 16th birthday?

I just need to focus on giving it 110% everyday on behalf of those who cannot.

Peace Like a River.

We Day Alberta 2012

Yesterday was a pretty amazing, fun, inspiring and exhausting day, and I didn't even skip a class. You might be wondering what I was doing on a school day that was so totally awesome...so I will just tell you.

Yesterday, Oct.24/12 was the first ever We Day Alberta!! What is why day you ask? We Day is a huge event put on for youth across Canada and is Me to We's signature event. Me to We is a branch of Free the Children, which is a non-profit organization started in Canada when Craig Keilburger was just 12 years old. It has grown into this massive organization with the motto of "kids helping kids." Its all about bringing food security, education, clean water and health care to children across the world, with a large portion of its funds being raised and donated by youth across Canada. We Day is all about the youth of the world, and inspiring them to "Be the change." You can't buy a ticket to We Day, you have to earn it through service.

Because I am no longer a youth, I couldn't attend We Day. So, instead, I decided to  volunteer, and even better, I signed up to be a Crowd Pumper. On Saturday we had our first training session where we learned the We Day Dance, and our flash mob routine. During our 4 hour Saturday session, we were unknowingly showing the head Crowd Pumpers April and Gabby that we could strut our stuff. So when we had our final training session on Tuesday night, I found out that I had been selected to be on the FLOOR!!!!! Apparently I have dance skills (lolz), but I think it was more like I had a lot of energy and that I dance like nobody is watching me. Non the less, I was given a floor section to pump up right in the first section in front of the stage!!! My job was to make sure everybody was up and dancing, having a good time and getting them to break out of their shell. So basically I had an all day dance party.

It was exhausting with all the cheering and dancing, but also crazy fun and inspiring. Seeing 18,000 youth come together to celebrate each other and be inspired to change the world was simply breath taking. Not to mention seeing Hedley, Shawn Desmen, Lights, Marianis Trench rock it on stage, all the while being inspired by Martin Sheen, Larry King (yes, that is right, the King himself), Marc and Craig Keilburger (Founders of Me to We and Free the Children), Liz Murray (homeless to Harvard) and SPENCER WEST! I even got to high five Marc Keilburger. The day was actually too awesome to really describe, and I am so thankful that I got to be a part of it.

Me to We has just recently added a new volunteer trip to Ghana, and when I saw the video and listened to the talk about I started to cry. I miss Ghana so much, and I think about going back at least six times a day. My mom is lucky enough to be leading a group of high school students there this spring (and gets to go for free!) with EF Tours and Me to We. I am super jealous.

Being a crowd pumper and having chronic pain was a bit of a challenge, every time I jumped and landed it was horrible, but there was so much energy in the room that it didn't even matter. I had a job to do, GET THE CROWD PUMPED UP! So I did it with every ounce of enthusiasm that I had, I even managed to have enough energy left over for class...and by that I mean I only fell a sleep for a few seconds during pharmacology....

Stoked to be part of We Day next year, and maybe sometime in the future figure out a way to get myself back to Ghana.

Floor Crowd Pumper Crew, Power of We

My New Besty Amanda

Much Music Booth with some fellow Crowd Pumpers (I'm the one wearing the tie)

From Two to Zero

My Grandpa from my Mom's side of the family passed away on Tuesday night. My brother and I jumped in the car on Monday night and drove 3 hours through the night to see him before he died. Unfortunately, when we saw him on Tuesday morning he was completely sedated. The man I saw lying in that bed struggling to breathe was not my my Grandpa.

He was the most incredible man I have ever met. He grew up in a National Park, and lived and worked in the same valley his whole life. He cut trails up to mountain lakes on horse back, gave valley kids their first plane ride, flew hunters into remote areas, rescued people on the ski hill, was a Mason, he built houses and cabins by hand, owned a Chrysler dealership and was known by all of his famous stories.  I am grateful for all of our rides on horse back, and for all of the stories he told around the dinner table.

He is the kind of man who's stories will stick around forever, he is the kind of man who is thought of as a legend. His life seemed almost like a fairytale from some children's book. He was the perfect mountain man, he knew how to survive off the land but also how to lend a hand.

In the span of four months, I went from having two Grandpa's to none.

I am pretty bitter that I can not attend his memorial service because they put it on a Tuesday. WHO PUTS A FUNERAL ON A TUESDAY???? They are expecting over 300 people to be in attendance, which is pretty much the entire valley.

 

Training

I pretty much completely stopped training August and then September wasn't so great either, but now that I am part of the High Performance program at the Olympic Oval, I'm back into 100% full bore training plan. I can see what my coach is trying to do, build up the endurance side of things before it snows, then do some testing and then jump into a winter of interval training. But my legs hurt for real after riding 3.5hrs on Saturday and 3 hrs on Sunday. Today is a rest day, and then tomorrow we are back on the bike with another 3 hr ride.

I did actually manage to finish that health and society paper that I wrote about last Friday, and I did learn a few things about myself.  I am one of those people who don't employ any method of coping strategy to deal with the pain, which likely means that I have accepted that it will always be there and that there is no point fighting. I just live my life like I don't have pain, even though I'm pretty sure if somebody was actually using a scalpel to cut open my leg right I wouldn't be able to tell.

Wiriting About Pain

I had to chose a topic for my Health and Society unit research paper. I thought about the whole shabang of health related issues (okay, I didn't think about all of them because that would take FOREVER), and I ended up settling on what I know best, Chronic Pain. I started off wanting to focus on the young adult population, but there is far more research on the adolescent population. And lets face it people, there is no point making an assignment harder than it should be, sometimes you just have to start writing and go where the sea of journal articles takes you.

It is interesting writing on a topic focused on a population that only two short years ago I belonged to. I didn't have chronic pain until my last year of high school, and it was brutal. As I wind my way through the research articles, there is one idea that keeps on coming up, adaptation to pain. People who have lower perceived quality of life and higher scores on depression scales are focusing their lives around ending the pain, rather than living with it. I can attest that focusing completely on the pain and finding new ways to get rid of it consumes your every thought. The pain starts to literally rule your life, and that's how it was when it first started for me. For the first two months, I avoided wearing shoes (I wore flips flops in December and January, and yes, I live in Canada) I rarely went out for our team group rides and I was less involved with my school life. Then one day I woke up and decided that enough was enough, that no matter how much it hurt I wasn't going to stop doing something. Even though my pain levels increased, I was happier.

They call this adaptive behavior. Rather than avoiding the pain, you adapt your life and actions to include the pain. Its like your annoying little brother that follows you around all day, you can't get rid of him, so you have to do things that also include him.

I always wondered why the pain doesn't seem to get under my skin (that often), and it's because I somehow learned to adapt to the pain. I will probably never give up on new ways to try and get rid of the pain, but in the mean time, I know how to live with it.

I found this book conveniently on display in the library today, so naturally I signed it out. Its odd holding a textbook about yourself...

BOOM

I just wrote my first test of the year. (Aside from the MCAT.)

Bomb it. I couldn't remember any of the 5 elements of the Population Health Approach. Turns out they are:
1. Target the whole population (duh, I didn't put that because I assumed that was a given)
2. Focus on promotion (I got that one)
3. Multi-sectorial/factorial (got that one too)
4. Participatory (couldn't remember at all, knew it started with a P though)
5. Evidence-based decision making (blanked)

For realze, I got 2/5 on that question. And that was just one question. There were only 8 questions and I am guessing the whole thing was only worth about 30...so yeah, screwed.

But seriously, who asks you to list five elements? That doesn't test if you know how to use them, just if you can memorize a list. So stupid. I likely got a lot more wrong. Meaning I probably got about 80% which folks, is not a grade that I can have in my program.

Also the Calgary grading scheme is wacko. We don't have percentages, only letter grades and each faculty gets to determine what percent equates to what grade.Naturally, in my program we have a harder grading scheme (I lied, that shouldn't be natural!):
A+ = 97 other faculties its 90
A = 90 (other faculties its 85)
A- =85 (other faculties its 80)
B+ = 80

GHAAAAAA. So I bet ya 10 buckaroos that I will get a B+ :(

The Scores Are In

Today, at precisely 2:54pm Mountain Standard time I checked my MCAT score. (Which you know, I also attempted to check at 12:05pm,1:21pm and 2:17pm because I am a premed and we are obsessed with stuff like this. We can't help it.) All day, since walking in to the Health Sci building at 8:30am, its all I could think about, and I had butterflies in my stomach up until I checked to see if the scores were posted at 2:50. For some reason, I was totally okay with getting a below 30 score. It didn't matter to me anymore, because it is just a test, a test that I can take again. Next time with more food...

But,  I bet you are all dying to here what my score is, so drum-roll please....
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And no, there is no specific pattern in my ellipses use. Stop being so neurotic you pre-meds!
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I'm not going to tell you what my score is. Sorry guys, its just you know, a thing that I want to share with my friends and family. I don't want anybody to be offended or feel like they are a God if they did better or just a mere mortal if they did worse. SERIOUSLY GUYS ITS JUST ONE TEST! And yeah, I know it seems like the most important test you will ever take, but lets face it, there is no single most important test in your life. Except maybe that drug test your National Sport Doping Control Agency asks you take...that's pretty darn important.

So if you got your score back and are disappointed with it, chill, study smarter (not necessarily harder) and write it again. Take a year off if you have graduated, get a sweet job, travel and volunteer. No matter how good or how awful your score is, its the person, not the number(and letter) that counts.

I will tell you that my score is probably good enough for all of the Canadian schools that I want to go to. Lets just say, I got the same composite score as my room-mate (with a higher writing sample score) and she is currently in her first year of medicine. I surprised myself with my PS score, way higher than I expected, met my VR expectations and disappointed with my BS score. (Remember the whole MCAT fiasco where I majorly bonked and felt like passing out during the BS section? Yeah, I blame that.) But, my score was fairly even across the board, so its solid, and I'm 75% happy with it.

I will apply next summer/fall for the Fall 2014 intake, and if I don't get in, then maybe I will consider rewriting. But for now, I plan on keeping my MCAT stuff in a box, and not looking at.

Remember, relax. For y'all who are type A personalities, just take a step back, and look at the whole picture. When people chuck baseballs at you, learn to use a bat and hit one back at em'. (I will let you interpret that metaphor on you own, you are a smart cookie.)

Peace like a river