So yesterday, I sent my resume to a neurology lab at the school that is my (eventual) top choice medical school.

And two hours later they called me to schedule an interview.

And they rearranged their schedule for tomorrow just to meet with me.

No big deal.

Here are a few approximations of my calm visage.

Oh yeah, on top of taking 20 credits this semester, we also decided to get...


a second dog!

His name is Phoebus, and he's a Miniature Australian Shepherd who just turned 3 months old last week.

Part of the reason we decided on a second dog now is because of my neurotic fear that Zeus will die before I finish my residency (he is 6-years-old) and that I'll be too heartbroken to ever get another dog. There are plenty of other, less morbid reasons, but that was definitely one of the big ones. So, since I've got about 5 months until I start my postbac, we decided that now is the best time to commit the time and money to raising a second dog.

Zeus, on the other hand, is not too terribly excited about the proposition of another dog stealing his thunder.

Back to medicine-related news, my EMT class is going very well! I have my first ride-along in about a week and a half, so expect a blog post sometime soon about that.

Even though I'm at the point where I've already applied for my second bachelor's at Cal State East Bay, I can't stop going back and forth on whether I want to do a second bachelor's or a postbac program.

To be fair, I know that since I have to pay with loans, the decision has essentially already been made for me. I get $12,500 a year, and if I do a non-degree granting program, I only get that $12,500 for a single year, whereas most postbacs take two years. Not only that, but any program around here will run you hundreds of dollars per credit - $383 per credit for CSUEB's quarter system, where I would need 80 credits, and $600 per credit for SFSU's semester system, where I would need 40 credits.

But even with that information, there's still something really alluring about the postbac program to me. I think it's the cohort structure. The idea that you can group up with a set of people who are a lot like you (older, respecializing students) with the same goal as you (med school) who are on the same timeline as you.

Is that worth the cost? In reality, no. But I do feel like I'll be missing out on something that would otherwise be helpful, academically and mentally.

As an aside, does anyone who did a do-it-yourself postbac read this blog? If I don't get into CSUEB for the second bachelor's program (which I doubt, but contingency plans never hurt), I'm thinking of just attending there through the Open U program. However, apparently you can't get financial aid through their Financial Aid office if you do that, so I'm wondering, how do you get your unsubsidized Stafford loans in that situation?

Several months ago, I called up my old pediatrician and asked for them to send me my vaccination records so that I could apply to volunteer at a few local hospitals. At the bottom of the vaccination record was a brief history of my medical record as a 6-year-old, which I found mildly amusing.

• "Disruptive behavior - A is not sleeping at night. Treat with imipramine, 25mg." After reading about imipramine, I can't see how that would've helped, but I'm not a doctor yet, so I digress.
• Two weeks later: "A is still not sleeping," probably due to a pill-taking phobia that led to my adamant refusal to take oral medication as a child, but randomly disappeared overnight in my teens, "[drug name undiscernable], 100mg"
• One week later, without comment: "CHLORAC HYDRATE, 500MG." Whipping out the capslock and the sedatives, hot damn. 
• One week later, again without comment: "Needs EEG."

Reading that I was sent for an EEG, which I vaguely remember, namely because I was cranky about getting that nasty gel put in my hair, reminded me of reason that I wasn't sleeping as a kid: night terrors. Apparently I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and would be unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to go back to sleep.

I do remember one specific set of them, because they revolved around the video game Doom. Specifically, I would dream/hallucinate that one of the monsters from the game would hang out ominously in my doorway. Not a huge problem, except for the part where it could breathe fire.



The night terrors cleared up eventually, but gave way to progressively worsening insomnia as I got older. Not only do I have issues with insomnia on a nearly nightly basis, but about once or twice a year, my brain will decide that I don't need to sleep for a day or two. Why? Because of reasons, that's why.

I've gotten better at dealing with the nightly bouts of insomnia as they've become more prevalent though. Oddly enough, one of the things that works best for me is playing a boring video game. You'd think the lit-up LCD screen would further impede my sleep, but I guess I've conditioned my brain into thinking that puzzles and drowsiness go hand-in-hand. Though every so often there will be a night where I have to start getting myself to sleep from scratch because I drop my DS on my face as I'm nodding off.

Of course, my brain's not down with me coming up with a coping mechanism for insomnia, and sometime within the past few years, I've begun developing something that sucks even worse than night terrors: sleep paralysis.


As far as I can tell, your prefrontal cortex has already checked out in anticipation of REM sleep when you get sleep paralysis, so the seat of logic and reason isn't hanging out to tell you "don't worry, you're not dying, I've just paralyzed you so that you don't hurl yourself out of a second-story hotel window while you dream, a la Mike Birbiglia." (seriously, listen to that Youtube clip. It's amazing).

As if the being unable to move just because your brain said so isn't scary enough, terrifying hallucinations and a sense of panic or imminent danger are common characteristics of sleep paralysis. For me specficially, this means that every time I experience sleep paralysis, it makes me feel like I'm going to die.

Here's how it usually goes. I'm drifting off to sleep, and I decide that I want to change positions. I go to move, but I can't. Then I try to open my eyes to see why I can't move, but even though I'm trying as hard as I can to open my eyelids, a seemingly simple task, I can't. Next, I try to make some sort of noise - usually some sort of gasp or scream - to indicate that, physiologically, I'm in some sort of trouble. When I do this, I realize that not only can I not scream, but it's getting increasingly hard to breathe.

My perceived difficulty breathing is the worst part, because I somehow make the connection that if the rest of me is paralyzed, then my diaphragm might end up getting paralyzed too, meaning I'll stop being able to breathe and I'll suffocate in my sleep. While I'm awake, I know that this makes no sense, but while I'm stuck in sleep paralysis, my rationality isn't exactly coming to my aid.

These episodes usually end with me struggling to move or open my eyes for so long that I will, after an indeterminate amount of time that feels like forever, wake myself up, and decide that maybe I don't need to sleep for the rest of the night. Or ever again.



So between the night terrors as a kid, and the sleep paralysis as an adult, you can pretty much infer that sleeping has always been really fucking scary for me. Husband and I have a running joke that he often really does have drag me into bed as I feign kicking and screaming, as I have (understandably, in my opinion) developed a strong aversion to going to sleep.

On the bright side, when I do get a good night of sleep, my overactive imagination rewards me with really vivid, interesting dreams. A few nights ago, I dreamed about a burgeoning zombie apocalypse which came complete with a really interesting, detailed, biological explanation as to why people were becoming zombies. I'll get murder mysteries, action, adventure and the like, always so engaging that waking up makes me almost as grumpy as going to bed.

One other thing about sleep paralysis is that if you relax and just let yourself continue to fall asleep, instead of struggling to wake up, sleep paralysis can actually lead you directly into lucid dreaming. To clarify, lucid dreaming isn't necessarily the taking control of your dreams and using your subconscious as a playground that we've all been told about. Lucid dreaming, by definition, is just being aware that you're asleep and dreaming, though some people can use their subconscious as a playground to some extent.

I've only been successful at transitioning from sleep paralysis to lucid dreaming a few times, since it's really hard to reason yourself down from ohmygodi'mnotbreathingi'mgoingtodie when your prefrontal cortex has checked out for the evening. When I have been able to lucid dream, my problem is that my regular dreams are so interesting that lucid dreaming is really boring, since I can't really top what my subconscious comes up with.

That, and I have thus far been unsuccessful at summoning a dinosaur during a lucid dream so that I could ride around on it.

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