miss akay

Conclusion of my '07-08 Holiday Break!

My last day was marked by the most severe storm I think I've ever experienced in San Francisco. It was so unusual in fact that my East Coast friends and family asked me all about it. The irony is that a storm like that on the East Coast is easily forgotten and often goes unnoticed. San Francisco typically doesn't get much in the way of weather!

I took the red-eye back to DC on Friday night. My flight was empty! I had an entire row to myself and so stretched out for a few hours of sleep. My parents fetched me and brought me to their house for coffee, where I waited for the sun to rise before I went grocery shopping. The rest of the day was spent trying to stay awake! I think I lay in bed for two hours with my eyes closed-ish, without drifting off. It took crazy discipline. I didn't know such a feat was even possible.

Around 5:30pm I drove back to my parents' house for dinner and watched the Redskins game. I taught them how to pause the game using DVR and have actually started to watch a little bit of football in short intervals. Though I admit most of the time is spent blankly staring at the screen, not even "seeing" the players run across the screen. I don't think that classification of mental status is possible with anything other than watching football. I fell asleep by 7pm and didn't wake up for 13.5 hours!

Today I unpacked my suitcase, went for a run around Iowa Jima, talked on the phone and worked on my Doris Duke application. It's nearly finished, at the expense of not doing my pre-reading for tomorrows lectures. Classes start again at 9am. At least they weren't completely evil by forcing us to show up for 8am lectures! I've been corresponding with a current Doris Duke fellow at UCSF. I'm hopeful to get the award, but still not 100% sure about taking next year off. My letters of rec have all been outstanding. If nothing else, it's nice to enjoy the ego boost from reading nice things about me written by people I respect a great deal. An excerpt from my favorite one:

Audra immediately immersed herself in the ongoing research projects in the laboratory, and I had the pleasure of working together with her as we refined our protocol for intraocular injections of bioluminescent retinoblastoma cells into newborn rat eyes to generate a xenographic model to test novel anti-cancer agents for the treatment of this ocular malignancy. Audra quickly mastered the microsurgical skills necessary to perform consistent intravitreal injections. She also showed initiative and insight in her ability to design experiments aimed at improving our protocol, permitting us to generate models more efficiently for our animal-model drug trials. Her skills were a tremendous asset to the laboratory and she is missed now that she has returned to her graduate medical studies at George Washington University.

In addition to her outstanding work with us in cancer research, Audra took an active interest in learning from the activities of our clinical service. She joined us in the operating room, clinic, and at our multidisciplinary tumor board conference. Audra showed a natural ease with patients, who appreciated her kind demeanor and empathy. In addition, Audra used to great advantage her past clinical experiences as a certified ophthalmic angiographer and a visual services assistant. As a result, she has ophthalmic skills and knowledge far exceeding her medical student peers. Audra has the natural sensitivity of an excellent clinician and obvious talent as a researcher. Without a doubt, she has the makings of an outstanding clinician-scientist.

posted by miss akay @ 11:30 PM