Learn Something New Every Day

Last week was Chicago Ideas Week - which I learned a day after it ended, from these balloons that were still up. Hopefully putting up balloons around town wasn't the best idea they had.

Dearborn St, at Exelon Plaza

If only learning one new thing every day (as the partly hidden balloon suggests) was enough. It seems the further I get in my preparation for my licensing exams, the further the goal of actually being ready moves. Partly because every day brings a new understanding of either how well I need to do to actually get into a career here, or I encounter a "high-yield" (often tested) area very far removed from what I know or consider useful.

This morning, I'm going through oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. After memorizing the mechanism and related cancer (for example, p53 is a tumor suppressor gene which prevents a cell from proliferating if there is DNA damage, and is associated with most human cancers), I now decide that's enough.

If I can't be a doctor in America without remembering the location of these genes, so be it then. (Or I hope remembering translocations Philadelphia chromosome t(9;22) and Ewing sarcoma t(11;22) is enough...) To put this in perspective, unless I'm treating a CML patient, I doubt even some decades from now I'll know which mutation(s) my patient has.

Curiously enough, with frustration, also my determination has grown. So here I am, moving on to antineoplastics, for about a third round of hammering into my head if it was fluorouracil that affects dTMP or what. Because it doesn't really matter if I know everything else about fluorouracil but the question asked ends up being the mechanism, and choices given include the enzymes with which I always confuse it. To put this in perspective: I anticipate never prescribing these medications, since I'm not looking to pursue any oncological/hematological specialities.

/End rant.