January (& a sprinkle of December)

Total 2nd semester service hours as of 1/31: 14

January felt like the shortest and longest month in all of the best ways. December was also pretty long - after the end of last semester I was basically counting down the days till we started classes again! I was grateful to be able to spend time with my family over the holidays, especially since I hadn’t seen my younger brother in almost a year because of COVID.

Over winter break I was able to volunteer at Glass Half Full NOLA. I was equally shocked and thankful at the steady stream of people that showed up to drop off their glass for recycling. This organization is so important to one of my friends, and getting to participate in something that makes her light up was awesome.

I also have continued to volunteer at the ReFresh Farmer’s Market every other Monday selling candles for Hagar’s House. The community of vendors and patrons there is amazing, and I always like being able to tell people about the mission of Hagar’s House. Last time, the Tulane VISTA member who came to the market with us told us about some of the really cool projects he has been trying to coordinate with Hagar’s House, from sustainable building practices to bike repair workshops. I look forward to continuing to volunteer at the market every other week and finding other opportunities to help out Hagar’s House; sometimes they need people to bake birthday cakes and I would love to brush up on my old cake decorating skills.

I enjoyed our last module (Endocrine/Reproductive) a lot more than I anticipated. As with most of our modules, I had a lot of callbacks to my past ER scribe experience. The differences between the insulins’ duration of action made a lot of my docs’ questions and patients’ medication lists make much more sense. I was also surprised at how much I already knew about reproductive pharmacology as a twentysomething female. Being already armed with this knowledge made me even more grateful for Planned Parenthood and organizations like it that provide education and resources about contraception and STI treatment/prevention. It sparked interesting discussions between myself and classmates, friends, and family members.

This past few weeks was also chock full of presentations for me. In addition to the Advances paper presentation (that I think I have somewhat of a handle on after giving three), I had my presentations in Endocrine Pharmacology and Neuropharmacology. My group chose stress and COVID as a way to introduce the book for Endo Pharm, and I enjoyed researching and presenting on how the pandemic has affected children. Our Neuropharm presentation was interesting not only in the paper’s own right (since the mechanism of lithium in bipolar disorder is still debated), but also due to the half hour discussion that ensued after we covered the paper. I was proud to see my classmates engaging with the molecular mechanisms as well as the implications beyond the hard science.

Lastly, I feel SO lucky to have gotten my first dose of the COVID vaccine through Tulane. This is such an important step in getting things back to some semblance of normal, and the science behind the vaccine is honestly fascinating. I'm looking forward to getting my second dose this week!

Mal on one of the colder market days