Week 4: Respiration, Week 5: Drugs

I really got stuck into my study yesterday - got heaps done. It was mostly focussed on respiration (which is what breathing is all about) and the principles of drug action. Actually, these were the topics I was most at ease with because I worked reasonably hard on them when they came up during semester.

Initially I was pretty freaked out by the whole TCA cycle thing, and also the electron transport chain thing, since it was radically different from anything I'd ever seen before, and seemed just bizarre. But in the end it's all pretty straight-forward. Well, it's not actually, but when you're shooting for 51% you can afford to take a few shortcuts. The secret for me was to stop being afraid of the crazy long names of the enzymes and products, and learn to love them for their eccentricity. Like my favourite, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase. He's like the Dutch kid at school that never gets called by his full name, and when he does, it's pronounced wrongly. But he doesn't let it get him down, he still turns up every day to convert oxaloacetate to phosphoenolpyruvate, and he does it with a smile, knowing that's he's the one who's really in charge of gluconeogenesis. We all knew someone like that, right?

The principles of pharmacokinetics were pretty easy too, but that's because I'm an engineer. As soon as the topic started and they began throwing equations up on the board, I knew I was safe. They're not really even equations - they all look like A = B * C. Yeah technically that's an equation, but come on - where's the calculus? Where's the group theory? Where's the projections? It was all pretty manageable for someone like me whose favourite joke is this:

Q: What's a polar bear?
A: A rectangular bear after a coordinate transformation.

Ha ha ha! Laughter really is the bed medicine. It's certainly a good way to remove stitches in the mouth.