Wail...I tell you, I really loved cardio. D-2 and I watched a short video when we started a month or so ago. It was great advice: "Be intuitive". Like we all know the basics of what our fucking hearts do. This guy said take a big picture approach with a question that you don't know the answer to immediately. Like what does the fucking heart do? You know that. Start there and try to reason your way to, if not THE answer, at least to be able to exclude some choices. Take in the big picture before stepping into the weeds. That was easier for me than for D-2 because I didn't know what the fucking specific flora of the weeds was. D-2 had that knowledge, but sometimes, because the questions are designed to throw you off, you get lost in the weeds and miss a big clue.
So I loved cardio. Until this week. Pharmacology of cardio. Give me a fucking break, man, I don't know these fucking drugs, much less the specific fucking CELLS they work on. Deary me.
Today we had a question that 1) started out incomprehensible to both of us 2) remained incomprehensible even after we read the explanation. 3) even after we researched the fact pattern and the system, RAAS, that was involved. 4) even after 17' when we left the question. I made one contribution toward understanding a little. I diagrammed two sentences in the explanation and showed D-2 that they were identical, two different treatments, but only one of which was in the proposed answer choices. "If they had put the other, an ACE inhibitor, among the choices, Ana, instead of the Renin-something that they did, that would have been the correct answer." But so Eichmann-like are the question formulators that they want you to know both, yet only give you one.
Ana called me tonight, my phone was still on silent, and she then texted me to say she was just checking on me, that she was worried. When I asked her why, she said because of my sighing today. I did sigh. That question was sigh-worthy. It was throw-First-Aid-across-the-room worthy, punch-the-computer worthy.
It was like endocrine, which I loathed. Coming up is renal, which Ana has said is much like endocrine in it's counter-intuitiveness. Sigh. But, as I have told myself in the past with particularly nettlesome tasks, and I told Ana the same thing in a responsive text tonight, "For Pete's sake, don't be a snowflake and melt, you fucking half-man king of the punk asses. "Keep at it to dislodge the rock", and always, keep moving forward, like a shark 😊
