Studying Never Tasted So Good
I have been conspicuously absent from the blog pages lately, and with good reason. I am smack in the middle of a two week “test stretch o’ fun.” During one of my earlier test stretches, I wrote about my fantastic pneumonic device for remembering all of the topical anesthetics, “But Everyone Loves My Pet Rock”. Go back and check it out if you haven’t already. My fun saying was just one of the many ways I try to remember material as I study. You see, when you have to spend as much time studying as I do, you have spice it up a bit to keep the interest level (not to mention sanity level) tolerable. Plus, when studying is “fun,” I tend to remember more.
It was with this fun filled attitude that I undertook my studying for my Pharmacokinetics exam last week (and yes it is just as difficult a class to understand as it is to try and pronounce). I was having some serious trouble understanding the basic concept of hepatic clearance and how it affected drug concentrations in your body. In “easy” terms I was trying to understand how your liver gets rid of drugs and how this process is affected by how much blood is flowing there. To make matters even trickier, drugs can be bound to proteins in your blood that affects if your liver can get rid of the drug at all. Are you thoroughly confused? Now you know how I was feeling!
So there I was, stuck in hepatic clearance wasteland not knowing what was going on. Then, the “epiphany” occurred. I was reading in my “Pharmacokinetics Made Easy Book” and I read that in a “high clearance” drug the drug is literally ripped away from a protein and it hit me: it was just like when I eat my favorite guiltily pleasure ,chicken wings. You see, I am the “high clearance” liver, the chicken wing is a highly bound drug to protein, and I being the highly efficient machine I am rip the meat (aka drug) from the bone (protein). Viola! I am full, er, I mean clearance happens!
Alas, after much struggle, I had related one of the most difficult concepts in Pharmacokinetics to the simple (albeit delicious) act of eating chicken wings. My analogy was able to help several other people in class understand, or, at the very least, get a hearty chuckle. In any case, I was able to lighten the mood for everyone else, and made life a lot easier for me as remembering hepatic clearance was as simple as understanding how I go about attacking a 25 wing sampler from Wild Wings. I feel like the test went all right, but for some reason, by the end of it, I was really hungry. How could that be? Take care!