we will not be trees

thisss news makes a girl like carol veryyyyy happppeeeeeeee!!!! :)))))))))

Arthritis drug gets NHS approval

well, so i leave for glasgow tonight. this whole trip back's been a bit of a madness.... there is a chinese belief that when a chinese family on a voyage eats fish, they aren't allowed to flip the fish for fear of ill luck on the voyage.... no one can choose what happens to them in life.. but it's how you deal with such circumstances that matters.

fall in the boat....

and everytime i come back, it's always another burst in the sky of fireworks, of love, of mirth, of the kinship of the friends who grew up in the same microenvironments, the same environments, the same singapore. and then we part...

and then it's the same you get everywhere - the same difference. the same souls looking for the same sense of belonging.

she wants to move

more immunological nonsense (photos included this time!!)

nerd attack! immunologists loose in the west end! before heading to the qmu
me and steve.erica, alexis, me.carol loves dancing.rooooaaaarrr!.

calum+mark.stephen is a nottie boy.luke, me, steve,?.me and greg aree in loveeee with T cells.

carol -heart- immunologists!

nerd love

soo. i have decided to take a break and present some findings from the nerd world applicable to the real world...

There is no such thing as the perfect textbook
there is no such thing as the perfect textbook. i mean, personally, Janeway(see above) is the man for me, but Janeway tends to have information on the same subject everywhere (eg. information on T cell receptors (TCR) can be found on pages 116-117, 128, 193 and 149-154.), his diagrams have the utter worst colour combinations (primary colours don't go) and he is a bit outdated.. (who doesn't know that there are 3 different types of Tregs and that Tr1 and Th3 are kinda obsolete?).


Similarly, there is no such thing as the perfect relationship, perfect person or perfect friend. But, like Janeway, there are just somethings in your life, that if you remove, it'd be analogous to cutting your right arm off. My Janeway is smothered in pencil marks, hi-lights, coffee / green tea stains and has earned the dog-ears of a well-read textbook. I know Janeway for all his inadequacies and strengths (which far outweigh the former), and if i one day woke up to see him gone, i'd be devastated.

There is such a thing as the perfect book
However, there is also such a thing as the perfect book. My bible, like janeway, has been with me forever and i've laboured into its pages for years and years. One thing different is that the bible, unlike other texts, is ALIVE. i mean it. While i am never faithful to any one book at a time (like a TCR, i am promiscuous) and tend to have 4 books at a go at the same time (hey, what can i say? I have many different needs), I find that the bible is the only one that has life-giving properties. Don't ask me to explain this in any other way, but it's supernatural. And the fact that it is written over a period of about 4000 years by multiple authors and that they all agree on the same thing is just utterly mind-blowing.

We need to go deeper
On the surface, Janeway looks incredibly daunting and reading one bit on its own can be totally taken out of context. However, persistence and perseverance has paved the way to understanding... Similarly, Romans 15:13 - we will only have joy if we know Him and we will only know him if we study about Him...

In conclusion, i'd just like to say that nerds can still have a life outside of their books... and the delving into specifics can open a world of knowledge that is broadly universal. %)

the iniquity of english cooks

what makes carol happy is the feel of a well-sharpened knife... i miss home. :/
but in the mean time, i am doing the best i can..

“But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine,” said Mrs Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were,—if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can."

- To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
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oh yes, and i fell in love with immunology...again...

taken from Nature Immunology 1, 291 - 297 (2000) Crystal structure of a T cell receptor bound to an allogeneic MHC molecule. Jean-Baptiste Reiser, et al.

a novel therapeutic approach

carol wuz so bored of writin her research report dat she started taking random fotos of herself that showed her been-studying-t00-hard-face and started blogging about nothinnn.. also she started texting random peoples just for fun...

carol: Yo dude, wassup? I hate you, you broke my milk bottle and it leaked and my obsessive compulsive-ness was obsessing about it this morning. :(

callum: HEY! LISTEN, U can just take that back young lady. It wasn't me who used it last cos some one else must have put the milk away cos i had a glass of milk and then after that some one made me a cup of tea with milk in it which they would have had to pour the milk then put the cap back on so take your accusations else where.I'm not actually annoyed just playin with U. I'm studyin and a bit grumpy cos none of my group showed up.How R U. Callyam Yardbur :)

enter the playas.

so @#$%!@#$^@#$&#$% STRESSSEEEDDDD from doing stupid ELISAs and reading a friggin average of 10 journals a week for immunology seminars. and fecking stats exam on tuesday and bloody answer for stupid journal club to the question proposed by the cancer-module-coordinator, prof. macMURDERER : 'what other proto-oncogenes are upregulated by inflammation?' damnnnn u intercalated Bsc degree... *evil look* i curse u with a bolus of tPA to dissolve your clots and make u die in a pool of your blood coming out of your every orifice..

and hence i have sent my dear richard to fetch me a solution of diazepam from the cardiac department at the royal.. (i'm kidding, i'd never abuse medicine like that, really....i would never steal from the NHS... ... honest!)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

oh... what i wouldn't give for a night out at the crib soon with ma boys... check em out here in class, all wrecked from a night of pimping... keep it up boyysss! ;)

strictly come dancing

ceilidh, ceilidh, ceilidh!

it's alll about the chat, really.... nothing is complete without the banter.. i know i say this tOOOoo much, and i know if u google my blog, the word 'banter' probably appears more than 500 times, but i just cannot emphasize how great the craic has been of late...

this can be attributed to the following reasons...

• HOLIDAYS ARE HERE!!!!
• carol loves dancing
  
• proper, sweaty, scottish ceilidh (there have been many of late...) and a good ol game of knights, horses and cavaliers.
• immunology students kick ass!!! (big time)
  
• carol's rnb club rules. (both meanings)
  

mmmm... carol loves a man who can dance.

the side effects of having great craic...

• coming home smelling of weed (don't worry mom, didn't touch the stuff!)
• coming home at 330 am in the morning absolutely shattered and having to be up in 4 hours
• coming home at 2am the next night even more shattered
• having to do the same tonight
  
• seeing drunk medics immersed in debauchery
• having to look after drunk friends with lowered *ahem* inhibitions

the joys of immunology.

the joys of the celts

mad mad mads's

meanwhile, conversation topics have been of a seriously diverse scope of late... 5 hours today at mads's was EPIC.... carol loves like-minded people... who not necessarily have to share the same morality or perspectives on things, but who has a mind which thinks in the same way as mine....

carol loves intellectual fodder... mmmmmm.....

achilles tendon

the combined effect of Medicine and Immunity in Health and Disease has the corollary of robbing me of my conversational skills, my vocabulary and my creativity. the limits of the human mind in terms of delving into different subjects is evident of late. spreading out = lack of depth = a jack of all traits and a master of none. but hyperfocusing (the direction i seem to be headed) has left me with little to say about other aspects of Life. (which contributes to the paucity of blog entries of late)

of note was the case study of the one time i deviated from my usual west end / city centre hangouts and ventured into the wild realms of greater glasgow... that day just utterly threw me off.. i was struck, so much by the randomness of the place, the novelty of taking a public bus in the middle of the night, the thickness of the working class accent, the sight of the teenage mum pushing her child in a pram, the druggie stumbling along the path, a dwelling that was not a student flat! my goodness... i balked at my naivete! i was never so dissociated that i actually FORGOT what the rest of the world was like.. damnnit, i need a holiday.... and non-medic friends, and time to relax and see the big picture, to listen, to speak less, to refresh my eyes... i hate going round in circles..
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

anyhow, halloween and trick or treating was great fun like... cheap wine + non-medics + heavy metal music + crazy costumes = a merry, merry night.
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a tribute:

kenneth and xiaoling-

the lovely people who delivered the doughy goodness of a krispy kreme all the way from london to me. i'm sorry, i know i was meant to take a photo of it before eating it...

ivanna-

the lovely lady who turns 21 today!

attrition tears

you know that feeling that you need to jump out of your skin? when there's an inner something in you that needs to get out and needs to get out? i'm feeling like that right now. when i'm surrounded by all the things money can buy, all the friends and banter a university student in the uk can have, when work's piling up beyond what i can manage and deadlines are looming in the near and present future - when i've got ALL THE THINGS IN THE WORLD TO DO... i feel like there's not one of them that i feel like doing. that's how i'm feeling right now.

but what do you do when you want to burst, but there's noone lurking around to mop up all the pieces and sew you back together? absolutely nothing. you keep it in, you wrap yourself up with another layer of woolly fleece, you sip up your peppermint tea and study the autumn away.

but all the trees will clap their hands...

• and this is a typical day in the life of an intercalating student....

	Monday 9/10
0900-1000	0900-1015 IHD Lecture (403) - Intro to Chemokines - G. Graham
1000-1100
1100-1200	1100-1215 IHD Lecture (403) -Neutrophils, Mononuclear Phagocytes - JAG
1200-1300
1400-1500	2-5 FRS (403) - Nature of Immunity & Immunopathology - M. Thomas
1500-1600
1600-1700
1700-1800	5-? Immunology students social	545-700 CMF meeting (Rob's flat)
1800-1900			630-10 girl's bible study (Gill's flat)
1900-2000
2000-2100
2100-2200