I don't know why I'm not asleep yet. I finished studying about.... 20 minutes ago, and I'm dead tired, but I'm really enjoying this music I'm grooving to right now.

I love, love, luuuuuuv Raheem Devaughn. His voice makes me wanna do it.

Lol.

I have studied soooo much these past couple of days and I still have so much more to do before Thursday. Its okay though, because I'm gonna pass, and then I'm gonna have so much fun this weekend.

omg.... I can't wait. I don't have much planned yet, well.... I have a boat cruise Thursday, then my roommate and I, in true EBP (Educated Black People) fashion, are having a Obama-McCain debate watch party Friday night. And I'm going to a gospel competition on Monday which I am REALLY excited about. I don't know what I'm gonna do in those couple days in between.... probably sleep. Drink. Call family and friends. Maybe hit up a club.

I know it doesn't sound that exciting, but my times of guilt-free downtime are few and far between now.

Thats the thing about being in med school. Even though you're not always studying, you could be (and probably should be), yet still not know everything. However, it seems like everytime you turn around there's a classmate who just seems to know a lot more than you, and they unknowingly make you want to crawl underneath a rock with your Gray's textbook and not come out for 3 days.

Its all goodie, though.
I met another HBCU grad med student today at Harold's. She was a sweatshirt with SPELMAN COLLEGE emblazoned in the front and she had her med student ID tag showing so I said hello. Turned out we knew some of the same people.

Its always fun to meet knew people because it seems like I spend 85% with the 101 people.... its starting to get claustrophobic.


Hmmm.... I'm finally getting sleepy.... and D'Angelo is asking me how does it feel.....

Okay... I'm going to stop writing whatever streams out of my consciousness... starting to sound a lil Weezyish lol.


G'nite.

Here is the scenario, it references quite a few studies over a long period of time I just going to give a synopsis of it.

Black women are at least 3x more likely to give birth to a pre-mature or low-birth weight baby than white women. Researchers thought it could be due to lack of appropriate pre-natal care/ nutrition, so they compared women on the basis of socioeconomic status, only to discover that middle-class black women are TWICE as likely to give birth to a pre-mature/ low birth weight baby than middle-class white women, and slightly more likely to give have a pre-mature or low-birth weight baby when compared to WHITE HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUTS.

Some thought that it could be do to genetics, and so compared the births of African-American mothers to those of recent African immigrants, and interestingly, African immigrant mothers numbers were on par with white women. However, the numbers jumped back up after just one generation within the country, meaning that women who were born to African immigrants in this country and were raised here (like me ) have the same rate of sub-par birth outcomes as Black-American women whose heritage here stretches back hundreds of years. Hmmm.... wonder what's going on.....

The most recent and popular theory is that this may be due to the higher levels of stress that black women are forced to live under because of racial discrimination (researchers are linking other "black" diseases to this as well, click here). The cumulative stress is built up over time, and therefore induces labor earlier than in white women, who are supposedly living under a generally less stressful environment than black women. Hence us being more likely to give birth to pre-mature or low- birth weight babies despite adherence to proper nutrients and pre-natal protocol.

My class is predominately white and some had problems believing this (especially the white women, it was just so mind-boggling to them.... you racism went outta style in the '60s), UNTIL the lecturer brought up another study done in Cali where they compared the births of Arab-American women 6 mos. prior to 9-11 and those occurring in the years after.... well, what do you know. They DOUBLED.

My medical school is pretty progressive in this sense, but for some reason, my classmates didn't take this issue very seriously until the lecturer referenced the study done on Arab- American women. Go figure. Anyways.... thought it was interesting, thought I might post. G'NITE.