Biosciences Bonn: 13: Beginning of the End

First thing’s first: my charging cable for my laptop is broken. I’ve had it since I got my laptop, so over six years ago, and I guess it was gonna crap out eventually. AIB miraculously had an old as Scheisse charging cable, my laptop accepted the charge and worked for me Monday morning. THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE LAPTOP ISSUES THOUGH: it wouldn’t work unless it was plugged in, convinced it didn’t have an internal battery. Quite frustrating. Thankfully, my pharmacology prof understood my predicament and allowed me to push my presentation to the next day. Phew.

Another thing that popped up (literally) was a bee-sting looking infection in my right eyelid. I looked like a hobo because I couldn’t put on makeup and I felt too bad and exhausted to try to do my hair or dress nicely. Having a constant ache in the middle of your face that hurts when you sneeze or even blink really wears on you. So, I added myself to the list of Aggies who’ve traversed to the doctor’s office this semester. Which is about half of us. I went to see a general practitioner Tuesday afternoon, who looked at my eye from three feet away and said “hmm that doesn’t look good. Get this cream and put it on twice a day.” That cream ended up being hydrocortisone and did pretty much nothing. I can tell everyone is getting tired of treating us sickly Texans. Besides my strange eye problem, we’ve had someone get their appendix removed, two people take trips to the ER for various issues, and many many people with the flue and the common cold. It’s a wonder I’ve only been sick once this semester.

While this seems to be the beginning of the end for yours truly, its also the beginning the end of the whole semester!! Our enmodes presentations were Friday in Aachen, and next week I’ll have to slave away making the finalized booklets to give to the company starting next week for my 485 credit. Next week will be the end of physiology lab (which I expect to fail) AND pharmacology, and then we just have our last physiology lecture test and final, and we’re done!! Gah!!

So this week we’ve been going ham on the enmodes project. We had over 2.5 hours of Monday and Tuesday devoted to enmodes, and all of Wednesday and Thursday. It’s somewhat frustrating to try to work on something for that long at a time. The anatomical side of things has been done for awhile, so once I finalized my slide in the presentation powerpoint I was pretty much just sitting there until someone gave me some menial task to do. I would gladly help if I could, but the majority of the stuff we still have left to do is SolidWorks or other animation engineering-type stuff that I know nothing about. BUT, after Friday, it is done! Whoop!!

...Thursday evening update: we were not done. Thursday my group went before Dr Wasser and the minions to present, and ultimately spent nearly three hours getting ripped to shreds and realizing we were, in fact, quite far from being done.

I, however, spent that time trying to get my eye diagnosed. At this point I could only open it halfway and Dr Wasser was fairly certain it was a sty that got infected. I went to Doc B and waited almost an hour to be seen, only to be told that Doc B was an ENT (ear, nose, & throat) doctor, and didn’t have much to say about eye issues. So Doc B called Doc C down the road and asked if she could see me. I walked about five minutes to her office and hoped to get in and out as quickly as possible. The receptionist told me, in English, to take a seat and fill out some insurance paperwork. Well that paperwork was in German. So I had three pages of health and insurance questionnaire to fill out and I couldn’t read any of it. I had to call Nick over (thankfully he lived only a few minutes away from this office) and he helped me fill it out. Another hour or so of waiting later I finally got to meed Doc C. She actually looked at my eye and decided it was a bacterial issue, and prescribed me some antibiotic eye drops. The whole examination took less than 10 minutes. It was a long, boring, frustrating event.

When I finally got back to AIB, our team was frantically working to fix the numerous problems Dr Wasser found with our presentation. At this point it was after 7pm the night before we were supposed to present. None of us knew what we were going to say anymore, and a lot of things had to be changed on the slides. The frustration in the room was palpable and it was clear the groups were all getting annoyed. Brynn helped me fix the main issue Dr Wasser had with my slide because I was useless without internet at the doctors’ offices, and once I got back I worked with her and a few other members of my group to lock down what I was going to say about my slide of our presentation. I was definitely thankful for my theatre background at this point because I pretty much had two hours to write and memorize a short script full of medical jargon before presenting to Dr Wasser and the minions one more time so we could (hopefully) get a thumbs up and go home to get some sleep. Let me tell you, the final run-through did not go as smoothly as I’d wanted it to, but we all agreed to practice our parts a few more times on our own before reconvening in the morning. Bedtime that night: 1:30am.

Friday morning we met at the bus and departed at 8am for Aachen. Lots of us isolated ourselves or split off into pairs to go over our lines as many times as we could before trying to appear relaxed and comfortable in the conference room where we were set to present. I’ve been told I fidget too much while I’m speaking about my slide, and it was very hard not to shift my weight or play with my Aggie ring during the minute I explained my slide. Our team’s presentation as a whole went SO MUCH SMOOTHER than it had the night before, and it was such a relief to be done. We were super happy with how well it went. We, the students, celebrated with small glasses of wine while Dr Wasser conferred with the two enmodes dudes who listened to us. He said that while they would never ever say that we did badly, they wouldn’t have said what they’d said if we hadn’t done really really well. HOLY WOW ALL THE RELIEF WOW. We then ventured off for a nice lunch and a tour of a biotechnology research facility, and finally back to Bonn.

TO PARTAAAYYYYYYY!!! As tired as I felt, there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to celebrate the triumphant end of our crazy, semester-long project!! Izzie, Brynn, and I went out for a drink and then we joined a much larger group at the club for some sweaty, freshman-on-northgate style dancing until 3:30am. Bedtime: 4:30am.

Saturday was Big Event in Bonn. I woke up after about 4 hours of sleep and headed out to meet up with the rest of the AIB students for breakfast and to pick up out t-shirts. Which were burnt-ish orange. I’m not the most red-ass Ag there ever was, but it was painful to wear such a color. Later in the day I realized that the colors of AIB are white, blue, and orange, and that was why the shirts were the color they were. So, disdain for main color aside, they were soft and designed really well, and definitely showed we were a team.

My group went to a local fire station to help the firefighters repaint the inside of their building. We wore breathable full-body suits as an attempt to keep as much paint off of our clothes as possible, and it was hilarious taking pictures in various Superman, Ghostbuster, or snowman poses. We worked much faster than the firemen thought we would, so we painted more than twice as much as we were originally scheduled to, and I think they were thankful. They provided us with lunch and beer, and we later got to take a ride in the firetruck! All in all it was a fun, albeit exhausting, day.

That night, though, was Sarah’s birthday party. She turned 12 on Easter weekend and was having 10 of her friends over for a sleepover. Naturally, Brynn and I fled. After getting minimal sleep the whole week and working at Big Event all day, we really wanted some quiet and the chance to get a decent night’s sleep. We stayed close to HBF that night and went to bed much earlier than we had in days. At this point thought I was sure I was catching a cold due to supreme lack of sleep. Ah well.

SUNDAY WE WENT TO A CASTLE!!! Even though I wasn’t feeling 100%, Brynn, Austin, and I had planned this two weeks ago and I wasn’t about to miss out of a gorgeous spring day and the chance to hike to the most well-preserved castle in Germany: Burg Eltz. So, while everyone else was lining up to run their parts of the Bonn marathon/relay, we were boarding a train for an adventurous day trip.

I will never get tired of hiking in Europe. Each trail I travel is different from any other trail I’ve been on, and the sights, sounds, and smells are always delightful. Granted, smelling wasn’t my strong point on this hike, but it was still amazing. We climbed up some rocks, slipped on some mud, and ate lunch on a cliff overlooking the beautiful castle. We later took a small tour of the castle and the treasury but we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Meh. We had a sweet snack in the castle cafe before heading to the second part of our hike.

The best part of hiking is going off trail. That’s exactly what we did right off the bat as we began following the trail back to our train station. Austin found a small trail leading upwards, so we decided to follow it just for fun. We climbed up a very steep rock and thought about sneaking into a blocked off part of the castle grounds (where an archbishop launched an attack from way back when) but Brynn and my cold were the voices of reason and we climbed back down to find our way home.

This week was exhausting to the max. With all the roadbumps leading up to the presentation, to the Big Event and sleeping at someone else’s place, I was out light a light Sunday night, wishing school would just be over so I could hike all the merry day.