Exam Celebrations

We had our first "Journal Club" this morning, which wasn't all that bad. We basically listen to a presentation on an interesting article someone found and discuss it afterwards. Today's was on an assessment done of the hospital's use/overuse of a particular antibiotic. They found that despite warnings and education to stop using the antibiotic unless it was necessary (since it is one of the few that certain bacteria are still susceptible to), the rates of misdiagnosis and misprescription of the antibiotic had not gone down. It was a nice discussion as well - Martin (our boss) was actually there too, and it's always nice to hear him speak. Dani, Sarah, and I also got to play tour guide to Ruth, Ala, and Melissa, who joined us in the Bacteriology building for the presentation.

It was back to work after that, with a short tea break in between. Work has gotten better (not that it was bad before, mind you) since my PCR reactions have actually begun working. So that's exciting. I'm slowly working my way through finding this tetA gene in my isolates. Only 100 or so more to go. For lunch, we went to the College Bar and met up with Niamh and Marit, which was fun as usual. We got back to work in decent time and finished around 4 again.

All of us were pretty exhausted, so we took naps for a few hours after work. It was nice and relaxing. We had a quick dinner after that, and watched TV until it was time to go out. The NUIG students had gotten their exam results the day before, so we went to celebrate. My friends Shelby and Amanda from LSU joined us as well, which was fun. Our first stop was Bierhaus, where we've been numerous times, and then we met up with Melissa and her friends from NUIG to go to a club called Central Park (or CPs, as they call it). It was empty, but a lot of fun. A few of us got sick, so that put a damper on the evening, but other than that we had a grand time before coming home to pass out.