The Mother Grain

So I couldn't sleep as usual when school starts.  It's saturday morning and I've been up since around 4:30 which is strangely normal for me.

The other day on my way back from our infectious diseases class I noticed that there is a health food store down the block from us.  It caught my eye because the store seems to specialize in coffee and coffee related health food.  I went in looking for vanilla rice milk (the only reason to add milk to coffee if you ask me) and while I was in the store I couldn't help but buy some other stuff that looked enticing.  They had pre made falafel and quinoa.  I had read quite a bit about quinoa on the internet.  It's called the mother of grains.  Apparently it has lots more protein than say rice or cous cous or oatmeal.  I bought some quinoa and looked for some good breakfast recipes.  I found some on the internet which were simple to make.  What you are looking at above is cooked quinoa with apples, bananas, cinnamon, and honey.  It looks like gruel but that gruel with some coffee was quite possibly the best breakfast I've had in a while.  The only sad thing is that it was after I ate this that I realized I had some blueberries in the refrigerator that I could have used.  Oh well there's some leftover and maybe I'll use it later.

On another note.  This was the first week of three weeks of infectious diseases rotation at school.  The department is one of the few departments at our school which has the dubious distinction of being well organized.  We do about two hours of lectures in the mornings and about two hours of rounds on the wards which I guess is OK.  My only complaint is that even though we are split up into groups to do the rounds our groups should be split up when we get to patients because there are like 15 of us in a patient's room and it's kind of too many people I think but oh well it's not that bad.  I'm pretty interested in infectious diseases because it's something I feel I know not enough about.  I think on the USMLE it was my weakest section.  It's been a while since I was in a hospital in America but I think I may be seeing some diseases here on a more consistent basis than I would have in America.  Everything I've read about in books which I never saw when I was in hospitals as a paramedic I've seen here and I have to wonder if it's because being in the heart of Europe it's easy to travel to all sorts of disease ridden places.  This week alone we've seen three patients with infectious diseases who have all been to Egypt and in two cases I think their travel was the reason for them contracting their diseases.  I bet they won't publish that in the tourist brochures for Egypt!!