Hello my lovely friends and family! I hope all of you are well and I am missing each and everyone of you dearly. You are constantly in my thoughts and I wish you could all be here to share in my experience.

Today was the best day I have had thus far. The Alaska Native Medical Center is beyond anything in my wildest dreams. There are at least 6 practice settings (if not more) that Stephanie and I will be practicing in. The hospital and clinics are BEAUTIFUL. Yes, I said beautiful. They don’t even feel like a hospital! They are so beautifully decorated with warm Native American art and designed to be a welcoming environment. Tomorrow we actually begin pharmacy practice experience. My first “mini rotation” will be in the outpatient pharmacy counseling newly discharged patients from the hospital on their new medication regimens. I am so excited to meet some of the Native population. I enjoy learning about new cultures/beliefs and I hope to discover something about my own past. Although these tribes are not part of my small Cheroke ancestory I feel some sort of connection with their way of thinking. The reverence the Natives have for all things living and a sense of protection they have for our planet is so beautiful.

The main clinic even has Native vendors come in almost everyday to sell some of their artwork/jewelry and other things.The ”mini rotation” I am most excited about is the natural healing/medicine. There is a doctor there by the name of Dr. Mala who specializes in natural Native medicine. They even grow their own herbs and roots on site to use in their practices! This is such a wonderful aspect of medicine that I believe is underutilized. Trust me I believe in the wonders of western medicine but I believe that spiritual and mental healing is just as powerful as physical. I just want to absorb as much as a possibly can. I can only hope this rotation will make me into a better pharmacist, health care provider and a more open person.

Our student coordinator Dr. Renee Robinson is AWESOME. She is so wonderfully poised and gracefully. I can only hope I can achieve her quite confidence one day! She gave as a wonderful packet with our schedule for the whole month and I do believe my mind might explode with this information. We are going to be working on many presentations, projects and hopefully some publications! She graciously let us borrow her car in order to get our drug test done (akward process btw) and we took the opportunity to get some food at a place we had so much about, The Moose’s Tooth! It was the best pizza I ever had in my life!!! Hands down! Mine had mushrooms, red peppers, mozzarella and goat cheese. We also ordered this smoked salmon spread with cappers and red onions. There is no sense in something tasting that amazing! After our yummy food we went out to return the car to Renee….

Imagine my surprise when…oh wait….ummm it won’t start. I killed the car. I left the lights on..wow…I am such an absent minded person sometimes. Lucky for us a man was pulling out and I flagged him down for some help. He had a friend who had some jumper cables inside! Whew..we dodged a bullet there. I would hate to call my lovely new preceptor with a “oh hey btw thanks for letting borrow your car on our FIRST day meeting you but ummm we kinda killed it” haha. Oh well, alls well that ends well I suppose. After getting home Steph and I began looking through our new rotation info and we began planning little excursions! I believe we will be going down to Seward to do some whale watching at some point (hopefully via train) and also renting a car for a day to see Denali National Park. I will quite literally cry when I see Mt. McKinley. Hopefully one day I can scale this beautiful mountain :) We also picked out about 9 hikes that we want to look into that are here around the area of Anchorage. I love this town. There are running, biking, hiking trails EVERYWHERE. I actually ran up to the campus of Alaska Pacific University this evening and WOW..what a view those kids have coming out of their halls. I can honestly say though I wouldn’t have had it any other way going to WVU. We have a beautiful campus as well and I have met some of the greatest influences/friends and had the best experiences of my life through our university!

With that I’m off to bed. I have a lot of work to do tomorrow! Goodnight all from the land of the midnight sun! Miss you all oh so very much :)