I was intensely studying something called kinetics. This is the study of rates of chemical reactions and it involves a lot of math. It was an essential part of my research and I worked hard to learn all of the formulas and how the math worked with the science. I had all sorts of numbers and formulas running through my head and a number popped to mind: 1021008576-75707. I was familiar with all sorts of constants like pi (p=3.14159265358979323846) and Avogadro’s number, which is 6.02214179 X 1023. That is a 6 with 23 zeros after it, and is a very big number. This was a number I did not recognize, but it kept resonating in my head. I knew that 1021008576-75707 meant something important and felt I had written that number down before. I had worked with it somehow and obviously memorized it. Why would I memorize something? I could only think for scientific reasons, but I just couldn’t remember where this number came from.

Some time later, I was writing a check to pay the rent when it hit me. 1021008576-75707 was the account and routing number of a bank account I had over 10 years ago; two bank accounts ago. I was simultaneously happy and frustrated with myself.

One day when I was driving home to go to sleep— it must have been about 5:30 A.M.—I fell asleep at the wheel of my car. I was on campus at the time and quickly woke up when my car hit the curb. A university police officer saw this and pulled me over. He did a brief field sobriety test and asked me what happened. I told him that I was working late studying and that I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home, sir.” I responded.

“Where is home?”

“2339 Haslett Road,” I responded.

“I’m worried about you. Are you going to make it home safely this morning?” He seemed genuinely concerned.

“Yes, sir, I can assure you I will not fall asleep at the wheel. In fact I may have a trouble falling asleep when I get home after all this excitement.”

“All right, I’ll follow to the edge of campus. Drive slow and safely and get home and get some sleep.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said as he walked back to his car.

I followed him until he turned off at the edge of the campus. Then I drove home and went to bed.

I went to sleep and got up 6 hours later to continue studying for my comps. I was so focused on those exams it was weeks before I told Ann I had been stopped by the police.

The date for my exams was fast approaching and Ann reminded me of something important. I was nocturnal now and I would need to be ready to take the tests on a conventional sleep cycle. While I had not really thought about this, I had realized that my I seemed to be getting to bed later and later and my work days getting longer and longer. So to get back on a more normal schedule, I just extended this by degrees, so that instead of going to bed at sunrise, I went to bed at 8:00 A.M., the next day at 10:00, then 11:00, and so on. Eventually I was sleeping and waking on a normal cycle. This gradual extension of my sleep/wake cycle caused me to lose a day, however. My study schedule had been based on a certain number of days to study each subject. I had used up all my time-off days, so I would have to adjust my study schedule to split this loss between subjects. I decided to split the time between neurophysiology and renal-respiratory physiology. I chose these because they were the least interesting to me and I welcomed an excuse to decrease the amount of time I would be looking at them. The second reason for choosing those was because they were scheduled to be on Wednesday and Friday respectively. Therefore, I had extra days to study for them.

There were eight physiology graduate students taking the comprehensive exams and we all worked alone on cramming the information into our brains. We rarely saw each other and when we did, we generally talked about how sleep deprived we were. Sometimes we would talk about the stuff we were studying, but I always felt angst from myself and anyone around if we talked about science because we were all afraid to discover something we didn’t know. No one wanted to discover a knowledge gap. If someone asked me how I felt at this point, I’d tell them that I felt like a glazed doughnut. This is as accurate a description as I could find. I was stressed from the studying, stressed from a lack of sleep, my eyes burned from constantly staring at text and my hand hurt from writing. Without exercising my whole body felt soft and squishy like the dough of a doughnut. My middle finger had an indentation in it from the pen I used to write my study notes with. My study technique was to write what I thought was important on pages and pages of notepaper. Then I would condense my notes into crib notes and finally I would put those notes onto one sheet of paper. The writing and thinking about what to write helped me learn because I was not just copying, I was re-writing what I felt was important. I adopted this study technique when a former college professor allowed one 3 x 5 card of cheat notes in an exam. During those tests I found that anything I put on the cheat sheet I remembered. So I made cheat sheets to study because I would remember what was on them.

I also learned that if a question popped into my head and I couldn’t remember the answer to it, I would have to stop what I was doing and find the answer. The act of searching for an answer would reinforce the memory and I would have learned that fact. But if I didn’t look for the answer immediately, I would not remember the fact if I got the answer or asked someone else for the info later.