09:56 – Barbara is off to the gym. She volunteers at the Friends of the Library bookstore again this afternoon. Her regular afternoon for FoL is Tuesday, but she may be volunteering two afternoons a week for a while. The woman who works Wednesday afternoons is undergoing cancer treatments, and Barbara wants to be there with her in case she needs to take a break. The weather forecast over the next few days is for wind, temperatures down in the single-digits F later this week, and some form of precipitation, whether rain, freezing rain, or snow. At 43F (6C) we reached our forecast high for the next few days this morning. It’s all downhill from here.
While Barbara was working at the FoL bookstore yesterday afternoon, her friend Joanne stopped by with her daughter, Kelsey. Kelsey just finished the first semester of her freshman year at a private college up in Pennsylvania as a biology major. She wants to become a veterinarian. She had a hellish semester academically, which is understandable given that she had an undiagnosed case of Lyme Disease and wasn’t able to sleep or concentrate on anything. It was finally diagnosed, but too late to allow her to salvage the semester. I asked Kelsey if she was still on doxycycline, and was surprised when she said that they’d prescribed only a three-week course of it, which she’d completed.
She ended up failing Chemistry I. That’s a problem because they won’t let her take Chem II until she’s passed Chem I, so she’ll end up doing general chemistry as a sophomore, when she should be doing Organic Chemistry. Her college won’t accept credits from another institution, so doing general chemistry as a summer course this year won’t get her back on track. So we talked about alternatives for a while. I suggested that Joanne talk to the dean and the chairman of the chemistry department and convince them that this was an anomaly caused by the undiagnosed Lyme Disease and that they should make an exception by allowing Kelsey to take a general chemistry course this summer and accept that as the prerequisite for starting organic chemistry in the autumn. That’d get her back on schedule and eliminate the need for a fifth year. I also asked Barbara to email my phone number and email address to Joanne and have her give them to Kelsey so she could contact me any time I could help her, with chemistry or anything else.