A little blue pill and a mini mountain adventure

So most of this week, for me, has revolved around a little known treatment for male impotence called Viagra. Don't worry, I haven't had to take it, I've just had to write about it. I've not blogged a lot this week because I've spent all my time trying to find information about Viagra and haven't been able to do anything else! I'm not doing this for fun, in case you were wondering... I had to write my first literature review on any one of a list of given drugs for my medicinal chemistry module, and since it was the only one I'd heard of, I chose Viagra!

It wasn't all doom and gloom though this week, in fact I quite enjoyed writing it at times, so I'll share some facts about it with you...

-It was originally developed as a vasodilator to cure hypertension and angina, but during clinical trials, the research team noticed that many of the men who took the pill got erections
-This was due to the fact that it inhibited an enzyme in the smooth muscle of the penis, instead of the smooth muscle in arterial walls that it was supposed to act on
-The drug was developed by Pfizer, and was first prescribed in 1998
-It was initially prescribed at a rate of 10,000 pills per day in the USA
-Annual sales of the drug peaked in 2008 when worldwide sales gave a profit of about £1,100 million, which is pretty good, when Pfizer is a company that spends billions on advertising every year

And now you know a little bit about Viagra. Apart from looking at online journals, I went out a couple of times, saw a turtle/tortoise in the middle of Kooloobong, discovered the eels in the ponds on campus, went to the gym a few times, and played tennis with Charlie. Nothing interesting at all - so today I decided to climb a mountain.

Mount Keira, which is just behind Kooloobong, stands at about 460m above sea level (according to Wikipedia), and the route to the top is meant to be fairly logical and simple, but of course, because it's me, I got lost!

While I was climbing, the path I was on suddenly stopped and I was presented with a steep, rocky hill. I knew I'd gone the wrong way, but decided to climb up it anyway. It properly tired me out, so I sat down when I got to the top, but then I realised that I couldn't have gone any further if I wanted to because of the massive (and I'm talking huge) rocks that were now in my way! So after about half an hour of trying to see if there was a way to get around these rocks I decided that I should probably go back and try to find the path I was supposed to be on, but getting down was a lot harder than getting up, and I was genuinely terrified that I would slip and break my ankle or something. After slipping, scrambling and sliding my way down the hill I found a path, it wasn't the one I came up on, but it was better than nothing! I followed it for a while until I came to a road, and decided to try again another day and managed to find my way back.

Even if I was scared for my life (or at least me ankle) at some points and it was a massive fail (something that is starting to happen more and more!), I still had a crackin' time and probably made it to about 400m so didn't do too badly! It was just nice to be able to be on the mountain by myself surrounded by nature! I was hoping to bump into one of the lyrebirds or wallabies that apparently live up there, but I think the closest I came to either of them was seeing a large pile of animal poo on the path. I did think I could hear a lyrebird at one point, but it was probably something else that just made a cool noise...

Next time I try to climb it, I'll get to the top, the view is meant to be amazing, but since I didn't quite get there today, here are a few snaps of what I did manage to see :)

The steep, rocky hill I was on about