Not a great day...

today was the most disgusting day of dissections so far. i walked out of the lab twice and was pretty sure i was gonna pass out/ vomit but i didnt. i put on a brave face. i would love to write about the details but will have to save it for another night as i have a ridiculous amount of material to cram into my already full brain. sweeeeeeet

Week 4: Holding a human heart, no big deal

The past weeks dissections have been the coooooolest by far! We are working on the thoracic cavity so we have been learning about the lungs, heart, and everything close to them. Tuesday we took out the lungs and Thursday we took out the heart! As mentioned before, our cadaver has a pacemaker so the wires had to be cut. Now, you can see the leads coming out of various parts of the heart and where they are connecting too, very cool to see.

Wednesday was my birthday and I was blessed with no anatomy lab. Instead, we were in the lecture hall for most of the day. What I thought would be a nice break from the lab turned into a very dull day that made me actually miss dissecting (well not so much the dissecting as more the finding and reviewing actual anatomy versus pictures on powerpoints). We finished up around 4 and some friends took me out to get Thai food. This was my first time eating Thia (everyone was shocked to hear this as I am apparently the last remaining person on earth to have eaten this type of cuisine) and after a great meal we all branched off to study. I went home and hung out with dad for a while and got about an hour of studying in before I feel asleep around 10:30. I tried to make up for this by waking up very early the next day and getting to school to review in the morning.

Thursday we dissected out the heart in the morning and in the afternoon we had ECM. This week we brought in our materials and got to ‘learn’ how to use them. I am pretty competent at taking blood pressures but everything else I am going to need a LOT of practice on. This coming week we have another patient encounter. We are perfecting the art of taking a comprehensive patient history and this time will be timed both seeing the patient and then after as we fill out their ‘chart.’

Looking back at my posts, I realized I haven’t really mentioned our Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine (OMM) class yet. We have it every Tuesday from 1 to 5 and this is where we get to learn the special techniques osteopathic doctors use. We are still learning the basics of what is ‘normal’ and how we can determine it, so we haven’t really gotten into the cool stuff yet.

Friday was a shorter day which I filled by going to the anatomy lab and reviewing everything we had learned that week. I spent the night with my second family and started off a relaxing labor day weekend J

Well, I passed!

After an agonizing afternoon of thinking I failed because I read my score as a percent rather then the total number of points I gained....i realized my mistake at about 2am that next morning while i was in a 'must get an A on my next exam' study session. I put myself through hell for nothing, but hey...now i know what it feels like to fail an exam, even though I actually did just fine. Dont get be wrong, I probably should/could have done waaay better but passing and getting minimally above the average is good for me for right now :) This whole med school thing is pretty damn tough i SWEAR! annnnd, that grade was only for the written portion, our lab practical hasnt been graded yet (insert nervous laughter here)

So monday group A dissected until 11am and then we only had one lecture from 1 to 2 so i found it to be the perfect 'at home study day' :) it was nice to spend time with alissa and kristin and give kk a big hug before she took of to switzerland to play volleyball like the champ she is. today (Tuesday), i came in to lab and took out our cadaver's lungs...just another tuesday in my life.

oh, did i mention that she has fake acrylic nails? Yeah, and they are painted bright pink. How the hell am I supposed to put it out of my mind that she is a actual person when I can see her nails like that? Also, while observing/learning about the lungs and thoracic cavity, we discovered many tumors all over her. They are calcified tumors which means they were actually boney tissue growing on her diaphragm and thoracic wall. Also, her lungs were so congested from heart failure...this poor lady suffered so much before she passed, its hard to learn about the pathology without thinking about that side of the science.

On a lighter note, my birthday is tomorrow. number 24 I think…

p.s. i hate my kitten at the moment because he is not my friend anymore and is a pretty wild beast, im thinking of letting him explore the great outdoors....just to see if he can come back alive or at least in one piece. just kidding.....not really....

Class of 2013- 1, Gross Anatomy- 0 (debatable i guess...)

ITS OVER!!! The first exam of my medical school career is over :) And yes, it was very hard but i got through it! The best part was the the last couple days leading up to the exam we received a ridiculous amount of new material to learn (that was going to be on the exam) and it was the hardest information to learn yet. There are 19 muscles in the forearm ALONE, and don't get me starting on your hand...lets just say the human body is incredible but god does it suck having to memorize all of it!

The test was in two parts, Friday morning we all had assigned seats in the lecutre hall and had a written exam that was 50 questions. Also, during the exam there was a powerpoint being flashed (15 slides, 2 min per slide) and we had to identify landmarks on bones and some MRIs, CT scans and X rays. We were given from 9:30 to 12 to take it. Then in the afternoon the class was split into groups of 25 people and all of us had a certain time to take our lab practical. This was intense! Me and 24 other people went at 1:30 and our cadevers had been 'pinned' with structures to identify. We were given 1 minute per question with a timer and very strict order to walk around the room. To clarify, it wasnt just our own cadevers it was everyones so memorizing one is not efficient, plus, everyone has anamolies (2 nerves of something instead of one or no palmaris longus muscle, etc).

I know I mentioned my cadaver before but I have learned more details about her since the beginning. She died at 60, like i said earlier, from kidney cancer and she has a tattoo of someone's name on her butt (sorry for the technical term). Also, she has a pacemaker!! I am very excited because this week we are studying the heart so i am excited to see how the pacemaker was put in and where it is going. Also, last week we had to dissect the breasts and another groups cadaver had breast implants, that was cool too!

Back to the exam, I was done at 2 and from there my classmates and I had planned to all meet at Characters bar which is about 25 feet from the anatomy lab right off campus. It was a great afternoon even though many of us were drinking away our worries about the test!

Yesterday was another day of celebration at a friends house. It was a 'black tie event' and everyone was dressed up and looking classy. It was a LOT of fun. Now im just gonna sit because tomorrow is another day of anatomy which means a lot of info coming at me!

Oh, and another thing this week was another patient encounter day! I leanred how to take a patient history and practiced on one of our actors. I was given 20 minutes and had to fill out a paper as we spoke. Then, we had 10 minutes to get feedback from the actor. Mine told me I did excellent and that I was going to be a great doctor :) It was a good day!

We're starting to crack...

A facebook status update from a classmate...

"...is starting to feel like hannibal lecter...if i have to skin my body anymore im gonna start telling people to put the lotion in the basket"

-AB

Anatomy Professor Advice for the first exam...

And this leads to three other pieces of advice:

1. Take the questions as simple and direct. I am not trying to trick you. I do not need to. This stuff is hard enough without making life more difficult by making it tricky.

2. Once you answer it as a simple question, resist the temptation to change answers unless you have a sudden brainstorm and realized your answer was stupid. If your thinking is "if you think about it this way, maybe this other answer could be correct..." than you are changing a right answer to a wrong one.

3. Be awake for the exam. Get a good night's sleep, and take it easy the day of the exam. If you are half asleep while taking this exam, then you're going to thwart all of your hard work.

So, what brought you into the clinic today?...

Last Thursday was the longest day of school yet. I got to the anatomy lab at 8 to find out that the schedule was changed and the day started at 9. So, I went right to work and starting dissecting to redeem myself for being late earlier in the week. Unfortunately, the beginning of this dissection required that I take a saw and literally take out her (we have not named her) clavical bone. So, with help from a friend, I did it…making sure to not cut anything else important that we had worked on previously. Going through bone is a lot tougher then I thought, makes me appreciate how much effort it takes to break one during sports, or just falling (like I have done several times in the past). I felt particularly sick after lab this day, most likely because I was inhaling the fumes for about 3 hours, no bueno. I changed into my ‘professional’ clothes after lab then had lecture, ate lunch, and then went to the ‘clinic’ to have my first simulated patient encounters. I then had the most mentally draining afternoon and I wasn’t even studying anatomy, it was from all the effort it took to speak with people…

Our course is called Essentials of Clinical Medicine (ECM) and it is every Thursday afternoon. This is when we learn clinical skills like taking patient histories and how to use our equipment. This is the course I will learn how to draw blood in. Anyways, this particular Thursday was as I said, our first simulated patient encounters. Basically, actors that are paid to pretend like the are patients in a VERY wide range of circumstances. And boy are they good!!! They broke us into groups of 6 and we sat in a clinic room. The ‘patients’ would rotate around each clinic room and each time a new patient came, one of the 6 of us would act as though we were they’re doctors seeing them for the first time. We were to practice building rapport with them. Some people came in pretending to be shy, nervous, mad they had to wait so long, and one old lady was just crying the whole time. It was intense!! The two patients I talked with were a young girl that was shy and an older lady that was lonely and basically just came in to have social contact with someone. The encounter lasted 5 minutes and then the actors were given 3 minutes after to give us feedback on how we did. The best part about it is during the 5 min you are allowed to take a ‘time out’ to ask the actor or your peers for help on what to do, or say next if you are stuck. And yes, I did take a time out for my first one because I had no idea what I was doing. The second lady was very easy to talk to and I think I improved a lot by that one.

Anywho, that was Thursday and I am glad it is over. Friday was a shorter day and after class a couple of us went to play pool and relax for a bit (they are plenty of bars right by school, very convenient!). Then I went home and studied for a while. This weekend was fun, I finally got to see old friends and also did a lot of studying on Saturday so it was productive. Today (Sunday) I went to lab in the morning and then slept all afternoon. GLORIOUS. OK, back to the grinding board. Test in 5 days!!!!