One Semester in Visual Form

Semester 1: Done

The semester's over AND I passed all my classes. Hooray! I'm really excited to be leaving behind it all, especially since I didn't enjoy 3 of my 5 classes at all. Apparently my promise to myself that "everything will at least be relevant from this point on" was a total lie, as I had to wade through biochemistry, which all doctors say they barely remember, cell biology, which I'm not even sure some of professors knew, and genetics, which was an awful, awful class. Anatomy was great, though, and I'm better for knowing it. So at least one good experience. Naomi has assured me that next semester is better. We take a huge class called Human Organ Systems, which goes through all the organs and functions while simultaneously in another class we learn how to do clinical tests for each organ. A useful class? Unbelievable! I'll be taking a break from my blog, too, since the copious amounts of writing I do in it take up too much of my free time. :)

Anatomy Down

It's Wednesday morning and I'm about to engage in one of two of my last full days of studying before the semester is done. Hooray! This is the test I need to do the best on but I'm pleasantly optimistic. Time to hit the books and learn about cholesterol, DNA chemical synthesis, and pain (just regular pain, not in any sort of biochemical sense).

Another Class Down!

Cell bio has bit the dust. It's on to Anatomy and Biochemistry, the two hard classes. Not too excited about either test, but hopefully they will treat me with some respect. :) Exciting news? No, not really. I've been studying for a ridiculous number of hours. Something like 14 a day, all told. I'm ready for a little break, I think, and some new classes.

That awkward three weeks of pain

Coming out of a break and nearly going into another one creates a really difficult atmosphere for studying. However, I have a semester to finish up here. :) Anatomy is going out like a lion with a huge test of over the head and neck, which is riddled with nerves, arteries, veins, and muscles. Everybody knows about the big hole in the skull where the spinal cord enters, but there are so many other tiny holes where nerves come and go. We learned about the orbit of the eye, for example. There are so many interesting little things about the eye. There is a surprising amount of fat behind the eye. This is why peoples eyes look sunken in when they are really malnourished; the fat keeps the back of the eye in place and insulates the muscles and nerves. Another fun fact about the eye is that the inside of your eyelid folds over and actually covers the front of your eye. This is the tissue that actually has all the capillaries that turn red when your eyes are irritated. This also means that, without some sort of a puncture wound, you are never at risk of getting something in your eye and having it go all the way around to the back of your eye and get stuck in your head. Hooray!

Preparing

So the next two weeks are going to be no fun. Three tests in two weeks, one of which is biochem and one of which is a final. :/ I also have two papers due. My goal is just to embrace the pain. I get a full week off for Thanksgiving, so there is a little oasis between now and winter break. Then it starts up again.

I was thinking about anatomy, and it's really a bizarre class. The knowledge you gain from it goes directly from "what the hell is all this nonsense" to completely obvious. Once you know the names for everything it becomes pretty difficult to imagine NOT knowing. It's the only class so far that's been like that. Of course I can name the muscles in my feet. Who can't? Oh yeah...

Adjusting to a new (read:still abnormal) sleep schedule

You'd think, with all the stories that you hear about med school, that I would be the one making Naomi and I sleep crazy hours. A life lesson: residency tops school for awkward sleeping habits. Prior to October 31, Naomi and I were getting up at an unreasonable 5:45 every morning tired as all hell. As of Nov 1, we are now staying up as late as possible so that she can survive her all night shifts in the ER. Throw in daylight savings and you get some tired kids. It's 9:30 and Naomi is pre-sleeping for her shift. I'm sitting around stinking from anatomy lab, working up the courage to force myself to be up for another couple of hours before I allow the gentle arms of exhaustion take me into their embrace. Man, I wish that were right now.

Newest fun facts:

• Caffeine does not have a significant diuretic effect. Caffeine, consumed regularly, will not make you pee any more than not drinking caffeine. Why do you have to go so bad after a 20oz Diet Coke? You just drank 20oz of liquid!
• Camels store fat in their humps, not water. They burn the fat in fatty acid metabolism and then through aerobic metabolism and use one of the bi-products, water, to hydrate themselves.
  

The bee's knees

So this past week has been a hellish nightmare of a week. I am now capable of writing out biochemical pathways for an outrageous amount of reactions that occur in human metabolism. Chemicals, enzymes, inhibitors, competitive inhibitors, blah, blah, and more blah. It's all very fascinating I'm told.

However, I also got to see some pretty cool stuff this week, as well. In anatomy we covered the lower limbs, specifically the foot and the hand. The foot is one complicated piece of work. There are layers and layers of muscles in the human foot; each one serving some sort of purpose; either real or vestigial (such as our big toe, which has a lot of muscles that are similar to muscles in our thumbs but don't actually make our toe move in cool ways like our thumb anymore). However, the big toes is actually really important in keeping balance, it turns out. It allows our body to place all of our weight on the balls of our feet when we need to.

The really cool glimpse I got was when we got to the knee. When we opened up the knee to take a look at all the fragile little tendons that athletes injure (ACL, PCL and lateral collateral ligament - the "terrible triad"), what we saw shining back at us was a pristine, silver titanium knee joint. Two, actually, he'd had both knees replaced. So now I know what you're really made of, mom.

Fun Facts Part 1

The average med student learns approximately 15,000 new words during their first year of school.

The average amount of sugar that the body keeps circulating in the blood at any given time is about 5g, about the amount of sugar in a sugar packet. The average soft drink has around 40g of sugar.

On those easier weeks

I have a genetics test on friday that doesn't scare the crap out of me for some reason. I have been asking around and the feeling seems to be mutual. Of all the classes we have, genetics seems to be the slack class. People sleep, do crosswords, day-dream...it's like the days of undergrad. The only real difference is that most everyone still goes to class; we are a guilty bunch. One of the great things about med school is that they bring in guest lecturers a lot who know the topic being taught. One of the problems is that very few of these magic scientists knows how to teach.

On another note, we dissected the arm this week. That's a cool-ass piece of work. Your forearm controls most of your finger movements, and does so by connecting muscles to these pencil-thick tendons, like cables run through a pulley system, that run all the way up the forearm, through the wrist, and into the hand. They get routed through a little tunnel and held down by a ligament. It honestly looks like a thick piece of canvas is just stretched over the top. It's tough as hell and narrow. Called the carpel tunnel and that's where carpel tunnel syndrome gets its name. If something swells, everything rubs up against everything, including the thick nerve that runs through there. Thought that was cool.

Post-test de-stress

If I were to actually write in my blog every time I thought "i should write a post", this blog would be at least, I don't know, two posts bigger. I guess the first step is to THINK about blogging, and then I should actually do it.

I had a brutal test today. At least I thought it was going to be brutal. I think everyone did. However, once I started taking it, it wasn't so bad. Much preferable to the opposite, I suppose. Anyway, nothing, and I mean NOTHING, feels better than finishing a test like that. I felt all sorts of stress just kind of melt away. Now I'm sitting here writing, beer in hand, post-movie, pre-Spider Solitaire game, pretending I'm a normal kid for a bit. :) I'm also excited because Naomi and I have a goofy little date tonight, which is just what I'm in the mood for. We're gonna make dinner and then I'm gonna do some drawing and she's gonna do some coloring-book coloring. Perfect. :)

Jenny, as you're my only reader, I hope you're doing well, too.

On medical students

All med students are relatively good students; it's how we got here. That being said, however, there is a surprising variety of student types. Allow me to describe some of the people I interact with every day:

The Alpha Student
Alpha students are on top of it. Doesn't even matter what "it" is, they are on top of it. They have read all the notes, done the readings, and always have two Number 2 pencils sharpened and ready. Honestly, most med students are alpha students (approx 95%).

The Gunner
Gunners are the curve destroyers. They didn't just read the text book, they probably wrote the damn thing. They don't have apartments because they just live at school. They sleep four hours a day, tops, and budget precisely 17 minutes of fun per week. Then it's back to the books.

The Alpha Procrastinator
Med student procrastinators aren't very good at procrastinating (the only thing they can't do well), but they manage. They are the ones sweating it out a couple of days before a test; up till four am wednesday and then thursday they just don't sleep.

The Old Men
This is my category. Not easily bothered the constant tests because we once had real jobs, we tend to hide away before any big, graded med school task. The constant stressing that goes on in the school is something to be avoided at all costs. I'm typically more worried that I might be forgetting to do something important...

A place to study

Recently I've been questing around campus for a quiet place to study. Quiet is a relative term; some people are okay with just about any volume of noise going on around them, but I seem to need monastic soundlessness to get anything done. There are plenty of buildings around the med school proper, and all of them are filled with SOME type of noise. I can't study at the MERF because there's too much people traffic (and everyone wants to chat). Also, the stress level in the MERF is well above what is on Wall Street during a given day. The library is pretty good, but I'm picky. If there is a bathroom nearby forget about it. If somebody has a piece of fruit or bottled water, those tiny noises drive me absolutely mad. So my quest continues. My goal remains to find an area of some building that people don't remember exists that is so blissfully quiet that I'm annoyed by my own heartbeat. I'll deal with that later.

First Post! It's not very good

Okay okay, a month into med school and I haven't written crap. I'll try to keep this up. I'm not planning on making these entries much more than a paragraph, otherwise I'm very likely to put off writing this forever. I'll just jump in where I currently am. I'm currently juggling an amazing array of classes: Medical Genetics, Cell Biology, Biochemistry, Gross Anatomy/Embryology, and Foundations of Clinical Practice 1 (or FCP). Of my entire class load, only one of the courses isn't self explanatory. The beauty of FCP is that it is broken into two additional acronyms: CBL or Case Based Learning and PPD or Professional and Personal (I think) Development. To give you, the reader, the same treatment that med school has given me, I will never refer to these classes by their full names again. Ever. I have an antomy/embryo test this friday that I'm studying for right now. The embryology portion is fun to study for; since fetuses are so small they decided to print our notes off equally tiny, so you can't read any of the words on the powerpoint slides. Not a single picture looks even vaguely like a person, either - in fact, most of them look like day-to-day items. A fetus at 1 week looks like a mulberry (and I kid you not, the latin term for this phase is called just that, a morela). At 3 weeks the fetus has progressed to look like a mushroom, or, in a different view, a computer mouse.

Okay, I'm seriously going to study now. I'll see if I can do a better job of writing as I get into the swing of this blog crap.