Bone Box

The second block is upon us. We're still doing all of the same subjects (histo, embryo, physio, anatomy, OPP, EOM) and now we've added biochem. Clearly, we didn't have enough to do. Clearly. We've moved on from the brachial plexus to its evil stepsister the lumbosacral plexus.

Oh, and I have a femur. In my house. That's not mine. That is all.

Geologic time

Someone informed me that 25 years is the smallest unit of time that geologists will use (i.e. a quarter of a century). I don't know if this is true, and I am far too lazy to look it up. I kind of hope it's true though, just because it's interesting. At any rate, today my age can be measured in geologic time.

Happy Birthday to me. Twenty-five seems really old, but I know it isn't. Maybe it's just that I never thought about actually getting here until now. One thing is for certain. Time goes quickly. It feels like just yesterday that I was doing really silly Shakespearean plays with my friends and watching silly shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My how things change.
I have biochem (ick) and a preceptorship at a substance abuse clinic (yay!).

Nurse Ninjas

Most nurses are ninjas, at least when it comes to respiratory illnesses. I have chronic asthma, which I have had since childhood. As such, I am normally quite skilled at managing it and rarely have symptoms. When I do have symptoms, it's usually due to upper respiratory infections or other illnesses. Currently, I have such an illness. Yesterday, I went to the school clinic to get a refill on my albuterol (I know, I know, I shouldn't have even let it run that low) and to have the nurse practitioner listen to my lungs to make sure I wasn't dying. I walk in and she's talking to a drug rep, but the RN is available. I basically say, "Hi," and before I can get anything else out, the RN has whisked me back to a room and is taking my vitals, listening to my chest, etc. It's like she had a weird nurse spide-y sense when it comes to asthma. It was quite remarkable.

I've had that happen before. Once, the nurse did it over the phone and demanded that I be driven to the clinic within the hour.

I don't know how they do it. Freakin' ninjas, I tells ya.

Post Block One Fortunately/Unfortunately Game

It's time for another game of fortunately/unfortunately.
Fortunately, I seem to have survived the block exam.
Unfortunately, with regards to histology, this seems to be based upon a technicality.
Fortunately, I am willing to accept that technicality as a "pass."
Unfortunately, this means my histo barrier is pretty weak.
Fortunately, I was not in the group in my class that had the upper respiratory infection during exam week.
Unfortunately, I have it now.

Post Exam Weekend

I have officially survived my first exam week. I'm a little thrilled, really. Every day was hard, no doubt, but I feel pretty good about how I did on my exams. I am pretty sure I passed everything, and there is a slight chance that I high passed a few things. That wasn't my goal this first exam cycle. My goal was to get my bearings, figure out what works and what doesn't, and then apply it to future exam cycles to do better and to use my time more effectively.

Also, this weekend has been awesome. I've done nothing school related, except for a memorial service for our body donors. The service was nice and respectful, except for the MSII that was wearing a mini skirt that was just barely longer than her short white coat.

I think I may be getting the upper respiratory thingie that's going around in my class. I am happy to have had it miss exam week, but I feel like crap right now and that's horrible. I wanted to go to church today, for the first time in a month or so. I feel gross though, so I may have to go next weekend. I'm sitting here with a glass of water and seeing if I feel better. Mostly, though, my church has a lot of elderly folks and I don't want to get them sick.

Either way, today I do have to do a little bit of work to prepare for classes tomorrow. I think I'm ready to move forward.

Sleep deprivation

This week has been, and will be, an exercise in sleep deprivation. The goal is to sleep just enough to function properly and learn things but not so much as to lose a lot of time to it. Time spent sleeping is valuable and could be used to study. Granted, I have been sleeping about six hours a night, which isn't horrible. It's also not good. I'm a gal that likes massive amounts of sleep, usually like eight or ten hours.

Oh, next week is exam week. That may help explain things. I have a block exam on Friday, Sept. 12th. Prior to that, I have an OPP practical exam on Tuesday, a Histology lab exam on Wednesday, and an Anatomy lab exam on Thursday. It sounds like a lot, and it is. There's a lot to know, although I feel pretty ok about OPP. OPP is a very active class. You are doing things to patients, like soft tissue manipulation and range of motion exams. As such, it's a little easier to learn this stuff. Anatomy is less active, but you can kind of multi-task in the lab by studying for the practical portion and then making sure you think about stuff that might come up in the written. This can be done in Histology too, so as far as those classes go, I feel ok.

Physiology is just a more in-depth version of the physio and cell bio classes I took in undergrad. I can spend some time with the notes, internet, and book and get it.

Embryology is horrible. I mean, it's interesting. It's just so complicated. Once you get to like day nine or ten, it's completely obtuse and you have to have a really good sense of what happens visually, since there's so much folding around that occurs.

Tomorrow, we welcome tropical storm Hannah to the northeast.

Forgetting school

Every now and then, it's necessary to take a day and forget that you're in medical school. Yesterday was one such day. I woke up leisurely, had a lovely brunch with my husband, went to an art show on the coast, and had a wonderful dinner with friends.

So it wasn't a complete success. I kept trying to remember the muscles in the extensor compartment of the forearm, as well as the muscles of the thenar and hypothenar eminences of the hand. Also, I kept finding bony landmarks on my husband. It was weird. Even on play days, you're never really away from it.

The downside, of course, is that yesterday is gone, and now even though my husband has today off and I theoretically have no classes, I am going to go study at school. All day.

Oh yeah, and we're less than two weeks away from our first block exam. Not that I'm stressed or anything.