Anyone have a transected eyeball I can borrow?

So much has happened since I last shared with you all. Friday will be my last day of class in block one (HOORAY) followed by finals. My finals will consist of:

-Multiple choice exams in: cell/tissue biology (aka histology), molecular medicine (aka biochemistry and genetics), anatomy and doctoring

-essay exam in physiology

-practical exams in anatomy (structures tagged on cadavers and models) and doctoring (performing a complete physical exam on a classmate. Note that "complete" means: neurological, musculoskeletal, thoracic, abdominal, and head-eyes-ears-nose-throat exams. No pelvic exams or any such things on each other thankfully.)

It's been a rough week or so with a lot going on in addition to finals. I gave my anatomy oral presentation today on the orbit (which is the little pocket in your skull that holds your eyeball). Anatomy presentations basically mean you pick a structure/compartment, stand in front of your cadaver and point to/explain things and their clinical significance to an instructor for 10 mins. Then they ask you questions. After much stress and many hours of work (dissecting, researching and prepping) I did fantastically on my presentation and the instructor asked me to preserve my dissection so it can be used in the future to teach undergrads. That's the second time an instructor has asked me to save a dissection (the other being the coronary arteries and cardiac veins on our heart). Maybe thats a little bit of bragging but its been a hard week so I think I deserve to be pleased with myself. I also just finished my doctoring presentation on the HEENT exam- and i successfully saw the optic disc through an ophthalmoscope! (that thing that doctors use to look inside your eyes.) I also can't remember if I said this before or not buuuut... I'm officially a new co-director of one of our student run clinics. We have training now through January and starting late January, my classmates and I (there are 7 of us) will officially be running a clinic (Eeeep). So excited :)

In other life news (the source of much roughness this week) I have one dear friend who lost a family member last week, another having lung surgery this week, a third who is also going through a tough time and a roommate who's having issues with her fiancee. Because when it rains it pours and finals is ALWAYS the best time for personal problems. yay!

For anyone wondering about break: I get two and a half weeks off. I'll be home at my parents house from 12/19 until christmas-ish. Then I plan to be in the mountains from Christmas-ish until Saturday January 5th (when I'll be sitting bump at the top of 7/8 for ski patrol and you should all come visit me so I'm not bored. If this sentence makes no sense to you, you can ignore it.) then back to Sac to start block 2 on Jan 7th! Woowoo! 

I leave you with these two GIFs to summarize my feelings:

http://whatshouldwecallmedschool.tumblr.com/post/37141139498/just-after-my-exam

http://whatshouldwecallmedschool.tumblr.com/post/37066833649/after-m1-year

your interpretation should be "come to the mountains and drink with me"

PS- the title today comes from a post in our class facebook group. The response was "sure boo, you can borrow ours!" Another great post along the same lines "Does anyone have a good falx cerebri I can borrow? I will repay you with scalpel blades." (falx cerebri is the fold of dura that divides your cerebral hemispheres in your brain. see wiki)

Clinic

My its been a long time. Everything's settled into routines and I've felt like I've either had nothing exciting to post or I've been to busy to post.
Two weeks ago, we started dissecting Stanley's face, then we moved on to opening his skull to study the nerves, spinal cord and blood supply (we do the brain this summer). Those dissections were really intense. For whatever reason, the fact that he has eyelashes caught me off guard. Also holding a brain in my hands was a bit bizarre. There's a lot that we don't understand about the brain. It was weird to think that even though we can't access them, I was holding someone's memories, emotions and personality in my hands.

But now for the purpose of my post. I'm excited to report to you all that I'm officially an incoming Co-Director for one of our student run clinics! I'll be taking over responsibilities by January and running the clinic with a team of 6 of my classmates for the next year! So, I decided to go work in the clinic two days ago (Saturday).
On Saturday, I saw a patient who we'll just call M. M came in for a pretty typical appointment- med refills, get lab results, monitoring diabetes etc. After a full patient interview in which M basically said there's been no major changes in her health, we moved on to do a quick physical exam. The plan was since she had no new complaints we just listen to her heart and her lungs and check sensation in her feet (which is part of a routine exam for diabetic patients). So I explain to her what I'm going to do, M says ok so I put my stethoscope in my ears and go to listen to her heart. But without saying anything she takes my hand and puts it just above her left breast- where she has a lump the size of a baseball. I'm a little afraid of what my face probably gave away to her. I've never felt a mass like that before. M then told me that she found the mass 4 months ago but it's grown a lot recently and become painful. She hasn't gone to the place that does free mammograms because she doesn't drive and doesn't know how to get there. M is unemployed and has no health insurance.

While we could process this on a social level and be frustrated that M was put in a position where her disease outcome may be effected simply because she doesn't know how to drive, or because she was afraid to tell someone sooner, but I think the greatest impact on me was in a different way. Its been humbling to realize that she couldn't even find words to tell me she had found a mass. Its moving to realize I was the first person to feel that besides M. I've been in the medical education system for 3 months, and already someone's willing to trust me with something like this. A bit of an eye opener.
The little shiny positive I can give you here is to say that there are people who really care. M brought the paper with mammogram information on it with her to clinic. So one of our fantastic undergrads who run the front office and intake at clinic used the wonders of google maps to find a place with free mammograms less than a mile from M's house. We sent her home with a map and the phone number to call Monday morning and make an appointment (our undergrad even tried to call on M's behalf but the place was closed on weekends).

Happy Playoff Season!

So today, after taking our biweekly quiz, sitting through a lecture and working through a histology (cell bio) lab, I did something I haven't done since starting medical school. I came home and climbed back into bed (yes, during the day) and after catching up on new Big Bang Theory (which is the 3rd best show ever, after firefly and BSG, Arrested Development and Scrubs come in a close 4th and 5th) I am still laying here under my covers watching the Cards/Nats game. For those who don't understand, this is my version of a nap (I pretty much don't sleep during the day unless I'm sick). And I haven't done this for the last two months.

BY THE WAY, as of today, I'm half way through my first block!!! This calls for a celebration (which will be put off for two weeks until my FOUR DAY WEEKEND).

On the schedule for this week:
-Finish dissecting our cadaver's hemisected pelvis (Tuesday)
-Do my first ever breast exam on a (practice) patient (Wednesday)
-Second anatomy practical exam- thats the one where they put the little tags on the cadavers (Friday)
-WATCH AS MUCH PLAYOFF BASEBALL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE (ALL DAY EVERYDAY)
-Plan to either wallow in misery on Tues/Wed (If the Giants lose) or celebrate an epic comeback on Thurs (if the Giants win)

In case anyone was wondering, here's how I WANT the playoffs to go (not necessarily how I expect them to go...)
NLDS: Giants beat the Reds and Cards beat the Nats
NLCS: Giants beat the Cards
ALDS: A's beat the tigers and Orioles beat the Yankees
ALCS: A's beat the Orioles
WS: GIANTS BEAT THE A'S IN A BAY BRIDGE WORLD SERIES

Happy Genitalia Week

Warning in advance: this week has been slightly disturbing, and I very much need to get it all out. So the content of this blog might be (will be) slightly (more) disturbing. Here's a list of things I did this week, I'll write about them in this order so if you want to skip something you can (If you'd like to continue thinking of me as a normal human being, I suggest you only read #5).

1. On Monday we had our male GU lecture- so we looked at normal and abnormal penises for an hour

2. On Tuesday we dissected the anal triangle (yes, its pretty much what it sounds like)

3. On Wednesday, I did my first rectal and male GU exam and had a lecture on pelvic and breast exams

4. Today we hemisected our cadaver's pelvis (cut it straight into right and left halves) and removed the right leg from the body (with a hammer and chisel).

5. Tomorrow is my roommie's birthday (guess what we'll be consuming large quantities of after a week like that?)

1. So Monday actually wasn't that bad. It's just that anything male is very un-intuitive for me (being female...). Fun fact of the day: men have a tiny little vestigial homolog to the uterus. (translation for non-science folks: guys have a little tiny womb inside of them. No, it doesn't work.) And women have a homolog to the penis which has some function (sort of...) I'll let you figure out what it is and what it's function is ;-) if you're stumped, you can ask me. And a fabulous direct quote from our anatomy instructor "The pudendal nerve provides sensory innervation to the penis or the clitoris. It also provides motor innervation to the voluntary sphincters of the urethra and the anus. So it's kind of important, you should try not to cut it in surgery" (Translation: One nerve lets you feel your penis/clit AND keeps you from pissing and crapping your pants. It's just a little important)

2. The anal triangle is the space between your ishial tuberosities (if you sit up nice and straight, they're the bones that poke down into the floor) and your asshole. We started this dissection by putting an excessively large tampon up our cadavers ass (my job since my lab partners literally couldn't do it). Which was somewhere beyond disturbing. Then we spent 3 hrs digging through the fat around the ass looking for nerves. Disgusting and unrewarding.

3. So doing an exam (on a practice patient who gets paid... not on my classmates) wasn't as rough as I expected. It's like there's a switch I can flip in my head that turns off the part of your brain that recognizes what you're really doing and just focuses on learning and doing it right. I think the most disconcerting part of the exam for me wasn't actually the rectal exam. It was the inguinal canal exam (checking for an inguinal hernia)... you can google it if you want to know whats involved. anyways, it was disturbing because to me, it really looks like it should hurt (but apparently it doesn't really?). Made me realize I don't really have a good understanding of man-parts and what is and isn't painful

In order to let you all still consider me a semi-normal human being, I'll stop describing this :)

Pelvic and breast lectures were a lot of "yeah yeah I've heard all that before", but apparently a lot of it went over the guys' heads. (The guy next to me didn't know what a cervix was for example, he definitely asked me in the middle of lecture). They also clearly didn't know what to do with the speculums they were passing around.

4. So today's lab was quite brutal. we've gone entirely through the abdomen and pelvis so today we literally took a chisel and hammer and cut straight through L4 and L5 vertebrae and the sacrum, then used a scalpel to extend the cut from the spine horizontally through the posterior wall (aka the cadaver's right lower back). Then we cut straight through the genitalia (yeah, go ahead and shudder at the thought of cutting personal parts in half. It made me shudder). And here's the best part: Stanley's bowels and rectum are really really really full (of poop). So we were having a hard time completing the cut to remove his right leg without cutting his bowels open. So we called over an instructor to help.

Instructor: well, you aren't cutting along the midline, you're too far off to the side

Me: well, his rectum is really full, and we really don't want to perforate it.

Instructor: It is really full, you just have to pull it off to the side like this [pulls].... and I just stuck my finger through his rectal wall, sorry guys, that's poop on my gloves.

[uuuuuuuuuugh]

so according to the instructor, our rectum was so very very full, that rupturing it was basically inevitable. In the end, she actually removed the entire thing which will make future dissections easier. So not the happiest day in lab. It smelled horrible, and it was rather violent. Seeing the sagital section (from the midline cut) of the male pelvis/genitalia wasn't that exciting, the female was pretty cool though, even if the ovaries and uterus are all shrunken in the few old ladies who haven't had a hysterectomy by the time they donate their bodies.

5. So party tomorrow :) One day to relax before we gear up for an exam on Monday, an anatomy practical on Friday and a visit to the "pelvic exam simulator" so we can all practice our pelvic exams on plastic lady parts before we see a real patient in two weeks.... shit just got real :-)

New Routines

Well everyone, it's official. I think med school's finally starting to settle into a routine. I realized its been about 10 days since I've written and I had to think what we've done over the past few days and my first thought was "well, nothing really special happened" (which isn't REALLY true, but that was my first thought). At the end of this week, we'll be half way through block 1 (and I'll be 1/8 of the way to becoming a real doctor!)

So my classes... Biochem spent the last two weeks trying to get us to do "self study modules" then spend class time teaching each other/making up skits and other nonsense. Needless to say, it didn't go well (as reflected by nearly half the class failing the biochem portion of our last quiz). So note to anyone who might someday want to go to medical school: schools are all soooo proud of their attempts to integrate curriculum and offer "group learning experiences" instead of just lecture. Fair warning "group learning" translates to "waste of your time". I never thought I'd say this, but I really wish they'd just lecture to us.

Physio has gotten harder but more interesting. We've moved through cardiac physiology and now to respiratory physiology. Best part about physio: its currently taught by an instructor who looks EXACTLY like Saul Tigh. I really really want him to come to class with an eye patch on one day (I know theres a couple of you who will be tempted to comment on this, but careful with any spoilers, at least one or two people who read this are still in the middle of the show :) )

and now for anatomy... Stanley's abdomen has been.. interesting. The first day we opened the abdominal cavity a TA came over and said "what the fuck is wrong with your guy's abdomen?" It turns out Stanley's had a couple of abdominal surgeries- his appendix and gall bladder were both removed. And after abdominal surgery all the connective tissue in your abdomen creates "adhesions"- which are exactly what they sound like... everything gets stuck together which makes dissecting (without breaking open any bowels) really difficult. The abdomen also smells realy REALLY bad (just in case you wanted to know). And the blood supply to abdominal organs is really complicated (although I did get another compliment on my dissection skills. The instructor said my dissection of the inferior mesentaric artery was "beautiful, even though the cadaver's guts are all stuck together").

Up next: we're learning the male GU system this week. I'll once again refrain from details but basically we're learning the exams for male genitalia and the rectal exam (yes they're exactly what they sound like. No, I don't know why this is one of the first exams we learn and no, we do not practice on each other). So this should  be an... interesting week. 

My new favorite body part

It's been much too long since I shared my adventures with you all, so here's a synopsis of my last 10 days (I'm hoping to get some sympathetic "aaaw, its ok, now I understand" sentiments.
So last Monday was quiz three, which I studied for like a mad lady since my anatomy grade was a little borderline (the quiz also covered physio, histology, biochem and epidemiology/biostats). Did well on the quiz (yay). Then Friday was our anatomy practical exam where the instructors put little tags all over the cadavers and ask questions like "which nerve innervates this muscle?" "what flows through this vessel?" "if I cut this nerve here, what functions are lost?" etc. (with a few "easy" questions thrown in asking "what's this?"). So I spent all last week prepping for that (about 5 hrs a day in lab... pretty sure I permanently smelled like fermaldahyde last week). This was all in addition to normal classes. All the exams led to a back log of work plus a parental visit on Saturday and a visit to this years OEC class on Sunday. Now I have a little room to breathe and tell you about our dissections over the last week or two :)

Last week we dissected the heart, (we'd already taken the heart out of the chest, now we actually cut open the chambers and looked inside) and I have a new favorite body part. Amazing pictures (not mine) here: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/chordae-tendineae
This is inside your heart. The little strings are called chordae tendineae and they attach to little muscles called papillary muscles. The chordae tendineae attach to your mitral and tricuspid valves in your heart (those are the ones between the atria and the ventricles) and hold the valves shut while the ventricles contract. These pretty little muscles and chords are what makes sure blood flows FORWARD into your lungs/body instead of backwards into the atria/veins. Aren't they gorgeous? Anyhow the heart dissection was pretty much amazing. If you're ever bored, look up pictures of the internal anatomy of the heart and you'll be completely amazed.
Last week we also dissected the posterior mediastinum- think of this as the inside of the back wall of your chest cavity (so if I cut you open from the front, then pulled out your lungs, its the area thats usually behind the lungs). And there, we discovered that Stanley had bone cancer. We'd found one bony nodule/mass on his external ribs, but didn't know what it was. When we found a second nodule, this one internally we asked about it and the docs said its most likely bone cancer. That one was a little eerie for me...
This week we've so far only dissected the abdominal wall, inguinal canal and testes I'll refrain from sharing details to keep the guys from shuddering, other than to say when you dissect out the testis, it really does look like a nut, specifically like a walnut in the shell still.. or maybe an egg (and my roommate says Russian slang calls them eggs...) funny that we use anatomically accurate slang.

We've also started meeting with our physical exam groups. So far we've only worked with taking vitals, which isn't really new for me. I'm not really impressed with our facilitator so far, but my friend (in my group) and I decided we'll give him one more meeting before we talk to the IORs about him. He's very casual and didn't really teach much, which was really hard for the people in our group who had never taken a manual blood pressure or listend to lung sounds (example: I asked "where specifically do we listen to lung sounds?" since this is a point we'll eventually be evaluated on in our practical exams and his answer was "oh you know, 2 or 3 places on the front on each side and 2 or 3 on the back"... no, actually I don't know, that's why I'm here. Oh well...

So now that I've vomited the last 10 days of my life onto the page, I"ll try and post more often... all this writing is a little overwhelming :p

Kaliiiiimaaaaa!!!!!

So this is what we did in anatomy lab today (except it was a little messier and significantly less Evil):

(From Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

Ok so backing up, this week we're studying the thorax in anatomy. So on tuesday we took off the anterior wall of the thoracic cavity. This involved using trauma scissors/EMT shears to cut the first five ribs. We had to get an instructor with bigger shears to help with Stanley's clavicles (according to the instructor we have "mr burly man cadaver"). Cutting through the ribs was really neat, but the sound is really disturbing. If you've ever heard someone's bone break, you know the sound I'm talking about. Except this is louder (because theres nothing between you and the cracking bone) and you can feel it breaking through the scissors. After taking the wall entirely off, we took out the lungs. The lungs felt like sea cucumbers (remember those from the aquarium touch tidal pool thing?). Still need to make a point of going around the lab to find some smokers for further ammunition to harass all you smokers into quitting. ;)

So then today, we studied the heart. We got as far as clearing away a bunch of fat, identifying the major nerves and vessels around the heart, opening the pericardium and then cutting out the heart. They say your heart should be the size of your fist... Stanley's heart is the size of 3 or 4 of my fists, its HUGE. Its also completely packed with clotted blood (and not gooey flowy blood, this is blood that's turned into a solid. Its like clay), which we have to figure out how to remove on tuesday. Anyway, holding the heart in my hands was pretty damn cool. Also got to see evidence of bypass surgery in a couple of other cadavers (staples and stitches in the heart in one and a wired together sternum in another).

Today we also did surface anatomy, which is basically "ok guys, turns out you don't get to dissect your patients, so now we're teaching you surface land marks to know where the internal stuff is". Today we did lung and diaphragm surface anatomy. So we all took our shirts off and drew lungs and a diaphragm on each other. Nope, I'm not joking. Although we were thankfully warned ahead of time to wear a sports bra or swimsuit top. This was less awkward than I expected since everyone was doing it and everyone seemed a little shy about it. It was also nice to have a female partner :p and it did cross my mind that maybe this is part of why med school has a reputation for being a hook up environment.
During surface anatomy, I discovered I can palpate ribs 2-12 on myself, most people can only feel 2-10 (first rib is under the collar bone). 11 and 12 are usually buried under muscle, but I KNOW I found my 11th (I can get my finger around the tip of it) and I'm pretty sure I found the 12th on my back. If you ask nicely, maybe I'll show you (lol).

In other news... physiology is studying the endocrine system. And biochem is starting to move into some genetics, which makes me very happy :) And doctoring is finally starting some real DOCTOR stuff instead of just epidemiology and biostatistics. We have our first meeting of our physical exam groups next week (so more on that later).

Quiz 3 is on Monday. Wish me luck!

P=MD

Once again, lots to update yall on. Lets go in order of most interesting this time instead of chronologically (just to be different)

So.... school just got a lot harder. We had quiz 2 today, and it was significantly more difficult than quiz 1. Histology (cell bio) wasn't bad, probably because I've sent quite a bit of time looking at blood cells through a microscope (thank you summer internship). Doctoring and Anatomy were ok, but not great (if you didn't see my colorful brachial plexus on FB, you should. For those who don't know, the brachial plexus is a big tangle of nerves in your in that little triangle below your collar bone/between your shoulder and your arm pit. It was really interesting to dissect on Stanley last week because his had a "variation" where some of his nerves joined back together, mixed their fibers up and then split apart again.) Biochem and Physiology pretty much kicked my butt, hopefully I passed them. Can I just say, there are these molecules called "glycoaminoglycans" (or GAGs) and I hate them. First of all, why is "amino" in your name if you DONT CONTAIN NITROGEN? wtf. I hope all GAGS die a slow and tedious death (just like we all would if we didnt have any GAGs).

Today we finished dissecting the flexor forearm, and then dissected the hand. The had was a little weird, for whatever reasons the fingernails kind of creeped me out. Our hands are a really human part of us. It's easy to ignore the fact that Stanley's an actual person when his head is all wrapped up and we're just digging around in a shoulder or something. But it's a lot harder to ignore his human-ness when you're literally holding his hand open so someone can cut the skin off the palm. The had was also really cool. There are two main muscles in the forearm (the flexor digitorum superficialis and flexor digitorum profundus if you wanted to know their names) which flex our finger joints (the metacarpopharangeal joint, proximal pharageal joint and distal pharangeal joint). The muscles are in the forearm, and their tendons run through the carpel tunnel (with the median nerve which, fun fact is what gets compressed and causes pain in "carpel tunnel syndrome"), then the tendons spread out and one runs to each finger (except the thumb, which has its own little party). So the highlight of lab today was dissecting out each tendon and then pulling on it to make his fingers bend. like little one fingered waves. 

One last thing, I worked at a clinic on Saturday that specializes in serving IV drug users. Saw a really interesting patient who came in with full body tremors. Her father has parkinsons so she was really concerned that she could be showing early signs of the disease as well. She was an interesting case because, while she needed some physical treatment, she mostly wanted to be reassured that she didn't have early onset parkinsons. It was a really good reminder of the human side of medicine, that we're ultimately treating people, not fixing machines :) Which is a REALLY nice reminder as I crammed for an exam. Unfortunately this clinic runs in the afternoons, which kind of kills my saturday study time so I probably won't volunteer there very often. I'll stick with the morning clinics.

So, TLDR; Schools a little overwhelming at the moment, but its still amazing :) I got a dead guys fingers to wiggle. And I'm counting down the days (3 more!) until I can go hang out with trees in the mountains :)

PS- the title of my post, P=MD is our saying, reminding ourselves that to become doctors (MDs) all we need to do is pass!

OPQRST

So, things got a little busy :) but I'll try and back up and tell yall everything important that happened since last week.
Last Saturday I worked in another of our student run clinics. This one took appointments so I liked the flow a lot better (you also get better patient continuity with appointments as opposed to walk ins, and you turn away less people). Highlight of the day: I got to do a patient interview! A patient came in with the usual chronic conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol) and complaining of knee pain. So, right before we walk in, the second year student I'm with goes "so there's a mnemonic for pain..." and I go "OPQRST!!!!!" and he's like "oh, you know it already?" and I said "I've volunteered as a first responder"... shout out to Ski Patrol! :-D (for those who don't know its: Onset, Provocation/Palliation, Quality, Radiating, Severity/Scale of 1-10, Time, all ways to describe pain). So basically clinic was awesome. This Saturday I'll be at a third clinic, and this one focuses on serving IV drug users and sex workers (its a "harm reduction" program) so it should be really interesting!

Last week was really really lecture intensive so the volume of information was really overwhelming. This week there's been less lecture but the labs have been overwhelming. This week we've had 8 hrs of anatomy lab, 4 hours of physiology lab and 2 of histology lab. Anatomy has been frustrating, we're working through the shoulder and arm now. There are an obscene number of nerves, veins, arteries and muscles in our arms. And they all have long names. I did however learn that your funny bone is the ulnar nerve and the "rotator cuff" is actually a group of four muscles around the shoulder blade (in case you wanted to know, they're called the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor and subscapularis... but you probably didnt want to know that).

Our next quiz is on Tuesday next week so this weekend should be full of studying... but then NEXT weekend, I get to go to the mountains (and I'm totally counting down the days...). For my mountain friends: my desk top background is a picture of pinecrest at sunset (I'd shout out a photo credit but im trying not to use names...). At least once a day someone in lecture goes "oh my god thats BEAUTIFUL, where is that?". I wish I could live in the mountains and teleport to school.

Thats all :)

Clinic, Quiz and Stanley's Arm

Ok, major events in chronological order (because I like things to be organized):

1. On Saturday I volunteered in a free clinic that's run by my school. The clinic is staffed by doctors, med students and PA students. Undergrad students do all the office work. Everyone is a volunteer, no one gets paid for their time. The clinic I was at last week is located in a neighborhood that's primarily African American (this weekend I'm volunteering in one in a Philipino neighborhood and next weekend I'm volunteering in one that focuses on harm reduction for IV drug users). So Saturday was my favorite day of med school so far. I like seeing patients, I like helping people. I didn't do any patient interviews or physicals. Mostly I was just shadowing to get the feel for how a clinic runs. Although I did get to take some blood pressures, heard a really distinct heart murmur, and palpated a mass. Basically, I really liked clinic and want to get more involved as I learn more and am able to do more (I really want to do a blood draw!)

2. We had our first quiz on Monday, which means I didn't go outside all weekend which was somewhat distressing but it was also excessively hot outside so I wasn't toooo distressed. Let's just say I rocked my first quiz (can we say 100% on the multiple choice? :) Does that make me a gunner?) My school has one big quiz every two weeks that covers material from all five classes. But the first quiz covered only one week to sort of ease everyone into the testing format/question types etc. So we'll see how well the next one goes...

3. Today was cadaver day two. Our task was to reflect (or fold back) the chest wall (skin and the fascia underneath) to expose the muscles for later work. We also had to remove all the skin from the arms. One arm we did a superficial dissection to find veins and nerves that run just under the skin (for example: flip your arm over and look at your elbow pit. See the vein that they use to draw blood? We dissected that out so you can follow its path all the way up into Stanley's shoulder). The other side we were supposed to go deeper and expose the muscles that are under the fat and nerves and such. It turns out Stanley has really nice big veins but he also has a lot of subcutaneous fat, which made his nerves hard to find so we didn't get very deep on either side. But thats fine, just more to do next week.

[skip this paragraph if you don't like squeamish details] Part of what I was tasked with was to remove the skin from the middle of the upper arm to the wrist in one big sheet (apparently I was dubbed the most precise with a scalpel in my group). Once I got the skin completely separated from the tissues underneath, it was really surreal. Rigor mortis prevented us from completely straightening Stanley's arms, so when I took the skin off, it held the shape of the bent elbow, which was just a really weird feeling. Holding human skin that maintained the shape of a joint in my hand... was even more bizarre than I expected.

Anyhow, the rest of this week is jam packed with lectures and next week is really lab heavy, then we'll have quiz #2 and then the week after is Labor day and I'm already looking forward to 3 days in the mountains :)

Meet Stanley

So today was my first ever human dissection. I spent quite a bit of time yesterday and this morning worrying that I might puke, faint or tear up. I was afraid that I'd freak out when we made the first incision through the -skin. But I didn't. :) In fact, right after lab I texted one of my friends (who oh-so-thoughtfully sent me a note this morning to wish me luck!) and said "That might have been the coolest thing I've ever done". That dissection was absolutely incredible.

So if you'd like to nerd out (and maybe gross out) for a second... we dissected Stanley's back today (Stanley's not his real name, its the name we gave him at the beginning of the lab). Cutting through the skin was a little weird, but once the skin was pulled back and the fat cut away... musculature is breath taking. I honestly can't put into words how awe inspiring it was to actually FEEL and SEE what its like inside a person (and this is just the back! Just wait till we get to internal organs!) There was also something really satisfying about cutting away the subcutaneous fat and fascia (which just looks like a bunch of yellow gunk) and finding perfectly ordered muscle striations underneath (someone more philosophical than I am can find some sort of Jesus analogy in there I'm sure...). Finally, there's something also satisfying about stepping back and admiring your handy work. Looking at the dissected back (we dissected deep on one side- to find underlying muscles and superficially on the other side to show big muscles like the trapezius and latissimus dorsi) and knowing that our hands did all that... that felt good, it felt like we really accomplished something. Which was a nice change because for the most part the first week of med school has felt more like this:
http://whatshouldwecallmedschool.tumblr.com/post/28985228486/trying-to-keep-up-the-first-week-in-medical-school

So overall, today was pretty fabulous. I can't WAIT to do the heart, lungs and brain (Stanley's cause of death and medical conditions should make these really interesting...).Who knows, maybe I will end up being a surgeon, since apparently I really like cutting things open to see whats inside :)
Only negatives for today (and the first two negatives are really more like fun facts):
1. My scrubs are too big (no surprise there...) had to roll them up so they don't drag in cadaver juice
2. I have to wear my glasses in lab because apparently prolonged exposure to formalin with soft contacts in can make them fuse to your eyes.
3. I spent 3 hrs on biochem tonight. Chem nerds, take a moment with me here: conceptually, enzyme kinetics makes perfect sense. I understand conceptually what happens when you vary enzyme, substrate and inhibitor concentrations. I understand the effects of altering environmental conditions. So why the hell do I need the Michealson-M...whatever equation? and that horrible graph where everything is an inverse (I think the y axis is 1/Vi and the x axis is 1/Km... or something like that). Math and graphs make life so confusing. If anyone can explain to me why I need to know these (other than "because its on the test") it'd be much appreciated.

I have a skeleton in my closet... literally

Ok, I'll get to the skeleton in a second, but can I just start by saying I am a happy camper. :) I'm sitting on my bed with six shiny new binders (each a different color) which I just filled with all my materials for block one. I just spent way too much money ordering awesome books with fabulous pictures. I have five pretty new highlighters (thanks to my big sib) with which to attack the contents of my pretty new binders.

Oh... and I also have a box of bones. So me and my roommies went to pick up our bone boxes today (yep, its exactly what it sounds like... a box that looks like a musical instrument case full of bones). Some bone boxes have plastic (fake) bones and some have real. By the time we got there, there were only real ones left (why anyone would pick fake over real beats me, but one of my roommates is a little creeped out by the idea of a dead dude's bones sitting in her room). Anyways, I guess my skeleton's not technically in my closet (yet) but thats because the box is still open in the middle of my floor because I can't get over how freaking awesome it is. I can't tell the gender (yet) so I'm taking suggestions for androgynous names. I'm leaning towards thinking its male though, the long bones (particularly the femur and tibia) are really long... this person was definitely taller than me.

So just for reference, this block I'm taking:
1. Gross anatomy- lectures + cadaver lab
2. Physiology
3. Cell and Tissue biology (aka histology)
4. Molecular medicine/Genetics
5. Doctoring
Doctoring is the class that first of all catches all the loose ends (bioethics, biostatistics, epidemiology etc) and its the class where we learn a lot of our practical skills. On the agenda for this block are the physical exams (general, neurological, pelvic, urogenital, and a list of others...). Anyhow, that list is just for context.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget suggestions to name my new friend :)

TLDR; I'm taking cool classes and got a box of bones!!! (and I'm really really excited about it!). lol, sorry it was too tempting.

PS- whoever's reading my blog in the United Arab Emirates... get lost creeper, go live vicariously through someone else.

Disclaimers

Hello my friends. I've been debating whether or not to start a blog to log my journey over the next four years. I finally decided in favor of blogging mostly so I can have a place to process. Currently the blog is public, so anyone can technically read it, but I'm not giving the link to anyone from my med school or my family. I want a place I can process uncensored. (If creepers start reading/commenting, I'll make it private). So my disclaimers are:
1. I don't plan to censor myself
2. It's med school, there's a certain gross-out factor involved. I'm sure things like bisecting a cadaver's face will require some processing so be forewarned.
3. Everyone says med school's a bitch. I might run out of time to blog, but as I said, this is for me (not for you) ultimately so I apologize now if I don't keep this up.
4. Please don't pass my link off to others without letting me know. I know its public so other people could find it on their own, but I just like to have an idea of who's creeping on me :D
5. For now, lets keep this name free. Thanks.

So, orientation's over and real life starts on Monday. Ready go!