Week Two? What?

Apparently this is the 2nd week. ONLY THE 2nd WEEK?? Craziness.

we have an exam Monday on 2 full weeks' worth of stuff. That's incredible that only 2 weeks gives you enough stuff to have 2 practicals and 2 written exams.

Anatomy:
We're starting in the thorax. We have dissected the muscles of the chest, opened it up and removed the heart and lungs, and looked at a boatload of nerves, vessels, membranes, etc. inside the thorax. It's pretty awesome. My cadaver is, we're pretty convinced, the best one. He was pretty old and incredibly skinny when he died, which has made the dissection much simpler than the other groups who have a lot more fat to remove and get in the way everywhere.  He had lung cancer, probably from smoking, judging by the blackness of his lungs. People really should NOT SMOKE. It gets really, really nasty inside your chest, and your lungs will start sticking to the walls of your chest and that is not what you want.
Anyway.

TAing histo lab was one of the most fun things I've done this week (and that's saying a LOT seeing how much I LOVE dissecting!) - I'm in a room of 24 students with a professor who knows a lot but doesn't talk much, so I pretty did whatever I wanted. A group of students had to present a powerpoint slide summarizing the lab, that they were given, and then everyone just has to go through the slides the lab manual tells them and find the structures they're supposed to find. I spent the whole time running around the room bouncing from person to person answering "BIG" questions that I remember having last year, that seem like nothing to me now. It was a lot of fun being able to teach people stuff I loved learning myself.

We put up black contact paper on a wall in our apartment, so now we have a giant chalkboard, basically, in our living room and we've been drawing stuff all over it to study. It's pretty much the 2nd most awesome thing ever to grace a wall. The first being this other painting I have that I absolutely love.

Also, I HATE embryology. I cannot wrap my brain around it. It doesn't make any sense to me. I CANNOT visualize what's going on...the process of this growing out of there, migrating up here and turning into the heart 8 months later...not sticking to my brain. ugh.

This week in med school

-failed attempts to hear a heart murmer on the roommate who knows she has a heart murmer
-failed attempts to all study anatomy together while TV is on
-failed attempt to use an opthalmoscope on each other.

this is gonna be great.

First Day of Medical School!!!

Wahoo!
Today was my first official real day of medical school!
The day that I've been waiting for basically my entire life.
I keep thinking how it compares to the olympics. I'm closely following the gymnastics and the girls keep talking about how they've been working their whole lives for this one moment and they have to go do their thing now that they've prepared for so many years for it. It's sort of like that except that this is not the end, this is not the glory part...but I have been thinking about/imagining/anticipating/working for this day my whole life. Instead of every 4 years, this is going to take a full 4 years. And at the end I will be awarded "doctor" but that still doesn't mean squat (in the medical field. Lay people will be impressed but to everyone else, I'll be the most clueless person around for another while)

We've been having orientation since Sunday, so I've met a bunch of people in my class, started being friends with some of them, hoping not to see too much of others...:-P (kidding. sort of.)

I have 3 new roommates and they are great and we are all getting along great and nobody is really weird or really dirty or anything like that. so it should be good. :-p
But I still miss Nitasha! It's WEIRD being here without her!

The feeling of "Oh no everything is new and I'm alone" that i had in college and last year here is not present this year...since many things are the same, and a couple people from my program last year are here as well. So it's been a much nicer transition than others I've had.

TODAY I MET MY CADAVER. The man who donated his body to the medical school so that I could learn anatomy, so that I can be a doctor, so that I could practice medicine, so that I could save people's lives. It was not as unsettling as I was afraid it might be to see the body for the first time. The face, hands, and feet are wrapped up partly to keep them from drying out, and partly to keep the situation a little more removed from the reality of the facts - next week we're going to open up a human body and take a look inside. Therefore, it's easy for the brain to just file it away as fake, I guess. I'm sure as time goes on it will sink in a bit more.  We didn't do any cutting today, just sort of got an intro to the lab, and then headed downstairs for lecture.

We got an intro to histology, which I'm (YEY!!!) TA-ing this year, and then an intro to anatomy, and then 2 anatomy lectures. The first one was mostly stuff that wasn't new to me...definitions of anterior/posterior, medial/lateral, and all that jazz, and then we started on the thorax - vertebrae, the names of all the different parts of the vertebrae, ribs, how the ribs are attached to the vertebrae and then the sternum, the muscles of the rib cage, the blood vessels and nerves supplying the rib cage...it was fun! I love that I have to learn this stuff now!

And then I came home and decided that since it's Friday I was going to veg out a little bit so one of my roommates and I watched White Collar. Because it's an awesome show.  I'm sure this won't last long.