October?

It appears I haven't posted since the end of September. OOPS!

Let's recap the months.
October
We did limbs in anatomy. I LOVED that block. Most people hated it. The lowest averages for both the practical exam and the written were achieved for the extremities block, but I got my highest grades of the year for that block. Yey.

I have my google calendar opened so I can see what I did. ha.

I went on a CMDA retreat! The greater NYC area chapter of CMDA had a retreat up in the Adirondacks and they sent out a request for people to work in childcare while the parents went to the retreat. So I don't really have any great love for watching large numbers of children at once, but I figured it would be nice to get away and see the Adirondacks at the height of fall leaves changing and meet some doctors and help give them a break to have some relaxed adult time.

It was overall a really great experience. I drove up with 2 young doctors who were both 5 years out of residency. It was incredibly interesting listening to their stories and perspectives on things...I felt like I was a little kid listening in on my parents' adult conversation. I didn't have anything productive to add but I was like "ooh, so this is what real doctors' conversations sound like!" Ha. I ended up rooming with a girl who is a 3rd year medical student who was on her surgery rotation at the time. (everyone who found this out was incredulous that she managed to get away for the weekend, including her) So that was nice, because I got to pick her brain a little bit about what it was like.

I felt really bad for the kids because we had the 0-4 year olds, in a room that had skee ball and 2 air hockey and 2 foosball tables ...which would have been super fun for 10 year olds, but these kids couldn't even see over the air hockey table. So it was interesting trying to entertain them, but somehow we managed.

The speaker for the weekend is (was?) a missionary surgeon. Unfortunately since I was watching the kids I didn't get t hear him, but I went and bought a couple of the books he wrote...I have yet to read them though.

Other things happened...but either I can't remember them or I can't remember when they happened so I'm not going to write about it in the October post. :-P

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.

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.

La de dumm

Well.

I'm procrastinating.

Today has officially been labeled a non-productive day, and I guess my brain has a hard time becoming productive in the afternoon/evening if it hasn't been so during the day.

This morning I woke up at 1:00pm, because...I could.

I got up, read this case study about cholera outbreaks during the victorian era and went to class to talk about said case study...where the TA gave us all the answers off her answer sheet, basically. So...I don't know why we have to bother doing it now, since they know that we all know the answers.

but whatever.

Then I came home and was mildly productive and cooked dinner...I had chicken francese (store-bought...mine is several times better!!) and made green beans roasted with garlic and bread crumbs in a little bit of olive oil. YUM.

Then I really didn't feel like doing any work so I washed a large amount of the caked-on goop off the various removable parts of the stove top.

Then I went to the first CMDA (christian medical dental association) meeting, which was about 15 people. It was good...they put this huge emphasis on being short and not making people feel pressured to spend more than 45 minutes there because we're all busy, etc etc.....but I didn't really like that because the whole point of me going there is to sort of relax and hang out with people and have a Bible study...and as soon as they finished today everyone sort of got up and left within 1 minute.

so i hope that as people get to know each other better, or on a day we do an actual Bible study instead of just mostly introductory stuff, that people hang out more.

We had our first exam on Tuesday, and I was stressing out because my cousins were here all weekend and I had to figure out how to do the family time and do the study time...enough study time to do well but not so much that I missed out on family time.

I guess it worked out because I got 1.5 standard deviations above the mean. Wahoo!

I haven't been going to anatomy lectures recently because of the histo test, and they've been stuff that's relatively uninteresting to me...but starting next week they're getting back into things like (My heart literally skipped a beat when I saw this) "Clinical Correlations of Blunt and Penetrating Trauma"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!! I CANNOT WAIT FOR THAT!!

and then they get into anatomy of the limbs and the musculature of the back and all that sort of stuff that I L-O-V-E.

Yesterday we had out first flag football game...I'm on a team called the rectus abdominators ( as in, rectus abdominus + dominators- love it!) and we played against this team of 2nd years that had two sets of people...they actually had a defensive and offensive team. And a girl who could throw ( = you get double points if a girl throws or catches a pass that scores a touchdown, or the extra points). My team had never played together before...so needless to say we lost, but not as bad as we could have.

PLUS it was POURING rain the whole time and everyone was sliding all over the place and soaked and muddy but it was a lot of fun.

Now I am sore and we've got another game tomorrow...probably also in the rain. So that's exciting.

ok. That is all. I am going to read about "Formation of Blood Cells (Hemopoiesis)(Hematopoiesis)"

(personally, I'm partial to "hematopoiesis", I think I just like words with more syllables.)

Anatomy, how do I love/hate thee

WELL

I got my MCAT score

and I decided not to tell anyone...except like 3 people. But it was the national average of accepted people. so if you really want, and you assume I got my info from the same place you're looking, you could figure it out.

It's not bad (it being the average) I would have appreciated it a little higher (seeing how I'm trying to get into med school here) but it's ok. My mom suggested taking it again...I'm not sure how I feel about that just yet. Another "we'll see".

I am currently taking a break (and by break, I mean, I'm finished for the night and for some reason not going to bed yet) from studying for my anatomy lab practical.

this class is the best and worst ever

best because ...well, it's anatomy, and in a sort of masochistic way I LOVE being forced to learn anatomy. and worst because that includes memorizing the origin, insertion, and actions of thirty something muscles in oh...2 days. names i've known for years...never bothered with the attachments or actions. bad idea Danielle!!

So I'm sitting in my apartment living room surrounded by my skeleton (hello there, Donatello, it's nice to see you with your skull cap on today! That is a rare occurance! I see your patellae have fallen down again...don't worry, I'll fix them again...eventually)

and my Netter's flashcards and my anatomy coloring book and this AMAZING website getbodysmart.com and my anatomy coloring book and my lab manual...driivng myself crazy copying and recopying lists of muscles

and I love it.

just...not the fact that I have to be tested on it TOMORROW.

And I found out today that if you get the national guard to pay for your medical school you only have to do 2 weeks/year and 1 weekend/month for 1.5x as many years as they pay for you, I think.

which is much nicer than a solid 5 years...so i'm going to look into that, because...well...the idea of $200,000 of debt is just not that appealing to me, ya know?

Hi Emmy!

oh yes!

Africa!

So I emailed some more...got in contact with some people...told them what I wanted to do, they said there might not be enough for me to do for 6 months, maybe try three? I was not a fan of that Idea, so I told her I'd really like to do 6 months...then I got an email a couple days later saying that she had realized/found/something more stuff for me to do so 6 months is not a problem

WAHOO!

so I will (as I understand it to be now) go to the middle of nowhere-ville, a Muslim area with no electricity or running water and a hole-in-the-ground potty for 2 months, then 2 other places in Nairobi, a slum and a not-slum? for 2 months each.

You can see how well-informed I am.

I'm working on that.

One thing I've learned in this whole process is that missionaries are slow emailers. I don't know if And it's not because of bad internet connections. because even the ones that are stateside are slow. I've been waiting 6 months for one of them to email me back. :-P

ok. it's really late...that's enough of that.

maybe when this is all over I can sit down and actually learn the muscle attachments for fun!