Thank you!!

Thanks for the comments, people! It is kinda nice to know that someone is reading. :)

What a lovely weekend this was. On Saturday I decided that, abdomen exam on Wednesday or not, I needed a day off. In the morning I ran some errands and cleaned up my increasingly disgusting apartment to a level that, while hardly white-glove-worthy, is somewhat less biohazard-worthy. It was a lovely day so it was nice to walk around to the bank, the office supply store, the wine store, the bakery... it was almost idyllic. There's not going to be too many more weekends of pleasant weather so every one counts!

One of the nice things about living here (I can't remember if I've said this before) is that it feels like a small town in the big city. I almost always see someone I know when I'm walking around and, since I do like my classmates, that's very nice!

And then I took a decadent nap. Ahh, it was wonderful.

In the evening, I went out with some friends from class. We walked along the Magnificent Mile, window-shopping and enjoying the beautiful evening. We got some popcorn from Garrett's (they're a Chicago institution, and their reputation, I must say, is well deserved), walked around some more, went to dinner, and then had drinks up in the Signature Lounge in the John Hancock building. It was kind of a touristy evening but we all still feel a little like tourists so, hey, I guess that's appropriate. :) We talked a bit about school but mostly we talked about other things. It was really nice to have an interesting political conversation with someone I can respectfully disagree with. It stood in stark contrast to the vituperative discourse that has become the norm with the talking heads these days, that's for sure.

Today I luxuriated in the extra hour of sleep, which I needed after staying out until 2 am, and then went hard to work on anatomy. I've got a ways to go yet but the exam isn't until Wednesday and I'm pretty sure I'll be good to go by then. It's basically just a matter of continuing to review the blood supply and innervation... I have a good general understanding but sometimes I'm off by a vertebral level or two. :)

As of now, I'm officially halfway done with the first quarter of med school! In that strange way that time often has of flowing, it feels simultaneously like I just started and like I've been doing this forever.

Long time, no blog

Doesn't seem like it's been eleven days since I blogged, but I'm guessing Blogger is more reliable on this determination than I am.

Time flies when you're having fun. Time flies even faster when you're having fun at the pace of one or two weekly exams plus volunteering plus getting your ass kicked by a rhinovirus or some such infectious baddie. :)

I am hanging in there, though the last two weeks have probably been the most study-filled of my life. I'll admit that isn't saying a whole helluva lot... I have been gifted with the ability to cram and I utilized that ability way too often in undergrad. Marathon 16-hour study session before exams I am used to. Keeping up something like that kind of intensity (if in slightly shorter individual bursts) over the long haul is a novelty.

In this last while, I have (roughly in chronological order):

• discovered that I passed my first round of exams (though the physio was far dicier than I thought it would be... seems as though they got tired of keeping the exam the same)
• celebrated the above not by going out, but instead by collapsing in bed and sleeping for an amazingly luxurious twelve full hours
• sawed through the ribcage of my cadaver
  
• held a (dead) human heart and lungs in my hands
• been fairly certain that I failed my first gross anatomy written (No muscles? Anywhere?? WTF? Weird, I thought this was the back and thorax exam, not the PNS-and-embryo-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else exam)
  
• performed my first standardized patient interview (complete with mildly humiliating DVD recording of same)
• performed my first interview on a patient in the ED
• volunteered at the free clinic
• dissected a six-pack (of muscle)
  
• performed a colectomy (on my cadaver, of course)
• relearned basic sugar chemistry, glycolysis, the TCA cycle, ETC/ox phos, gluconeogenesis, the pentose phosphate shunt, and glycogen metabolism
• located the ampulla of Vater, which for some reason always makes me think of Darth Vader's helmet
• discovered that I passed my first gross anatomy practical and written
  
• been very happy that this physiology module is cardiac and hence about 70% review
• (except for the thirty-seven brazillion different ion channels we are required to memorize)

And so that's what's new and exciting in Molly's world for the time being. I'll try to post more often, if only for my own sanity. No guarantees, though. :)

A Calculated Risk

There are only 24 hours in a day. While it would be nice to be able to spend all of them studying, it's simply not possible. I do need to sleep. And eat. And preserve some faint semblance of a life.

And so I made a decision this weekend. I studied for my Monday physiology exam on Saturday. Saturday evening I took last year's exam and did fairly well on it. (Well above passing.) And so I decided to devote all of Sunday to anatomy, which, due to the biochem exam on Friday, I'm a little behind in. Word has it that the physio exams change essentially not at all from year to year, so I'm pretty confident that my performance on the old exam will translate well to my performance on Monday. And if it doesn't, then... oops! Oh, well. :)

I'm not going to host this video directly on my blog, but you really do need to see the "PaxilBack" parody of "SexyBack" if you haven't already. I laughed my ass off.

I can't believe I'm starting week four. That's almost halfway through the first quarter. Scary!!! I've got to say that I am loving the quarter system so far, though. Semesters just could get to be tooooo long.

At any rate, boa noite to anyone reading this. And leave a comment if you are!!! I would love to see if anyone is paying attention. :) :) :)

Worm!

One of the worms that was in my plum this afternoon. GROSS!!!!

WVWV - My First Time 60 sec. PSA

I love this PSA. I think it does a great job of getting the message out. :)

Ahhh... so glad this week is over!

Wow, this was an intense week. Stressful, busy, long... and wonderful. All through the application process, I had what I think are probably pretty normal fears for anyone, but especially for a nontrad, about whether or not I would like medical school and if uprooting my whole life would be worth it. The answer is indubitably yes. It was worth it and then some. I am loving this experience even more than I ever thought possible. It is sooooo amazingly, incredibly, awesomely cool that I can't even begin to describe how much I'm enjoying myself.

Case in point: in anatomy lab today, we were looking at the deep muscles of the back, the vertebral column, and the spinal cord. We had an anesthesiologist come in to do a "clinical correlates" presentation on lumbar puncture and epidural and spinal anesthesia. He had a really cool powerpoint presentation about the relevant anatomy and general principles of the procedures, and then he showed a video of a resident placing an epidural catheter in a woman. Afterwards he and three gas residents circled around the lab for quite a while (maybe an hour?) to answer any questions we might have. I jumped on my poor resident! (I don't think he minded, though.) I asked him all the questions I've ever thought of about epidural anesthesia but never asked because they were irrelevant to nursing practice or because I didn't want to look like a moron or because I or the CRNA or anesthesiologist didn't have time. He seemed really excited to teach about it and we talked about the procedure, indications and contraindications, complications, etc. We didn't get to see a whole lot of epidural stuff on my floor (this started changing as I was leaving, but since I worked so little then I really never got too familiar with it), so I learned a lot and it was just so cool to have such a great resource there just to teach me! (Well, to teach other people too, I suppose, but I'm greedy.)

It also was just about the neatest thing ever to see a spinal cord. How many people get to do that? It was larger than I expected it to be (I don't know what I was thinking, really, but my first response was, "Ooh, that's thick!") and the dura mater was tougher than I had envisioned. The cauda equina did not look quite so much like a horse's tail as advertised but I can see where they got the idea. My dissection techniques still leave a lot to be desired but I did improve, I think. I'm also still not quite sure that I'm seeing everything I'm supposed to be seeing, but these first two sessions have been pretty rushed, apparently, in comparison to what comes next, so I'm hoping that the next labs will be a little less frenetic. I think I'm going to like spending extra time in lab. I also really like looking at other people's cadavers to see the differences. I think I'm going to try to pay special attention to other people's backs, because I'm kinda doubting that they're going to flip my guy over for the practical... it just took too many of us and was really, really difficult.

In other news, I had my first biochem test today. It was OK... I feel relatively good about it. I know I missed up one question for certain, but I'm OK with that. (Apparently this prof includes a question on every test that you can only answer correctly if you remember a certain obscure detail from the notes... it's not something you can really reason your way through.)

We finally got our anatomy exam grades today. My whole class passed both the practical and the written, which was cause for much rejoicing!!! I did much, much better on the written than I thought I'd done, which of course makes me very happy. I couldn't possibly be more pleased with my score on the practical, too, so I'm just one bundle of joy right now.

After lab I went to social rounds (best idea EVER) and from there I went out to dinner with three of my classmates -- wonderful people. So, all in all, it was really an amazing day. I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy, but I am inexpressibly grateful to have the opportunity to do this. It's even better than a dream come true, because it's even better than I dreamed it would be. I really feel, more than I've ever felt before, that I am in exactly the right place and doing what I was, for want of a better word, made to do. This fits me like a glove.

I'm going to stink for a very long time

Sorry so long since the last post. I don't really have time for this post, but I'm going to write anyway because I really need to do something pseudo-creative for a little while. :)

It's been an interesting week thus far. Lots of firsts.

On Monday I had my first "patient encounter" as a med student. Since I've worked in patient care for 10 years, this was perhaps not quite as profound of an experience for me as it was for others, but I was actually more emotional about it than I thought I would be. My clinical skills small group (3 people) and I walked together from the med school building to the hospital all dressed up and wearing our brand new crisp white coats, and it was kind of a cool feeling. Then I had a moment of weird disorientation because I was back in a hospital (yay, home!) but had no idea where anything was (oooh, scary!). Eventually we found the intern who was precepting us -- what a great guy. We chatted for a while and then he assigned us each a patient. These first interviews weren't really histories... instead we had a short list of questions to ask about the patient's perception of illness and health care experiences. I was assigned to a very nice lady who had just returned from something (a chest x-ray, I believe, but I'm not sure). They were just shifting her back into bed before I came in. I was a little disturbed to see that the transporter left her without a call light, with her Foley bag in the bed with her, and with her bedside table out of reach, but I got that stuff sorted and we chatted for a bit. The primary goal of this exercise was to get us to be able to achieve some sort of rapport with our patient. Goal achieved.


On Tuesday I had my first medical school examination in human morphology, both practical and written. Our first unit was on embryology and histology of tissues. The practical portion was thirty slides -- ten chick embryo slides and twenty cells/tissues. The written was a 12 page mix of short answer, matching, and multiple choice, and was worth 160 points. The practical went very well, I thought, and I've heard a rumor that everyone passed, though we haven't received our scores. I thought the written was rather challenging, although that could just be because, in my opinion, anyway, it didn't play to my strengths. Too much cartilage/bone/CT, not enough muscles, nerves, epithelia, and blood (and embryo, really -- I wound up being pretty good at the embryo stuff to my supreme amazement).

Today was my first cadaver lab. We had a meeting during lunch where a speaker came and gave a talk on the history of dissection, death and how different religious/social traditions deal with it, and how this is the experience that really sort of marks the transition from being laypersons to becoming physicians. Honestly, I think people were more freaked out after the talk than they were before. But it was quite interesting -- I find medical history fascinating.

Then we went inside, got changed into scrubs (sadly not provided by the school), and had to wrap our cadavers in cloth (for preservation), flip them prone, and change them into different bags. I really like my group but we were behind from the get go because our cadaver is very large -- not horribly obese or anything, but just very tall, broad, and solidly built. We had to recruit some assistance to get everything positioned and it took quite a while.

We are beginning with the muscles of the back. Our cadaver's back is probably twice the size of some of the others (ok, this may be a slight exaggeration -- very slight). And, of course, we were all very new so everything took a long, long time. I have a feeling that we are always going to be the last group done in lab. Which is fine -- I think it's an incredible opportunity and I am all about spending as much time as we need in order to make the most of the amazing generosity of this person's gift to us.

The infamous smell is both better and worse than I thought it would be. The odor is not horrifically unpleasant, I think -- I've smelled much worse coming from live people -- but it is insidiously, horribly, and unmeasurably pervasive. Hopefully my skin will forgive me for the long hot showers I'm going to be taking every night when I come home.

After lab the Humanism in Medicine group had cookies and milk (and leftover pizza from the lunch meeting) for us and were available if anyone wanted to discuss their experiences. Apparently in last year's class there were several people who were quite upset and crying the first day. They remarked that we seemed very laid back and calm, which I suppose we really were, in retrospect. We all just walked in, took a moment to appreciate the gift we had been given, and got to work.

So, I hope I'm done with firsts for a while, now. I really would like to be able to get settled into some sort of routine! I suppose there are two more firsts coming up -- the first biochem exam on Friday and the first physio exam on Monday... oh, yeah, and my first standardized patient interview next Friday -- but I don't think they'll be quite as dramatic as these ones were.

I like my biochem teacher a lot but he is not the sort of fellow who likes to simplify or demistify or, I don't know, make things terribly clear. Apparently his exams are all about application, but we don't discuss, really, anything related to application in class, so the exam will be interesting, to say the least. I went through Lippincott last night and thought it was very helpful, despite the fact that he wants to burn every extant copy. Yes, perhaps they oversimplify, but there is something to be said for working your way UP from the basics.

Well, that's what's new in my world, and if you've not heard from me lately, that's why. Hopefully I will be able to take some time this weekend to reconnect with people!!

Breaking for the night

OK, I'm calling it good for tonight. I still need to review the developmental timeline and the derivations some more, but I'm feeling in a better place now. The exam isn't until Tuesday, so I think I'll be OK.

Random musings (shout-out to the Random thread!):

• I love Project Runway. I adore Tim Gunn. And I love this PR blog, Project Rungay. Funny guys!
• Liquor laws must be different down here in Illinois-land. I got offered wine samples at the grocery store today. That doesn't happen in WI -- I think you have to have a liquor license to do tastings of alcohol.
• The word liquor is seeming awfully strange to me tonight. I actually looked it up on dictionary.com to make sure I was spelling it correctly. Every so often a word will just jump out at me and look wrong. Egg is especially prone to this phenomenon, I've noticed. Which is just bizarre, because, I mean, really, how the hell could you misspell egg? Egge? Eg?
• During my study breaks today, I watched the WoW episode of South Park on YouTube. OMG, I was cracking up. It was awesome!!!
• It figures that it's possibly the most beautiful weekend of the entire year, and I'm stuck inside. Sigh. (I can't study outside, I get too distracted.)
• En route to the grocery store, I passed this huge used book sale. I promised myself I would look only at one table. It happened to have a hardcover set of Stephen R. Donaldson's Mordant's Need books, and since my paperbacks of them are falling apart, I picked them up. Three bucks, can't complain. Still need another bookshelf, though. At this rate, I'm going to need two!
• Hooray for printers. I've gone without one for the last 5 years or so (I printed anything I needed to at school or on my boyfriend's printer), but that has proven to be an untenable strategy for med school so I broke down and bought one this morning. IT IS SO COOL! It's an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier. I got it for under $100, and it does a great job. I've noticed in the past that I don't necessarily need to scan or copy things often, but when I do, I really really really do. And in fact, one of my classmates coincidentally (she had no idea of any of this) called me tonight to ask if I had a scanner and could I scan something for her. It turned out that I had a digital copy of the document she needed so I could just email it to her, but I thought it was kinda serendipitous that it even came up.
• Serendipitous is one of my all-time favorite words. I don't use it enough. I should work it in more.
• I think the highlight of the PR reunion show was the clip they did of Tim Gunn's vocabulary. While I think the attention lavished on it was more a function of the other people's inadequacy than it was of any ultra-amazing properties of Tim's, let's face it, the man is admirably well-spoken and he chooses his words with precision and care. Anyone who makes the phrase "Sturm und Drang" sound natural and totally unpretentious wins my fanhood for life.
• My boyfriend and I are in a better place, so yay for that. We really reconnected over the phone this week and I'm very happy about it.
  

Random picture: There was a really bad storm earlier this week here and trees were blown down and uprooted all over the place. This is just one of many that I passed by on my way to class, and I happened to snap a cellphone pic of it, so here it is.

I suppose I should go to bed. I have an early morning grocery trip which will get me out of bed in a timely fashion so that I can be effective the rest of the day, but none of that will matter if I don't manage to get some decent sleep! G'night!

I have come to the rather scary conclusion that I have overstudied for the practical part of my embryo/histo exam and understudied for the written. I think there were a few factors that contributed to this:

• I was worried about being bad with visual information and overcompensated
• There were much more abundant practice materials for the practical
• There is only one good old exam for the written because of a change in the course directorship and a major shift in the content, structure, and focus of the written section
  
• The expectations for the practical were much more clearly delineated, allowing for a more accurate self-assessment
• Looking at pretty pictures is more fun than, say, memorizing tissue derivations

So time to get my butt in gear!!!

(P.S. - I've had some good pizza since coming to Chicago but I ate from Medici tonight and it was just truly unbelieveable.)

Busy days!

Whew, long day today.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays our luxurious lunch break is cut short by half due to our Clinical Skills class. We are starting to learn the basics of taking a history. We begin practicing with standardized patients soon, and I think that might be fun. We will be videotaped and we have to watch and critique ourselves, which is the only part I'm not looking forward to. I recognize that there is a lot to learn from that exercise, but I *hate* watching myself on camera.

After anatomy lab, we had an "all-school" meeting in which our dean updated us on what's been going on administration-wise and alerted us to upcoming events that we can attend. I expected it to be really boring but it was actually quite OK. When that was done we scooted in small groups to the various Book Club meetings. My group was hosted by a wonderfully nice faculty couple at their condo, which was conveniently located only a block from my apartment, so I was happy about that. :) We had an excellent discussion about the book (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) and I got to talk with some of my classmates that I haven't really gotten to know yet, so I thought it was a very worthwhile use of my time. The club will meet once a quarter, and I think that's just about right. No word yet on what we'll be reading next or if we're going to stay in the same groups.

Anatomy continues well, physio is fine -- I just need to put in a little more time in making sure that I have the few equations and transporters that we need to memorize down cold -- and that leaves biochem as the course to watch. Even after looking at old exams I find myself struggling to identify what we are actually supposed to know and exactly how we are going to be asked to apply it, so I'm looking forward to going to the review session on Thursday evening and talking with the TA's.

Quiet weekend

Not much going on this weekend. Yesterday I went grocery shopping with one of my friends from the class who was kind enough to take me to a grocery store outside of Hyde Park so that I could escape the hellacious prices here. The store we went to is in the South Loop, and has what is, I think, a pretty nice view. :) Ten minutes before I took this picture (with my cell phone) it was the brightest, sunniest day you could imagine. Shortly after I took this picture it began absolutely pouring. Fortunately, today was gorgeous.

Other than that, I cleaned up my place, did laundry, and studied a bit. This afternoon I had to go recert for BLS, which was of course no problem. This upcoming week is looking pretty busy, and is our last exam-free week until after Thanksgiving, so I think that the honeymoon (as far as the workload) is going to be over pretty soon. But I'm still enjoying what we are covering, for the most part -- biochemistry is a bit of a snooze but I hope it will get more interesting as we move past the basics -- and I'm loving the anatomy stuff (we're still in embryo/histo), so all is good. :)