On Tuesday, as I dissected in Anatomy lab for the last time EVER, I asked Dr. Dalley about the whole "tying off the external carotid" thing. He was totally stumped. All he could do was laugh. Which goes to show just how far removed first-year Gross Anatomy is from... well, anything useful to real physicians. Not very encouraging for somebody who's struggling to last until the end of the semester. Which is in a week, saints be praised.

Today was our last day of Anatomy class. We had a lecture about the ear, and then went to lab, which was pretty useless. It was quite obvious that everybody had mentally checked out. My group found the stapes bone and called it a day (and a semester). After all the groups performed the most perfunctory dissection ever, we went back to the lecture hall for a memorial service to honor our anatomical donors. It was really nice; I was proud of the way our class came together on fairly short notice to honor the gift we were given. When Dalley wrapped up the second of this afternoon's two review lectures, we actually gave a standing ovation. It was a pretty great moment. I mean, Dr. Dalley's great and all, but personally, I was standing up to honor the fact that anatomy class is freaking over.

Okiedoke, now I'm about to watch a movie with some people, before settling in for a night of studying.

Today was my final day in the Head and Neck clinic. I saw a teenager come in with a fistula (meaning,a communication that should not be there) between her external carotid artery and internal jugular vein. The artery just dumps its blood into the vein, and veins really aren't meant to have arterial blood in them. The end result was this visibly pulsatile mass just behind the ear. It had what's called a 'palpable thrill', which means you could palpate it and feel the blood whirring around. I thought it was really interesting, but the attending told me that I couldn't even comprehend how unusual it really was. Of course it was new and interesting to me, I've seen nothing. The doctors who've been doing head and neck surgery for 20+ years had never seen one, either. We spent almost half an hour just looking at the scans. It was awesome. And you know what they're going to do to fix it? Tie off the external carotid, just after the common carotid bifurcates.

So. Apparently, the external carotid artery is not quite as essential as our Gross Anatomy professors would have us believe. I feel like I've been lied to. Why in the WORLD am I memorizing the eight branches of the external carotid, and the fifteen branches of one of the branches, if you could just clamp off the whole thing with no ill effects? In an attempt to further my own education (and do better on the upcoming final), I asked if we could talk about the arteries that take over when you get rid of the ECA. The attending's reply? "Oh, I couldn't give you names, it just works." It just works. Nanney and Dalley would have us believe that we wouldn't even have heads if it weren't for the ECA. Yet actual medical doctors practicing actual medicine will not hesitate to tie them off. Bilaterally, even! And it just works!!!!!!!! I am wasting my life.

I also got to see a couple of facial nerve tests. Another thing that in actual clinic, is not nearly as meticulous and drawn-out as Dalley & Co. would have us believe. All in all, it was a great day to wrap up the preceptorship. Now I get to focus on wasting my life... I mean, studying all this super-important minutiae.

During a conversation with my dad over Thanksgiving break, he said that he was sure Anatomy was giving me a deep appreciation for the wonder of God's creation. He was WRONG. I would feel more awed if the system were more efficient. Why in the WORLD does the branch of a branch of an artery need to have fifteen branches of its own? If you could open someone up and see one big fat artery that supplied everything, then I would be impressed. We could call it the Big Fat Artery of God. The Netter atlas would have just two plates: The Outside of the Body, and The Inside of the Body, featuring the Big Fat Artery of God.

But alas, He did not see fit to create us that way. So I get to try and figure out a tangled mass of aberrant arteries and structures that have far too many names relative to their size. And my instructors aren't making it any easier for me. If we're expected to know that the ascending pharyngeal artery has branches that supply the meninges, they could have damn well told us that during the lecture on the damn meninges!!!!! How hard would that have been? None of this "the middle meningeal artery is the only one you need to worry about" bullshit, followed by "Oh and you need to know these others as well," TWO LECTURES LATER. Organization is the key to adult learning.

In other news, the script I wrote for Cadaver Ball is already being quoted in the halls. Pressure to actually turn it into something good aside, that's pretty awesome.

YES, I'm still at school. YES, I will be back in just over 8 hours. Of course I'm loving my life right now; why wouldn't I??

Today was a long, long day. Lecture from 8-10, lab from 10-noon, tour guiding from 12-1, lecture from 1-2:30, lab from 2:30-4, lecture from 4-5:15. Oh, and today's labs involved doing some pretty traumatic things to the head and face. By the end of the day, all I could think was, "Did I actually spend an hour of today telling people that I love this place???" I do love it, deep down, in a place that is currently buried by A MILLION HOURS OF LECTURE. Today was asking a bit much of us.

After class on Tuesday, I generally study Anatomy until it's time to go to trivia. Today I was barely able to make it to a couch in the study lounge. Crashed, slept for a while, woke up refreshed and ready to get my trivia on.

It was just the Faithful Four (Gang of Four? Tetrad?) at trivia tonight. It was a good time, of course, even though we didn't come close to winning. I've always wanted to be on the "one team" in the "Only one team got the answer..." announcement, and it happened tonight. I was the only person at the bar to know the answer to "This British author won the Nobel Prize in 1983. He wrote allegories." Technically, I didn't so much know it as much as think through things and make a good guess, but still. It totally counts. I also learned that Pearl Jam originally wanted to name themselves after Mookie Blalock, which is cool because I've been on a "What bands were originally called" kick. Meaning, in the one minute of trivia learning time I have each week, that's the stuff I've been looking up.

Too tired to write any more.

What's up, kids? Yes, it's true, I'm still alive. I apologize to any friends, classmates, and RAs-for-life who might have been worried about me. I've just been pretty busy for the past week and a half. The free time I have had, I've used for Cadaver Ball, football, and other creative pursuits. More on all that later.

Thanksgiving break was good. I slept ridiculously late (until 9) every day. I ate a lot. I watched a ton of football. I studied a little bit, but not much: just memorized the cranial nerves and their holes. My dad was kinda pushing me to study more, but my mom, sister, and everybody else were having none of that. So I sided with them, and just resolved to up the intensity once I got back.

Then I got back, and suddenly found myself less than a month away from finishing Anatomy. As of now, I believe we only have six lab periods left. That's...12 to 18 more hours?? Surely I can last 18 more hours. Even with an increased intensity level. I've still been doing fun stuff, but I'm trying to be more efficient with the chunks of time I have during the day. (Read: I'm trying to spend all the chunks of time studying). And then, when I need a break from studying, I work on stuff for Cadaver Ball.

Have I explained Cadaver Ball? Let's just pretend I haven't. Cadaver Ball = med school prom. It celebrates the end of Gross Anatomy for us, and the (almost) end of med school for the fourth years. It's a huge, gigantic deal. There are drinks and dancing, of course. But most importantly, the night's entertainment is in the form of skits, music and dance numbers done by the first- and fourth-year classes. I enjoy writing things that make people laugh, so I've been working on a few skits and song parodies. The stuff I've done has been pretty well received so far.

Then there's football. The Cooper's Ligaments played in the league championship game tonight. I kinda felt like I was living a football movie. Playing under the lights, in the wind and driving rain... the only thing missing was "Hero" by (the) Foo Fighters pumping over a speaker. We were definitely the underdog. The team we were playing has been playing together for the past four years; we've only known each other for the past four months. They had a head coach and an offensive line coach and a defensive line coach (with clipboards, natch). Their quarterback had a wristband with their freaking playbook on it, like a freaking NFL quarterback.

We didn't play like the underdogs we were... we just lost like it. Although I must give a lot of credit to our defense. The other team scored on their first two drives, and then didn't for the rest of the game. Their defense was just a bit too much for us. Not to mention that right after our biggest play of the game, I snapped the ball too low and erased most of the gain. Stuff like that is why I'm not clutch. But it was a lot of fun overall, as was the entire flag football experience. And the best part? The quarterback we played against tonight? Hopes to be a first-year med student next year. We'll see how well she plays when she has no free time for practice and has the branches of the external carotid artery on her wristband. Should be awesome!! (I really take an inordinate amount of pleasure in seeing others go through ordeals that I've already been through....I should stop that.)

Happy December! Best month ever!

Back to my normal non-awesomeness. Anatomy exams were returned today. I'm going to start by saying that toastedkelp was right; testing us on everything from the diaphragm down was pretty freaking ridiculous. Who does that? Somehow, in some way I'm not ready to question, I'm still passing the class as a whole. But I got my shit thoroughly rocked, especially on the lab practical. I think, statistically, I would've done better if I'd been given a word bank and just picked things at random. And all I'll say about the written exam is that I owe Johanna, big time, for teaching me everything I needed to know about lymph, ten hours before the exam. My eldest daughter will definitely have some extra h's in her name.

Today's preceptorship seemed designed to be a summary of the entire semester of Anatomy. Dr. B. did an Allen test on a patient considering a radial free flap. Then I "got to" take dorsalis pedis and posterior tibial pulses on a patient considering a fibula free flap. I put "got to" in quotes because Yay, awesome, I helped! But...touching feet. And then I was able to identify the mental foramen on a scan of a mandible. Pretty exciting stuff.

To cap off the evening, my white coat is now missing. I wore it from 10am to 6:30pm. I left it on top of my bag for half an hour while eating dinner across the hall, and somebody made off with it. Right now, I'm hoping somebody accidentally picked it up from on top of my bag, and will return it soon. I'm also glad that I took my phone, ID, and iPod out of the pockets before I placed it on top of my bag and went across the hall for half an hour. Goodness.

One more day before Thanksgiving break, one more push before the semester ends.

We started our final unit(!!!) of Anatomy today. Head and Neck. Lab involved skinning the face, which had been kept covered up to this point. To say that it was intense would be the biggest understatement ever. I would have been fine, if the lab instruction sheet hadn't included a paragraph about the momentous occasion of looking into the face of our anatomical donor, after already learning so much from them. I cried, of course. But it didn't take me long to compose myself, and soon I was actually helping out with the dissection. The facial region requires methodical, careful work, which lends itself more to my style than to the rushed approach that frustated me so much last unit.

Speaking of last unit, we might be getting our exams back as early as tomorrow. I thought I'd have at least a weekend to prepare myself. Add to that the likelihood that biochem exams will be returned too, and we have a situation that is not cool.

Football this evening was a make-up of the game we were supposed to play on Sunday. The team we played was our best opponent yet. Their defense held us to only 6 points. Luckily, our defense shut them out. My personal favorite moment was when they tried to rush a play while our defense was still in the process of getting onto the field. One of our players went from the sideline, to rushing their quarterback, in one continuous sprint. It was pretty great. The entire team had a lot of good plays. It was a lot of fun, but it was freezing. I'm still shivering.

I recently realized that I am no closer to having an Emphasis project lined up than I was months and months ago. I need to get cracking on that.

I could have studied more, but the odds are, no matter how much I studied, I wasn't going to learn the exact nitpicky details that were asked about.

Concentrating on the written notes, slides, and atlases does translate into more knowledge on the practical, but only to a point.

It's all about calculated risk-taking. I decided that it would pay off to pay less attention to the thigh, in favor of urogenital embryo. Possibly the worst decision I could have made, but how could I have known that ahead of time?

During the slide portion of the exam, we're allowed to ask questions about the images, but asking stuff like the age or the sex of the specimen will get the slide thrown out. One of the slides Dr. Dalley put up today was an image of an obviously pregnant woman. He said, "I know I told you that you're not supposed to ask about sex, but it's appropriate this time. The answer is, at least once." Think about it...or maybe not. It might've just taken us a few minutes to get it because our brains were dead. Anyway, that was my one genuine smile of the test day.

Now, the rest of this week will be a break from studying, then I need to start the whole process over again. I only have one more Gross Anatomy exam to take, ever. That's pretty sweet.

Biochem exam today. It was okay. Anatomy exam on Tuesday. I have yet to learn anything from the pelvis down, with the exception of the knee. It's not looking good.

I didn't pre-register for spring electives. Whoops. They sent us about seventy emails about that, all with varying bits of information. The one I was going by said we had until 5pm today. That information was about as accurate as the stuff you'd find in a Halle lecture. That is to say, wrong. But I don't really care, because for some reason, after having choices like Gothic Architecture and Arthurian Literature, I can't get too excited about Cardiac Pharmacology. That's kind of sad, because I'm supposedly going to be spending the rest of my life studying stuff like that...but I don't have the energy to care about stuff like that right now. I'll pick something tolerable once add-drop starts, or I'll do a blue sheet and make up my own course of study.

I'd better get back to my current course of study, which involves becoming familiar with the entire pelvis before I go to sleep.

Today, my lab group had to give a clinical anatomy presentation on knee arthroscopy. It turns out, not only is our knee joint lecturer too busy showing us gratuitous gruesome videos to be an engaging and informative speaker, he's apparently too busy finding the videos to actually prepare accurate lectures. In hindsight, it was obviously dumb on my part to use information he presented to us, but time was not on my side. Besides, why is the accuracy of the stuff I'm being taught even an issue? That's not a rhetorical question. Why is that even an issue?????

I need to get a whole lot happier about this "med school" thing before I give tours on Thursday and Friday.

My classmates and I were hazed today. Really, that's the only word for it. First: today was the day we were told we'd get our graded Anatomy exams back. Then, a couple of days ago one of the Anatomy professors sent out this long email about today's class. It basically said that we'd be going in to lab at 8am, to visually explore the abdominal cavity. Then we'd have lecture about the stuff we'd just seen. She gave this whole long explanation about how it would probably be easier for us to understand the material in the lecture, if we'd already seen the physical structures first. Which is reasonable, but some of the more pessimistic people in the class (myself included) instantly thought, "Wow. How badly did we do on the exam, that they're changing the whole structure of the class in an attempt to help us learn better?"

So this morning, first thing, we went in and did our visual exploration. During that session, Dr. Dalley announced to the class that from now on, at the beginning of each lab period we'll be presenting the information from the previous lab session. He said something about that helping to solidify our grasp of the material, and definitely used the exact phrase "Because it seems not many groups have been doing that." The day graded exams are returned, you tell us you're redesigning the class on the freaking spot, and give a reason like that? So. An hour into the day, and my nerves are already shot.

It only got better from there. We had lecture forever. It was a three-lecture day that was actually more like a five-lecture day...certainly the longest day we've had yet. It didn't help that all three lectures were given by the same lecturer, who's known for her ability to cover the most material in the shortest amount of time. The exam grades might not have been mentioned all that much, but it was hanging over everybody's heads. The Powerpoint slides might as well have read "EXAM GRADES. EXAM GRADES. EXAM GRADES." Oh, and at lunch time, instead of having free time to relax, we had a "Meet the Promotions Committee" info meeting. It basically went, "Here are the people who decide if you go to the next year or not! Here's what happens if you fail a bunch of exams like the one you are going to be getting back VERY, VERY SOON! But don't worry, you all probably did fine. Let's talk about repeating a year." Not cool.

[whine]Also, I am seriously going to have a sit-down with a Dean about scheduling mandatory lunches on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Non-mandatory info sessions and lectures, whatever, that's a choice. I usually skip those, because the idea of a free lunch is not THAT great, especially when we're already having our brains overwhelmed for eight or nine hours. I really don't think it's fair to take away the one hour of free time we do get.[/whine]

The fourth and fifth of the five lectures were after lunch. We'd been told that the exams would be in our boxes at 3. As the lecture dragged on, I'm sure more eyes were on the clock than on the slides. 3:00 came...and went...the lecture finally ended. But we weren't dismissed! Dr. Dalley came up to talk to us about the exam. That dragged on. And then, "They'll be in your boxes by 4:30." So we had to go to afternoon lab with this thing still hanging over our heads. Longest lab ever.

It was 5 when I finally went and got my exam. I got the P, which is all that matters in life. But really, I can't adequately describe how much they managed to build up the suspense today. It had to be on purpose.

Trivia tonight was fun, but I need to go to bed so I can't say much about it. I'll just say that toastedkelp missed House in order to play trivia, because she's awesome.