Some Good Things
We had our last Neuro exam today and simultaneously began Cardio. We actually got our "unofficial" grades from the exam this afternoon, which is a really quick turnaround. The happy part is that I FINALLY made an A on a written exam in a "real" academic course. (I got an A on our first OMM exam, but I feel that OMM ought to place more emphasis on the practical exams and techniques given that that is really what OMM is all about than the written, so I discount that A as not really being worth as much.)
Perhaps this isn't necessarily, good news, but I did find it to be exceptionally cool and vastly different than anything else I have ever experienced. We got to saw open the chest cavity on our cadaver today and we had to take out the lungs. Based on where we saw, you really can't see all the way around and we left the heart in (not dealing with that until next week or later), so if you know your anatomy at all, that left the lungs pretty well obstructed. So after some stealth work with my scissors and scalpel, I literally just had both my hands in there, digging around blindly to try and wiggle the lungs free from the pleura and whatever else was holding them in. When I finally got one out (which happened to look relatively enormous compared to the lungs of the cadavers at the other tanks around us) I held it up like in the Lion King when the baby is born. Yeah! I got a lung out! I realized while I was doing this, that this is what surgery could be like (particularly in trauma scenarios), digging around blind, just feeling what's in there and comparing it with your mental map of the anatomy. Did I mention, it was pretty fucking cool? I didn't realize I would be as excited about this as I was.
While I would love to take a little down time and just veg out catching up on some TV shows, I already have 3 lectures to review and there's no let up for the rest of the week. Quite to the contrary, for this particular unit, the professors seem to like to treat every lecture like an MLM (basically where they randomly call on people with PIMP questions related to clinical cases being presented), so I definitely feel the need to learn this shit quick and be on my game or forever make an ass of myself in front of a few hundred classmates. And so it goes....
On the bright side, if I make it through next Wednesday, we will finally have our first two full days off since Labor Day. Amazing!
Many spanks,
BBC ;)
Perhaps this isn't necessarily, good news, but I did find it to be exceptionally cool and vastly different than anything else I have ever experienced. We got to saw open the chest cavity on our cadaver today and we had to take out the lungs. Based on where we saw, you really can't see all the way around and we left the heart in (not dealing with that until next week or later), so if you know your anatomy at all, that left the lungs pretty well obstructed. So after some stealth work with my scissors and scalpel, I literally just had both my hands in there, digging around blindly to try and wiggle the lungs free from the pleura and whatever else was holding them in. When I finally got one out (which happened to look relatively enormous compared to the lungs of the cadavers at the other tanks around us) I held it up like in the Lion King when the baby is born. Yeah! I got a lung out! I realized while I was doing this, that this is what surgery could be like (particularly in trauma scenarios), digging around blind, just feeling what's in there and comparing it with your mental map of the anatomy. Did I mention, it was pretty fucking cool? I didn't realize I would be as excited about this as I was.
While I would love to take a little down time and just veg out catching up on some TV shows, I already have 3 lectures to review and there's no let up for the rest of the week. Quite to the contrary, for this particular unit, the professors seem to like to treat every lecture like an MLM (basically where they randomly call on people with PIMP questions related to clinical cases being presented), so I definitely feel the need to learn this shit quick and be on my game or forever make an ass of myself in front of a few hundred classmates. And so it goes....
On the bright side, if I make it through next Wednesday, we will finally have our first two full days off since Labor Day. Amazing!
Many spanks,
BBC ;)