First time through the skull …

The solemn fox captures what it’s like to cut through the skull in anatomy class…

Neurology, Week 2

The week started bad with “blue Monday“, supposedly the most depressing day of the year. By coincidence, the markets went into free fall at the same time, and by the end of the week “blue Monday” had become “black Monday”, drummed up with dire warnings of markets about to crash. For me it was neither the markets nor underlying depression that got me down, but rather it was a simple head cold. It’s the dangers of institutional learning, I think. Once one person gets a cold in the class it spreads like wildfire.

The material we covered this week included the organization of the spinal cord and how lesion placement will effect the quality and type of symptoms seen in the patient. It’s interesting stuff but I find it complex and hard to understand at times. Fortunately the lecturers have started the class off on a very basic level, covering only 3 tracts (2 sensory and 1 motor) that run through the spinal cord. Given a cluster of symptoms, with our new found knowledge, we should be able to place the injury according to the spinal level and aspect of the cord affected (ventral, dorsal, lateral). To be honest, although this week’s material was interesting and demanded a certain focus, the class seemed restless as we are still waiting on our grades to be released.

It’s been well over a month since we wrote our last exam, and granted although there was two weeks worth of holidays between now and then, it still seems that it is taking a long time for our marks to come down the pipe. Apparently two weeks ago the promotions committee (the committee that decides whether you pass or fail medical school) met and discussed those who had failed one or more exams. This past week the promotions committee contacted these individuals directly to inform them of which exams they did not pass and to set up remediation. On a personal note, I have been through this myself, in the past, and it is a horrible process – waiting for the dreaded phone call will raise your levels of stress like no other, the idea of failure can affect your confidence and the idea of remediation cuts into critical time that you could use for other things, but I digress… Now that the promotions committee is done, our class should receive their grades sometime next week (hopefully). I know I passed the written portions of my exams and am fairly confident that I did alright on the lab aspects as well, but still I feel as though I need the official word before I can truly relax into the second semester.

Neurology, week 1

The craziness continues as the work piles up, and I fall further behind. I shouldn’t complain, it’s just that I still have Christmas brain – that is to say, I still feel as though I am in holiday mode and haven’t quite hit the semester 2 groove yet. It doesn’t help that my partner keeps singing Christmas carols as she moves through the apartment. It’s January – dammit! Carols, like eggnog, have a limited longevity before they drive someone insane…and while we’re speaking of insanity, why not include all things related to the brain, as this was the first week of neuro. Awkward seguey aside I have now just started perhaps the heaviest academic block of the first 2 years of medical school, neurology / psychiatry.

Neuro promises to be one of the more difficult academic blocks in medical school. It is 9 weeks in length and covers materials that span several different fields of study. It has a language, a vernacular all its own, which further complicates things. I find myself not only learning the new language but also how to apply it in a theoretical and sometimes complicated way before I understand the basic definitions. The up side is that I find Neuro (and I’m including psych here as well) incredibly interesting. It is interesting from a philosophical view when you think of consciousness and the state of being; it is interesting when you look at the anatomical / histological structures; and it is interesting to see the effects of lesions in the clinic (although terrible for the patients). Neuro would be a field that I would consider if I had the brains (ha!) for it and it may be a specialty that is worth looking into a bit deeper. I had, perhaps prematurely, decided not to consider neuro simply from a lifestyle point of view. I was thinking that the workload of internal medicine wasn’t quite what I was interested in, but perhaps I need to revisit it and see if my assumptions are correct or not. Regardless, I need to focus on the here and now. The workload will only grow and I really need to buckle down and start catching up with the material we’ve covered so far.

Dermatology, week 1

… was last week. Alright, I admit it…a week in and I’m behind already. I still haven’t caught up in the sleep I need let alone the massive amount of notes from the previous week. Last week covered dermatology in all it’s erythematous papular glory (or rather gory). I’m struck by how Dermatology is very much a “pattern recognition” specialty and also by the fact that Dermatologists in general seem to enjoy showing the most horrendous examples of each of rash and only the worst examples of each disease are used in the lectures. My skin itched when we covered arthropod associated rashes and I almost gagged when we had the lecture on vesicular / bullous skin lesions. In the end I was left with the 4 cardinal rules of Dermatology:

1 . If it is wet, dry it

2. If it is dry, wet it

3. If it is not supposed to be there, cut it off

4. If you don’t know what it is, use steroids

I only wish it were so simple. I expect (hope) that clinical practice will be more benign but I guess that remains to be seen.

Post-Christmas milieu

It looks like a bomb went off in my office. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I left for Christmas but it seems like I merely tossed my binders of notes into the room and closed the door for the last 2 weeks. There are papers and books about, interspersed with pens, stickies and an assortment of other office supplies. It’s a mess and with school starting this week, I’m slowly beginning to realize how much work I need to do before I’m ready to tackle a new semester’s worth of classes…

Altogether over the holidays I had: 8 flights over 10 days (no airline seems to fly direct anymore); 12 days of family and friends; 2 turkey dinners; and many visits with a plethora of little kidlets. It was good to get away from things and also good to forget classes for the moment but it was, at the same time, also exhausting. To say that I don’t feel relaxed or ready for semester 2 is an understatement.

Semester 2 of year 2 is a long one. It consists of 21 weeks of class (including exams) with the breakdown as follows: 1 week of dermatology; 9 weeks of neuro/psych; 4 weeks of reproduction and 5 weeks of growth and development. This is 19 weeks of class followed by a week off to study and then a week of finals. In addition to the regular classes another lab component will be added this semester, neuroanatomy. This all adds up to an extremely busy semester and it will be interesting to see how everything sorts out by finals in May.