48-49th days - Anatomy and Histo labs

I had a 2-hour Histo lab on Monday and a 4-hour Anatomy lab on Tuesday. Histo's always the easiest, once you know the slides, there's nothing you can do stop me. The problem is sometimes I go overboard and tend to say everything about the slide once I see it. This was the case this time. I normally hold back when other's are presenting, but after the presentations are over, we do practicals. In practicals, the clinical tutor can show us any slide and we have to say what it is. I can't help it if I don't hold back now. People are starting to think I'm getting cocky because I'm just saying what I see in the slide every time. So looks like I need to hold back yet again for even the practical....

In anatomy lab, it's the same stuff. We had abdomen again, but with some new stuff. It's fun to go through different cadavers and point out abnormalities and differences you see. This is the stuff I like the best and anatomy is the closest thing to what I will be doing for the rest of my life as a doctor. Most of the professors already know me by face, if not by name. There's a professor who's asked my name 9 times (and I thought I had bad memory). I like my anatomy group too, they're all smart and nice people. Today, we had a question on Meckel's diverticulum and the rule of 2s. The rule was 2% of the population, 2 in. long, 2 ft. from ileocecal valve, occurs in 2 yr. olds, and there are 2 types. I had all of those things, but I also said that 2% are symptomatic. Suddenly, a lot of people started disagreeing with me. The MIT girl in our group said, "I wrote a paper on this, trust me, it's not 2% symptomatic. You must have gotten that off of wikipedia". I said nothing further and gave in. I went back and looked it up and found in the NIH and American Journal of Emergency Medicine including that 2% ARE symptomatic! I wonder if I should even bother telling my group because they think I only use wikipedia to find things lol.
http://www.ajemjournal.com/article/S0735-6757(07)00440-8/abstract

The anatomy lecture we had today was about medical imaging. The professor was teaching it was a PhD and a surgeon. He said that he spent 6 months trying to understand the MRI and can only talk about it for 10 mins. In terms of reading the radiographs, he knows his stuff, but in terms of the physics, he has no idea.

47th day - Amazingly loud and long Thunderstorm!

It is 3:36 am as I write this and it is because I started sleeping at 12 and I woke up from the sound of the thunderstorm. Normally, I would just keep sleeping, but this one definitely wins the prize as the loudest and longest thunderstorm I've ever experienced. I would record it, but I'm too lazy for that. The weather forecast said we were hit by a heat wave and so we may be having t-storms the whole week!

Doing Laundry in Grenada

One of the biggest disadvantages of living in Grenada is doing the laundry. The mold here already spontaneously forms at a much faster rate. With the heat and humidity, this is prime for bad smell. I'm living off campus currently and in order to do my laundry, I use the washer, but not the dryer. To dry my clothes, I must hang them outside on a line on my balcony. Once I do this, my clothes have regained the stink that they had before I washed them from the outside environment. Not only that, the fabric becomes more wrinkly and harder.

Compared to on campus though, I do not have to wait in line. On campus, there are only a few laundry machines in each building which houses more than 100 students. I've been talking to my friends on campus and even they have problems with laundry. There have been many reports of girls getting UTI (urinary tract infection). This happens frequently since if your clothes are not washed properly, pathogens can travel up from the bottom. Gladly, I don't have to worry about this. Though, I do check my clothes to see if there are any bugs before I wear them just in case.

The dryer we have is broken and it also generates too much electricity causing our utility bill to skyrocket. Though, I do wish they would fix the dryer.

44-46th days - Lots of lab practice

I've been going to the anatomy lab a lot lately. In McMaster, we also had to go to the anatomy lab frequently in order to practice. We had bellringer exams in which a person would be situated at a station for 1 min. and will have to answer the question at that station. Then after a minute, a bell will ring that will tell the person to move to another station. In McMaster, all the bellringer exams were non-multiple choice. Thankfully, this is not the case here at SGU.

I woke up at 6:30 am on Saturday to get to the Mock (practice) bellringer at 7:40 am. There were 25 questions in the wet lab including some image-based questions like x-rays and CT. I didn't do that bad, I missed 6 and the ones I missed weren't completely wrong. My answers were right, but there were answers that were more right. The mock was actually non-multiple choice. In the real exam, I'll be able to pick out those more correct answers.

A lot of the students got scared because they've never experienced something like this. They had no idea it was going to be like that. They also never go to the lab and just study from books and lectures, so for them it was an eye-opener. Not too many people even "passed".

43rd day - tea exploded in bagpack

One of my roomates left her tea mug in her room today, so I brought it with me when I went to school. I kept it in my bagpack and unknowingly, more than half of the tea spilt inside my bagpack. Thankfully, only the corner of my notes were a little wet. I was able to return the tea mug though with some tea left. After all of that, my bagpack actually was smelling good because of the tea leaves.

I went to the anatomy lab today, went over the abdomen pretty much. One guy's job in the group was to hold the Netter's book. The rest was all me, I pretty much pointed out all of the structures. If there was, however, some small artery that I did not know what the branches were, we looked it up in Netters. Though it was pretty simple and I was able to locate all the structures in the cadavers.


I spent an hour in the lab and then I had to go, eat lunch, and then pre-read Histo, which I ended up finishing. The lectures were pretty easy today. I went back home and studied.

42nd day - anatomy lab

I had an anatomy lab in the morning again. This time, there were two people from my FTM program that joined my group. As usual, I ended up naming everything and everyone else just watched. The FTM guys were whispering stuff like, "don't worry we'll get there someday". After the wet lab, I went to the dry lab, and then discussed some clinical cases, then we went again to another room to discuss more clinical cases and did a physical examination. Same stuff.

After 4 hours of that, I had 1 hour to eat. I went to the indian lady at the bus stop again, she had kadu (pumpkin) and daal, so I took those with rice and roti. It was a pretty good deal and filled me up. After that, I went to the library to pre-read what I could (not much considering the time left). Lecture started, the first part was all about the lumbar-sacral plexus. Basically, something you need to memorize by yourself. I memorized the brachial plexus the fast way in 5 mins. There's a fast way for this plexus too. The 2nd part of the lecture was embryology, which you also had to really learn on your own. The 3rd part was biochemistry and he was still on glycogenolysis and glycogenesis which I already did in FTM, so I ended up sleeping during class. I woke up when he got to the clinical conditions.

 I went home, used the fast way to learn lumbar-sacral plexus in 20 mins, even some stuff we haven't learned yet. It's really sad that most of the students will spend weeks memorizing it when there's a trick to learning it. Anatomy's all about tricks and mnemonics, nobody will spoonfeed you all those tricks, you have to be self-assertive to seek them.

41st day - ethics is over

Before my exam started, there was a #2 normal pencil kept on everyone's desk. The prof. had said that you don't need to bring your own pencil since we will provide you with one. Well, regardless, I ALWAYS bring my own pencil/pen/highlighter. I used my own mechanical pencil for the bubbling as I don't have to worry about sharpening it and also, I'm just used to my own mechanical pencil. It was amazing though, almost every single person the exam room was using the pencil provided. There was even a girl who told me that I should be using the pencil provided, not my own pencil! LOL. Both are #2 pencils, in terms of scantron bubbling, both register. I have taken waaay too many exams to know this since all through our undergrad, pencils were provided to us just in-case some moron did not bring his/her own pencil. Though, in undergrad, almost no-one actually used the pencil provided. It was funny how students here strictly follow the rules, even simple ones like this.

Ethics is now done, there was only 1 exam. Now I can fully concentrate on these 3 courses, especially anatomy, my fav. and probably the hardest course.

40th day

Nothing special, just more studying for ethics and some studying for anatomy b/c I got bored of ethics. I washed my blanket and cleaned my room.

39th day - studying for ethics exam

I've been spending pretty much the whole day studying ethics. While, everything is common sense, there are some tricky questions that involve terminology. If you don't know the terminology, then you will not understand the question nor the answer choices.

On a side note, I recently heard of a student from my FTM program who quit and left yesterday back to the states! Yes, that's right, they did not even take the Unified exam and quit. It was too much stress for them. If you can't handle the heat, then better to stay out of the kitchen because it's not even hot yet and it's about to get much hotter later. There's probably more of students like this, but they will take midterms to see if they got any "potential" before they jump to conclusions.

Some jokes

 

It seems I'm a combination of the 1st 3 except I do know how to take care of patients and I'm not competing against anyone except myself. Ninety percent of my class is "The Crier" or the "Questionable Admission" or "One-track mind".

38th day - Good Friday

Since I studied Anatomy for the whole day yesterday, I was ready for the Anatomy Lab. I had a Histo lab in the morning today, but I prepared for that the day before. I made some notes, emailed it to myself, and planned to print those notes once I got to school. When I got to the library, the print room was closed! Oh well, when it was my turn to present, I knew all the slides pretty well and knew everyone else's slides too. As usual, our group is almost the last ones to finish (due to us asking many questions). It's not about speed, but in the end, all that matters is understanding.

After the Histo lab, I put on a lab coat and went directly to the Anatomy lab. There, one of my fav. professors, Dr. Burns was teaching the heart to a couple of girls who made an appointment with him. I just randomly joined and listened while answering all his questions at the same time. Then, we went to the thorax, same thing. Dr. Burns was really good and was a nice guy. He looked like Dr. Sheppard from the Lost tv show. After a while, some more students joined the group and it became more fun. Dr. Burns had to leave after thorax though.The girls who made the appointment also left and I was left with all the other people who joined.

I just started with another body and did the abdomen, those students joined and listened. I went over all I could with the abdomen. It was fun. Of course, I couldn't cover everything, but it was still fun. All the students this time were very nice too. We decided that we should book an appointment with Dr. Burns as well.

So we took each other's contacts. One of the guys also loves street meat and studies on fridays until 12 and then goes to street meat at Grand Anse. How can I refuse?? This is exactly what I need, a group that actually studies and then eats food as a reward after. Yay found a good anatomy study group and now I can go for street meet every friday!

37th day

The grades for all our Unified exams came out. I got all As. However, this was not the case for most of the class. The average was around 78%. There were some students who left during the exam in 30 mins b/c they quit since they couldn't understand the questions.

This video summarizes what 90% of the class thinks, especially the very last part:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X2bMzf7udA

36th day - missed some free points!

Everything was good today, kept up with all lectures, and I'm starting to read more of my Anatomy book in order to understand the connections of the arteries, veins, and nerves even though they haven't taught it to us.

The bad news is that I just found out that there was an online quiz posted during the weekend and the deadline was on Monday, this was one of those quizzes that if you did it, you get full points and if you didn't do it, you get 0 points. I was busy studying for the exam that I didn't notice that there was even a quiz posted. The anatomy course also uses a different system than the other two courses called Sakai. The system I'm used to is Angel. Angel actually tells you if you have to do a quiz or a deadline is approaching. In sakai, this is not the case. It was 2 points. The whole course is 325 points. There will be 9 more quizzes. I'll be sure not to miss them!

Good news is that I had chawal with moong daal and it was actually very good! I found it on the upper bus stop. Normally, their food is not that good, but it seems they know how to make their daal.

35th day

Today was a Tuesday, which means 4 hours of Anatomy lab starting at 7:45 am followed by 4 hours of lecture. It was the heart, lungs, and thorax today. I knew my heart very well, lungs I learned on the spot, and thorax I need some revision, but I also learned it on the spot. The dry lab was easy as well, all the clinical related questions were simple. The only hard part was the physical examination which is basically a medical student examining me. I have to take my shirt off and they can DRAW on me with marker! While I didn't like that idea, all groups were required to do it. The thing about physical examination is that there is no way to practice it unless you practice on someone.

The lectures were Anatomy and Histo today. The Anatomy was new stuff and the Histo was old stuff. I didn't get time to pre-read since it was Tuesday. I post-read today. I have no labs in the morning for the next two days! Now I can relax for a bit and just read some more Anatomy meanwhile.

34th day - first exam over!

The exam was easier than I thought it would be. Most of the questions were straight-forward. Sure there were some tricky ones, but if you studied enough, you would know. I actually did not even do any practice questions, all I did was study. Anatomy was the only tricky one. I'm expecting the midterm to be much harder.

The rest of the day, I did my laundry, grocery shopping, and cleaned up my room. I watched a movie, ate some good, and went to sleep. I also have anatomy lab the next day, so I didn't really have too much time to relax.

33rd day - eating pancakes

There is an analogy that we use in med school for studying. It's a pretty good one actually that applies to all disciplines. Each day, there are 4 lectures, hence 4 pancakes. You must eat 4 pancakes a day. If for some reason, you didn't eat a pancake on a day, then you will have to eat more pancakes the next day. Like this, the more pancakes you don't eat, the more pancakes you will have to eat later. This is what happens to most students who delay studying and end up having to study more later.

I have been eating all my pancakes everyday, but in order to review, you must eat these pancakes again. I ate 18 Histo pancakes in 5.5 hours, 22 Biochem pancakes in 10 hours, and 22 Anatomy pancakes in 9 hours. I can eat so many pancakes in a smaller amount of time because I've already eaten that pancake before. Normally, 1 pancake takes 1 hour to eat.

32nd day - my birthday!

Well well, it's finally my birthday. I feel somewhat old - 23. I was studying until 12 today, got 100% done with Histo in 5.5 hours. Tomorrow is a new day, should be done with both subjects. I may go to the bakery just to check what they got to treat myself. Other than that, the day will be spent on studying.

31st day

Since our first test is on Monday, they moved our Histo lab, which is normally on Monday to today. We had muscles and nerves today. Most of the people in my group barely finished studying for muscles, so we were going very slow. In fact, so slow, that the prof. herself ended up presenting some slides and she called me to help her since I have done both and knew my stuff. I pretty much went over 10 slides in 5 mins including clinical questions and practice slides, that's how fast we needed to go in order to catch up to the rest of the groups. It was just me and the prof. doing all the talking and the other students writing very fast. If the prof. had a question, I would answer it, and if I couldn't answer it, the prof. would give the answer. One of the questions was, "What is CSF?" Pretty simple question, one girl in our group said Cerebral Spinal Fluid, then she described where it is found and how it is produced and went into a paragraph answer. Still did not answer the question!! The CSF is an ultra-filtrate of blood, simple answer! I have no idea why the other students didn't know their stuff considering that all of this material will be on the Monday exam. I was going so fast, it was like I was a auctioneer. It gave me enough adrenaline to last me for the rest of the day!

30th day

Woke up, went to ethics small group session. This is where we discuss certain medical cases that are difficult to judge and there's no easy yes or no. Afterwards, I had some breakfast, then finished my Histo lab and then had lunch and then went for 4 hours of class again.

They skipped an anatomy lecture today. I also didn't anticipate they would skip it, so I didn't pre-read the next lecture. The lecture was on aortic arch and I didn't have the lecture with me, so I had to use my laptop to follow along. It was an indian guy who was teaching it. The guy took like 15 mins. just on the first slide which was just memorizng the 12 branches of the aortic arch. Meanwhile, I just ended up memorizing all branches in 5 mins.The lecture just went into more detail, so I skipped a lot of slides and went straight to the clinical applications, which is what is important.

I went back home and studied for the rest of the day. I noticed even though my milk expires on Sept. 12th, it expired today Sept. 9th (TIG). The milk smelled so bad that I didn't even want to take a chance.

29th day - Wednesday, the easy day

I talked with Joe today, our mechanic. He's the guy I have to pay the utilities too. It seemed that yesterday, the power WAS really cut from our house. He did something to the meter that reset it (something that is not allowed and if the electrical company found out, he'd be in trouble). Anyways, when my roomate came back, she flipped the circuit breaker AFTER Joe reset the meter and that's why it worked. That was risky, but very nice of Joe to do that. I gave Joe the bill in cash as in Grenada, any other way is very cumbersome. (TIG)

I also need to get a checkbook from my bank here. It will be another TIG process, but it needs to be done so I won't have to pay transaction fees in order to transfer money from my account to my landlord.

Today, our lecturer was late by 15 mins (Grenadian standard time). That's not as bad as Indian standard time, but indian standard time doesn't occur in school. It seems the prof. thought class started 2 hours later and he had to be called to come to the class. That's the mistake of the person who made his schedule. That person sent everyone an email apologizing for the mistake and that it will never happen again.

The lectures were easy. I went home after and stopped by at Charcoals along the way. It seems other than Subway and New York Bagels, Charcoals is the 3rd best place to eat on the island so far that I've encountered. There are probably other good restaurants in the island if you go to the main city, but they are very very expensive. Charcoals, as the name suggests, is good at grilling stuff, so their chicken and fish are great. I ordered a chicken sandwich and they didn't have the same bread this time. It was half the size of the one I used to order before. The lady even told me that their sandwich is going to be smaller, so I asked them if they could add something like fries to make it even. She added 3 dinner rolls instead. Those 3 dinner rolls were some of the best bread I've had, it was even better than the Italian bread in Houston, TX. The best part was, it was free and free food always tastes good!

28th day - Tuesdays

Tuesdays are the worst for me. I have a 4-hour anatomy lab in the morning followed by a 1 hour break and then 4 hours of lecture. Tuesdays are not bad because of the Anatomy Lab. I love Anatomy. They are bad because I only have 1 hour in between my lectures and my lab. Normally, I pre-read 4 hours of lecture in 2 hours or more. This is difficult, but since a lot of the material I am familiar with, so it is do-able. Since I only have 1 hour though, I use that time to eat. I had 40 mins left after I ate today, in 40 mins, I finished 1/4 lectures. Then, during class, as the professor was teaching, I was also pre-reading ahead of each slide, so that when he arrived at the slide, I would know what he was talking about and know what notes to take, if any.  Most of our lecture notes already have most of the things that the prof. says, but since students have not seen the notes ahead, they end up writing down much more than needed.

Honestly, I feel also very tired on Tuesdays, so I was almost falling asleep during that first lecture. In the 2nd lecture, the dean came to teach, so I forced myself to wake up and it was pretty easy to follow him since the stuff was basic. However, I didn't pre-read this lecture, so I wasn't as efficient as usual.

The next lecture was Carbohydrates, a topic I've done in my undergrad and something I had to know for the MCAT. We had approximately 10 mins before the next lecture. During those 10 mins, I pre-read the entire carbohydrate lecture! That's what happens when you know the topic already. I went through the whole lecture, highlighted what was needed and important. I could have technically walked out, but I stayed for the entire lecture. He spent more time on it than I did and ended up not finishing.

After that, I went back home just to find out that I have no electricity in my house. It was because the utility bill was not paid in advance. I went back to school and studied there instead. I have the money for the utility bill with me already, I just need to give it to the right person at the right time. I thought that time was the 8th of the month, but it is actually the 5th for utilities. Oh well.

Hahaha oops it seems like there was a short circuit in the house and all I needed to do was flip the circuit breaker. Electricity works again! (TIG)

I ended up waiting for 2 hours in the bus stop for my bus tonight (TIG).

My first exam is on Monday, an exam called Unified, 2 days after my birthday.

27th day

I had a histo lab in the morning. The school website that is used to access our lectures and other course info. was down during the weekend, so many people were having problems. Fortunately, I finished the histo lab prior to those problems. When it was my turn to present, as usual, things were very smooth. I was answering questions from the students more than the prof. was. It's like I gave the prof. a break when I present. It's funny how many times you have to repeat yourself though. Some students forgot about the basic things that we learned in Lab 1 and the discussion ended up clearing concepts in Lab 1. We are on Lab 3! This kind of wasted our time, but oh well.

After the histo lab, I changed into my scrubs and went into the anatomy lab for some practice. There was already a prof. in there with a large group of students going over the forearm. I joined the group and just watched. He later asked to identify a muscle on the forearm and it seemed nobody knew. Since nobody answered, I gave him the answer. There was a guy from FTM in the group. I said hi to him, no response except a mean look as if he was frustrated. Oh well, to be expected. I can't help it if I know the answer.

Eventually, some of my friends from the Histo group also came and one of my friends from Mac. I was still answering questions from the prof. while they came, so I guess they figured out I knew my stuff. After the prof. was done, they all asked me if I could review everything the prof. went over. I said sure, why not and I went over all the muscles of the forearm with them. It was fun, I felt like the doctor teaching students. Some students I didn't even know joined the group thinking I was one of the upper year students. Haha feels good to be respected.

After the lab, I heard there was a "special" session going on with the prof. in another room. Me and my friends checked it out, but it ended up being students asking the prof. any questions they were confused about. It wasn't helpful to me, so I came out of the session and did something more important - preread for the upcoming lectures. I went to the library and finished pre-reading.

There were 2 lectures of Histo followed by 2 lectures of Ethics. After the Histo lectures, more than half the class leaves. I stayed because I'm used to not skipping class even for ethics. It was, however, pretty boring. After the 4 hours of lectures and 4 hours of starvation, I thought I deserved some really good food. I went to the indians selling indian food at the bus stop. They are there everyday, but it's not the healthiest nor the best indian food. However, I was in the mood, so I got chicken biryani+palak paneer+chicken+roti for 25 EC. Not bad. I ate it cold, but it wasn't bad. The chicken biryani was good and I haven't had roti since I got to Grenada, so that was good too. Overall, I would say 5/10, but I'm used to it by now. If I warmed it up, it would probably be 6/10.

I stayed at school because there were apparently some meetings going on that have something to do with internships with WHO. How could I resist?

26th day

I finished Histology in the morning. It took quite a while actually, but I wanted to be thorough. I was doing my laundry while studying. I went to school to withdraw some money, but the ATM wasn't working! (TIG) So I took a bus to Grand Anse and used their ATM machines. There's only 2 ATM machines within the area. I then went to the grocery store to do some shopping. I then went to a new place that wasn't there before, New York's Bagels! I went inside and it was the same guy from the New York Bagels from campus. He recognized me straight away and we had a long talk about his business and how he would be moving. The guy is desi and he's going to add some desi stuff to his menu. I had no idea he was the owner hehe I got connections now. After that, I went back home.

Since all subjects (biochem, histo, anatomy, and ethics) are pretty much done, it's time for review! I have a lot of practice questions for each subject, so I'll end up doing them. Anatomy is the most fun as I have a book that has more than 200 practice clinical related questions that would help me for the USMLE. Obviously, I can't do all 200, at least not yet. Therefore, I will be doing some practice questions the profs. themselves posted and also some old practice tests that students have been able to get their hands on via mac daddy. I explained mac daddy in my earlier posts.

Facebook statuses - something to be used wisely

I woke up this morning and checked for any email or facebook msges. Instead of a blog like this, a lot of people rather just use facebook to publish their status updates. I would do that, but I would end up insulting waay too many people. Here is example of the type of medical students that go here say:

"thinks that MCAT scores and GPA matters very little when it comes to entry into med school. As long as you're SUPER DUPER socially retarded...you're in. Oh, wait, they accept about 10% normal kids...and see how they react to the other 90% socially awkward people."

The person who said this took FTM twice..ahem they dropped out of pre-med midway the first time. Also, obviously, the only people who agreed with this statement were former FTM students. It's funny because I've been wanting to say something similar for a while, but I can't. For me, the statement is the same except change socially to mentally. If these guys were looking for a major in which their "ultimate" social skills mattered, maybe they should have considered acting, but oh wait, acting requires brains to memorize lines.

25th day - A productive Saturday

It's a saturday, so I should be getting my full sleep today. Apparently, I woke up at 7:44 am without an alarm. Looks like my biological clock has already adjusted. I made oatmeal today and kichidi for lunch. Some of the bottom part of the kichidi got burnt, oh well, still ate the top part.

I finished DNA replication, packaging, transcription, and post-transcription. This was the hardest part for me so far, so I'm glad I could finish all 4 of them. The 2nd hardest part was embryology, but I finished that after I finished the DNA stuff. It's easy if you read through it slowly.

There has been a persistent mosquito in my room. Every time I try to kill it, I fail. It's as if the mosquito is getting smarter. I even gave it direct hit with the bug spray, yet it still lives. Way to go evolution.

Since I finished both embryology and DNA, I watched a movie and even got to exercise today. I'm trying to exercise 3 times a week, fri-sun. Since my roomate is gone, his master bedroom is available. I use it for my exercise room and it's very good. I exercised a lot today, almost as much as I do when I go for my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes. I took a shower and a protein shake afterwards.

I still had some time in the day, so I finished reviewing respiratory disorders as well. The only thing left now is Histology, which I should finish tomorrow.

24th day - Curiosity kills the cat, only if the cat is stupid

Today was a biochemistry small case study group. Here, we are given case studies, but have to apply biochemistry concepts to solve and diagnose it. Simple stuff. However, not so simple when I ask a question about the "why". We had 2 cases, both dealing with heart attacks. I solved all the questions with ease, but after the session was over, I asked a simple question, "In case 1, why did the patient feel the chest pain for the first heart attack and not the chest pain for the 2nd one?". The teacher said that the first one was due to ischemia which caused some pain. This result caused more cells to die, leading to another heart attack. That is, the 2nd heart attack was not due to ischemia and that is why she didn't feel pain. This was the wrong reason and I proved her wrong. We were given a graph analyzing her serum and after a heart attack, there is a sharp peak of CK-MB. After two days, these CK-MB levels return to baseline and then she has her 2nd heart attack where the CK-MB levels peak again. If the 2nd heart attack was not due to ischemia and due to cells continually dying from the 1st ischemia, then the CK-MB levels would be constantly increasing after the 1st peak, but they were not. They were decreasing! She agreed with me and we went to the biochemistry course director to ask this question. After a lot of talking, the biochem prof. said "you will encounter many things in medicine that you will not know the answer to."

I wasn't exactly happy with this answer, so I went to the anatomy course director later. I showed him the case and asked him the question. He gave me a looong speech about how there are many cases wehere people are healthy and get sick suddenly. This does not answer my question. Eventually, he admitted he does not know the answer. I had my own theory on this that had to do with neuroscience.

My theory was that sensory fibers of the heart that carry pain sensation are sympathetic fibers and they normally cross in the chest OR arm. In the 1st heart attack, the area of the heart that died had sensory fibers crossing to the chest wall, while in the 2nd heart attack, it was an area that the sensory fibers carried to the left arm. This was just a case study, so I couldn't ask the patient if she felt any pain in her left arm, but most likely she did. This was my final answer and it made sense to me. I think a neurology prof. would have reached the same conclusion, but I don't have anymore time to run around and ask more profs.

In class today, I actually sat with the FTM crowd, but it was with the good people. It was nice, I had a nice conversation with them.

23rd day - Blackout!

Today was an easy day. I finished pre-reading the heart and lipids in 2 hours, so it gave me some free time. During class, it was raining like crazy. The electricity went away twice in the class and the teacher had to restart.

I went back home. It was my roomate's last day, so we were gonna go to this restaurant to eat that was close-by. It was walking distance and as soon as we approached the restaurant, LIGHTS OUT! Power outage of the entire island for the next 2 hours. I went back home and watched a movie on my laptop with the remaining battery life that I had left.

Once the power came back on, I saw people's comments on facebook that it was a complete blackout for them, even on campus and that there was no generator. All I can say is TIG.

22nd day

It's a Wednesday, which means nothing in the morning today. I could wake up at 8 instead of 6. I was able to pre-read all 4 lectures of anatomy+histo. I came to school, ate lunch, went to class. I found out that I ended up pre-reading 5 lectures, not 4 by mistake, oh well, that happens a lot. Now I'm ahead :)

I still have to read that post-transcription stuff, but I'll dedicate the day for ethics today. In ethics, they gave us a course manual, around 100 pages. I'm on page 20, so I'll read 80 pages today and I'm done with the course. We only have 1 exam that's in 3 weeks. Everything else, I'm caught up with and will take me 1 hour max to review all the lectures from any course. In 2 weeks, we have a test called the Unified, it's a test that comprises of all our courses - Anatomy, Histo, and Biochem. Ethics is not included. For Anatomy, I have practice questions from the Gray's Anatomy Review book, for Histo, I have quizbank questions from last year, and for Biochem, there are practice questions online. I'm all set in terms of preparation.

After class, I went to one of my friends' dorms on campus today and man, it was SMALL!! Take my room and cut it in half and that's what room he had. He was even sharing it with a roomate, so you have to cut it in half once again. The reason I went to his dorm is because he had a program that I was looking for called "MacDaddy". It's a program passed around from student to student that contains all of the questions, lectures, etc. from upper-term students. Obviously, it will not contain tests, since those change from year to year and are never given out. However, that's where I found quizbank for Histo.