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.