Quick Post

Here I am! I've hit the ground running, and it's enjoyable if exhausting. I've been taught lots and lots of really interesting information-- in fact, I think all of it has been interesting. So far, I haven't fallen asleep in class, nor have I found any of the material to be useless and irrelevant (which was a common occurrence in previous educational experiences). It's amazing how much a brain can absorb after having been idle for quite some time. I wasn't sure if I could manage to wake up every morning, walk up that hill, stay awake in class, let alone study or learn anything, but much to my amazement, it hasn't been too bad so far. And the majority of the people are super cool, which is a plus. I love the diverse backgrounds-- everything from fresh-out-of-school to a girl who was a professional dancer for 10 years. It makes for a fun class.

Some things I've been doing:

• Exposure to real patient-doctor relationships: we're continually being exposed, in various ways, to the ways in which doctors and patients interact-- from Day 1, the importance of a compassionate yet professional relationship has been hounded into us. It's really humbling and inspiring to see the repoire that our instructors have with their patients. Their patients are at ease around them, and you can really see their trust of and comfort around the instructors. I think it's been a great way to start school-- not science right away, but people.
  
• "Gross Anatomy Lab"/cadaver dissection: my group's is an 81-year-old female who had small cell carcinoma of the lung, which metastasized into the liver and surface of the heart (and probably many more places). She also had sternal staples from a heart bypass surgery. Today, we discovered that her gallbladder was chock full of stones. All in all, it's fascinating to see the lecture and textbook information stuff come alive (well, not alive, I guess) in 3D before your eyes. It's also pretty cool to see things like congenital heart defects, pacemakers, and other pathologies in the other bodies in the lab. The fun of the experience definitely makes the odor seem like a trivial nuisance.
  
• "Life Without a ____" series: yesterday was the first, and we were priveleged to hear the first-person account of someone who had a heart transplant when he was about my age. All of the talk about AICD (internal defibrillators) reminded me a lot of David's work, especially when the patient talked about the false defribillations he experienced (8 of them!).
  
• Lunch meetings: for various student organizations, some of which are super cool, others of which are interesting but not really my thing. They usually involve pizza or other fast foods. Going to lunch meetings usually means that I'm in the med school for 9 hours a day, either sitting in a lecture hall or standing above my gross anatomy cadaver. Free food vs. claustrophobia-- I'm not quite sure which wins. I may start going outside for lunch soon.
• Pre-reading, Re-reading, Always feeling slightly behind: yep, that's pretty much all I gotta say about that.
• PBL, or Problem-Based Learning: each small group (9 students) is given a very vague medical problem, and as a group, goes through differential diagnoses and attempts to come to a group hypothesis about what's going on in the patient. What's cool is that they give us real cases, and show us the real radiological films from the patients X-rays, CT scans, MRIs). My group has been really bad at debating philosophical and ethical stuff (think: a room of dramatic lawyer/philosopher types), but when it comes to PBL, they're a blast.
• Hangin' with the best boyfriend ever EVER! :)
  

Okay, so that was pretty long for a "quick" post-- but it only took 15 minutes to type, so that's good. Off to researching my Learning Objective for Friday.

Hope all's well in everyone's respective neck of the woods.