You know those anxiety dreams where you go to take an exam and as soon as you get the paper you blank out? That was me and the neuroanatomy exam yesterday. I was exhausted from a marathon study session the day before, and apparently I actually fell asleep during the exam. The parts where I was awake weren't much better.

Oh well! The other exams were alright, and I really am not stressed about anything. (Sleep-deprived, yes, but not stressed.) I took yesterday night off to recuperate and eat applesauce and watch a melodramatic costume drama on DVD. Good times. There's one more to go, and then I am done.

It's really shocking to think that the year is almost over. In a lot of ways, I feel like we just got here. I'm moving back home on Thursday; starting work the day after Memorial Day. Perhaps I should have looked into something international -- I'm very interested in global health as a possible career, and I'm exceedingly jealous of my friends who are going abroad (postcards, please!) -- but I think the job will be interesting, and I'm not going to deny that it'll be nice to be home and taken care of for a few months. (I'm grown up, really!)

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Now playing: Virginia Hullabahoos - Your Song
via FoxyTunes

Exams continue to dominate my life, but Thursday is Match Day, when fourth-years find out where they are going to be training. Even the Times has taken notice.

The run-up to the last anatomy exam.

A good family friend, now in his fourth year of med school, was studying for Step 1 some years ago. I was incredulous at what he said his study schedule was: essentially study hardcore for 5 hours, take an hour break for lunch and some TV, and then back to the books for another 5 until dinner. I thought he was exaggerating, counting "study time" when he was actually online.

Now, I'm incredulous at the memory of my own naivete. To recap the weekend: on Friday I took a 3 hour exam on GI and spent the afternoon (from 12:30 PM to 1 AM, with a half-hour dinner break) studying either in the library or in the lab. Saturday, I went hardcore from 10 AM to 1:30 AM. Today, I took a practice practical at 11 AM and went to the study lounge in my dorm directly after. Study breaks limited to trips to the vending machine, water fountain, and bathroom. And all this for one measly exam.

The strange thing is, I don't feel tired at all. In college, this sort of schedule would have left me exhausted and murderous. Now, I don't really mind it so much. Yeah, it sucks, but I don't feel as mentally blank as I would have even a year ago. Maybe I'm building up some of that magical stamina that is supposed to get residents through their 80-hour weeks. (Or third-years through their unregulated work hour weeks.)

Life is going to be weird after anatomy. I expect it will be rather like after I gave my undergrad thesis to the bindery. It's consumed my life since the end of August. I really don't know what I'm going to do with myself.

It's that time of the month again

Exams start on Friday and continue through next Thursday. March Block is acknowledged by all to be absolute hell, but I'm trying to stay positive. In less than a week, anatomy will be over forever! And then we have Spring Break. I'm planning to go home and pass out on my parents' couch for at least three days.

I've always thought of our class as very cohesive and cool and not at all competitive. But atlases have started disappearing from the anatomy lab, which puzzled me until I saw some people wrapping them in the red biohazard bags and stashing them in their lockers. Seriously? Maybe I just missed out on all this in college, because I avoided the regular premed classes as much as possible (I took the Chemistry for Chem Majors sequence, AP'ed out of bio and calculus; baby physics was the only "premed" class I took), but I thought we were cooler than that.

This year is P/F, but second year they throw honors into the mix. We are trying to convince the administration to change that.

No more exams!

Well, for a month, anyway.

It wasn't such a bad block, since we didn't have anatomy. I can't wait for after Spring Break, when anatomy is Over For Good.

And now we have the med school formal tonight, which will be excellent. I love being all girly and getting dressed up for things -- don't get much chance for that these days.

Proof that med school takes over your life:
(3:40:04 PM) Laura: i was just painting my right hand
(3:40:15 PM) Laura: and im very unsteady with my left holding the brush
(3:40:34 PM) Me: uh oh
(3:40:39 PM) Laura: and the first thought to pop into my head is "gee i wonder if being ambidextrous makes you a better surgeon"

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Now playing: Cast Of Rent - La Vie Boheme
via FoxyTunes

Surgeon's Blog has an excellent post on all that health economics/politics stuff that keeps coming up in connection with the election.

I would contribute actual content, but I'm tired, and sick, and studying for exams (just genetics to go!). My headaches have been getting more regular and more severe, which is really no fun. I consulted the wise and wonderful WebMD yesterday, which told me that I might have a subarachnoid hemorrhage. I love the internet.

First, my big news: I got the summer internship I applied for at the American Academy of Pediatrics! It's mainly child health advocacy stuff, things like insurance and immunization, and apparently involves going to Congressional hearings. Woot! It's such a relief to have my summer taken care of, so I can start planning a short vacation. (Last summer? *sigh*)

Three exams next week, but no anatomy. So I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs, wondering what more I can do. I've gone over my notes, taken ten exams from previous years (overkill? but they reuse questions like mad); I've even made flashcards for things that they specifically told us won't be on the exam.

Anatomy is just such a time drain for me -- it's not intuitive at all, and the exams test ridiculous (and often incorrect) detail from a book whose last edition was printed when I was in elementary school. Even after five months, I still find cadaveric dissection emotionally challenging. (Unfortunately, I appear to be a sap. Damn.) So usually, anatomy dominates my study time to the point where I fall behind in everything else. I know that's what's going to happen in March, when we have our last anatomy exam.

Interestingly, the last time we had an exam block that did not include anatomy, I felt the same way -- like I had adequate time to prepare for the other classes. The difficulty of classes, at least at this school, is all over the map. On one hand, you have Anatomy of Doom; on the other, human development, which is the biggest joke in the world. (If you show up to take the exam, you pass. I know someone last block who bubbled in C for every answer. And passed.) Most of our other courses fall somewhere in the middle.

Is this what life after anatomy will be like? Free time?

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Now playing: NYMC - Studyback
via FoxyTunes

Apoptosis tongue-twister

From the transcript for this lecture:

There are other members of this family that are pro-death factors: three examples are bak, bax, and bim. In a normal healthy cell, bak and bax are normally present; however bak is bound by bcl-2, which neutralizes it, and bax is in the cytoplasm, where it can't do much in terms of mitochondria. Bim is present in low levels. When a cell gets a signal to cause death, bim levels go up, bax and bim move into the mitochondrion, and bim binds to bcl-2, displacing bak and neutralizing bcl-2. And now bak binds to bax, when bax and bak bind to one another they form a pore and this pore permits the release of cytochrome c from the mitochondrion. This then binds to APAF1, which binds to caspase 9, which then activates caspase 2, causing death.

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Now playing: Newsies - King of New York
via FoxyTunes

If anything deserves an interrobang, it's this

Haha, so unprepared for tomorrow, it's not really funny but I cannot force myself to care anymore.

So close, so close to being done with one-eighth of my medical education HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!

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Now playing: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Concerto in A, K. 488, I
via FoxyTunes

The more I study, the more my lack of knowledge becomes apparent. It's frightening.

Also, I do not understand why we have the longest anatomy course in the country (August through March), yet I'm still always cramming. Either other schools learn less or I am just not getting it

I can't wait for next Friday, when I'll bubble in my last exam and then have a whole ten days off. Gosh, I don't know what I'll do with myself. The last time we had days off with genuinely nothing to study was a weekend after our October exam week.

This is how we socialize nowadays:

(9:08:14 AM) Rebecca: i need to go shower but i wil talk to you later!!
(9:08:18 AM) Rebecca: where are you studying today?
(9:08:31 AM) Me: probably [the library]
(9:08:37 AM) Me: lower level

I really dislike Monday exams, because it means we don't get weekends. The weekend before is spent cramming (see above) and the weekend after is spent catching up with all the classes you ignored in the pre- and post-exam madness.

Balance

For the first time, I feel reasonably prepared for a test in med school. Of course, they haven't provided us with any practice questions for this class, so that might have something to do with it. Heh. Syllabi are incredibly high-yield, though. My school doesn't officially provide syllabi anymore, but there are old ones floating around; they cover exactly what the lecturer emphasized and are much easier to understand than the Powerpoints. I heartily approve.

(For non-med students out there: med school syllabi aren't just a list of topics to be covered. Rather, they are extensive, multi-page lecture notes. The anatomy syllabus, for instance, is 650 pages long, excluding the index, errata, and learning objectives appendices.)

I've been a lot better about balance this exam block. For instance, I take about half an hour every evening before bed to read White Teeth, a novel of Awesome by one Zadie Smith. It helps to pull myself out of STRESS mode and remember the power of literature.

Speaking of which, I got the teaching job I applied for and have been teaching 7th graders every other Saturday for the past few weeks. It's a lot of fun, and coming up with lesson plans is not as terrifying as I thought it would be. (There are two other advisors, who are full-time, so that helps.) I'll be teaching solo in December when I do my elective; I know what I want to teach but am holding off on the actual planning until post-exams.

It's going to be so relaxing to have a real weekend this time. I wonder what I'll do.

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Now playing: Mozart - Elvira Madigan Piano C
via FoxyTunes

P = MD

I passed my exams!

We're on a P/F schedule, which is God's gift to medical students. You simply can't imagine how fantastic it is to not worry about GPA anymore.

To celebrate, my college roommate (who is visiting this weekend) and I picnicked in Union Square Park with Greenmarket produce -- bread and cheese and the strangest-shaped plums you ever did see -- and went to the Strand, an amazing bookstore. I think this will have to be my post-exam relaxation every block.

This is the weekend of no studying. One needs it from time to time. Hobbies are good.

Exams

Why's the blog so pink? Well, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. My family's had a scare with breast cancer some years ago -- everything turned out fine for us, but so many men and women are not so lucky. So even though I detest the color pink as a rule, I decided to go Pink for October to try to raise awareness.

Ladies, self-exams are good. I admit that I don't always remember, myself, but we had a lecture a few weeks ago about breast cancer and mastectomies, and the post-op pictures were so frighteningly raw and bloody. If I can get a link to one of those "click and we'll donate a mammogram" things, I'll put it up here as well. Breast cancer may not be preventable, but it is certainly treatable if detected early.

*descends from soapbox*

My exams were not so hot. I am notoriously bad at predicting my own performance, though, so perhaps I did better than I thought. And many of my classmates felt the same way, so perhaps there will be a curve. Or something.

Honestly, I was just thrown by the level of complexity of many of the questions. I've taken tough exams in undergrad, but they were almost all short answer or essay. The few multiple choice exams were mainly focused on recognition of the right answer, rather than a logical thinking process of connecting Random Fact A to Seemingly Trivial Minutia B. This is good to know, because we have 6 more exam blocks to get through by the end of the year.

It does help, though, to know that our exams are Pass/Fail only in first year. That is, I think I passed. Removes a lot of the stress. As for competition/cooperation, I have to say that I haven't seen much of that going around. We get a ton of help from the second-years here (they run special workshops the week before the exam to review all the major concepts). But intraclass cooperation seems to be mainly based on study groups; I don't think anyone sent out study guides they'd made. (I did want to upload mine to the class website, but I couldn't figure out how to get the silly thing to work.) I think, though, that we are all still in premed mode, and that will change as the year goes on.

I took some much needed time post-exam to chill, buy groceries, go to the library -- it was delightful. My friend A invited a bunch of people to have dinner at her apartment on the UWS, and it was so wonderful to sit around talking with friends for the first time in weeks. L brought champagne, so we toasted to "finding balance." The past week has been very rough, academically and personally (I kept having to hang up on my mom so that I could study, and I hated that). Hopefully, we'll all find a way to pass but still retain some semblance of a normal social life.

Sucked that we had a full day of classes today. I skipped out on the second lecture to go to an interview for a Saturday school enrichment program I'd like to get involved in. Hopefully that will come through, because I truly want to get more involved in the community here than I was in my undergrad. I should be hearing back from the program director sometime tomorrow. As a good friend from elementary school used to say, "Cross your fingers and hold your nose!"