Crunch!

Calcifications of the blood vessels show up in x-rays, making these vessels visible where they normally wouldn't be seen. Here we've got the calcification of the aortic root (arrow). The other day in Anatomy, someone demonstrated the crunchiness (no better way of putting this) of the said structure. It felt like someone put a wafer tube inside a latex glove that kept on cracking as you touched it more and more. "99% of the people in the world will not experience what you will in medical school" we were told somewhere along the line. How true.

Anatomy labs are now open 24 hours, and usually there is someone there at all times. Often large groups of students congregate around a particular table and teach one another various parts of anatomy covered in lecture. Our exam is next week, Friday. Not to be outdone, the Fundo 2 (2nd part of the fundamentals track) class is throwing a big one our way on Monday of the said week. Parents: sign your kids up early. This is a lifestyle that many envy and few achieve.

Shooting Gallery

Last night was Injection Workshop night. We learned how to deliver three types of injections: intradermal, subcutaneous, and intramuscular, or for the neophytes: painless, painless, and painless. First we watched a grainy video from the early 80's on how nurses are supposed to do it, then we watched a nursing student inject a 3rd-year volunteer, and finally it was our turn. Being the "suck-it-up-this-is-medical-school" manly men that we are, my friend and I decided to postpone the experience a for a bit and ease into the process by watching our mutual friend deliver the first shot. She's a former nurse, after all, so she knows what's she's doing, right? Absolutely. It was all over before we could process what happened, and like a couple of gibbering chimps we settled to our task. I went first, and with surprisingly steady hands, delivered my very first intradermal (see picture--not my arm, but equally hairy). My head was preoccupied with the worry that I'm hurting my partner. I listened for ouches or yikeses, but none came, so I pushed the plunger and created the telltale bubble that a properly-administered intradermal would. The rest was easy, but we made sure we watched our friend deliver her shots before we tried. It all was pretty much painless, and I realized that obsessing about needles for so many years has ended in a rather anticlimactic experience. So, flu shot anyone?

Another Week, Another Exam

The normal pace of med school is one exam per week. A slight change of plans is coming up for the next week: two exams. One on Monday, and one on Wednesday. This is hard to get used to, especially for someone who's taken his last serious course 11 years ago, but since I'm not the oldest one in my class, I'll manage. From the comments I've gotten from the upperclasmen, one just gets used to it.

An average day is courses in the morning, a post-lunch workout, and studying with varying breaks till around midnight, especially on days preceding an exam.

No pictures of my own, yet. My camera phone from the profiteers at Samsung doesn't come with a data cable for transfer purposes. I did get one off eBay for a few bucks, since the official cable was around $20. But, and this is a big but, the phone refuses to show up as a drive! It turns out that you need a "Data Bundle" that includes special software (PC Studio 3.0) to read the contents of your phone. Cost? A mere $100, something this med student can't afford. Of course this will be addressed in other ways. In the meantime, enjoy the picture of some Medieval dude cramming.

Puns with Gross

Gross Lab. Day 2. You could make so many puns with the word "gross." I choose to forgo the tempting option.

The sense of awe is pretty much gone. You've cut into a human being who was once alive. You distanced yourself from it, and you're still here, still back for more. As the muscles are being exposed, you notice something familiar cutting through the ethanol fumes and formalin. That unmistakable smell: Meat. Right away I am reminded of my favorite childhood story: When escaping from the Russian gulags, prisoners would pick an extra man of sizable girth. Somewhere along their way through the unforgiving badlands of Siberia, they would kill him and eat him. Warped childhood? Nah, just useful tips from Soviet-era Pioneers (boy-scouts) disguised as didactic tall tales, all there just in case uncle Stalin decided to declare you an enemy of the people. Resisting the temptation, I forgo the opportunity to share the story (BTW, confirmed by real Russians) with my tablemates.

There are 8 of us. We are split into 4 groups of 2, and each group is assigned its own dissection. For those not mathematically inclined or currently attending dental school, 4 x 2 = 8. The dissections take several lab sessions to complete. Their culmination is the presentation, where we show off what we did, hopefully teaching everyone something in the process. The first presentation, as expected this being medical school and all, was an overachiever's multimedia extravaganza, and short of a string orchestra and a laser light show, everything was there. OK, OK, so it really was just handing out color printouts, some yammering about the dissection, poking the structures with a handy probe (see picture) which is the laser pointer of the anatomy lab, rattling some bones on a plastic man-sized skeleton, and guiding the tour to the cross-section pans filled with body slices. I always say, don't let the facts get in the way of a good exaggeration. The subsequent presentations lacked the pizazz of the original, but we're just an exhausted bunch of med students, right?

Gross

The most celebrated course in medical school is of course gross anatomy. In the light of recent findings about the next year's Procedures course, I would beg to differ and throw the pelvic exam right of passage in there, but who am I to upset the entrenched stereotypes. So gross it is, though it really isn't too, for the lack of better term, gross.

It all begins on the first day of lab. Yes, it's my blog and I get to state the obvious. Anyways. You get your notes, and in the excitement of the whole thing, actually read them the day ahead. Come to lab prepared, dressed in your blue or green scrubs (you picked during second week, remember?), and dive in. Pretty much like that. You first listen to a series of lectures on respect for the people who donated their bodies, on how a single off-color remark will get you booted from med school, and how you'd better be keeping up with your lab. You seriously ponder donating your own body to science. You wonder about the people who were once alive, and now will be the subjects of your first clumsy cuts. You ponder the human condition. But then the attention bell rings, quiets down the room, and the anticlimax is delivered: "Dont' forget the purple gloves! Mandatory once you're in the lab, off when you're in the atrium! They come in 3 comfortable sizes." By the time you pick up your scalpel, you think that the only course in medical school is gross anatomy. Well there are two others, and one of them counts for 10 credits, while gross is only 8. Hush, the cadaver corps don't want you to know that.

So it all begins with somewhat of a sense of awe. You're surrounded by dead people, there is a bona fide priest who says a brief nondenominational prayer, a Bible (New Testament to be precise, but the laid-back Jewish students aren't burning the lab director in effigy) on one of the shelves, there are people feeling weak, there are tiles on the walls and the floor, and there are 20+ stainless steel containers, henceforth known as "tables," with preserved bodies in plastic bags.

Each container has 1 bagged cadaver, 1 box of tools, and 1 set of grease copies of lab manuals, Grant's anatomy book, and Grant's dissector book. Now, the preservative used is a formalin solution (mostly ethanol), so the smell isn't as obnoxious as I remember it from my days as a young whipper snapper dissecting formaldehyde-dipped frogs in high-school bio. We begin by cutting the bag open and poking holes in the bottom to drain the solution. The bravest souls flip the cadaver on his stomach, and the bravest of the bravest makes the first incision with the scalpel. Once the appropriate incisions are made (down the spine and to the sides), you scrape the fascia (connective tissue between skin and muscle) away as the skin is being peeled back. Eventually everyone joins in, and we take turns peeling the skin back. We see our first muscles. We feel like we're the first people to land on Mars...Publish Post