Black Monday

Should be a Led Zeppelin song.  Instead, it's the day when our med school initiates us into its ranks with a barrage of 4 exams, including histo written and practical and gross anatomy written and practical.  It was yesterday.  I spent all weekend studying, hampered by the lovely arrival of hurrican Ike on Sunday (which, yes, was *actually* classified as a tropical storm as it trampled on us here in the midwest).  The power went out at about noon on Sunday and my dearly beloved laptop decided to bite the dust about 2 hours later (along with all of my study material), and so I headed out to the local hospital where my sister is currently residing thanks to her dastardly appendix.  At least I knew they'd have power.  The tests went fine--I got well above the average on both of the gross exams, and I feel pretty good about the histo written.  The histo practical was my weakest showing and I don't think it was a very fair test compared to the first one, but ah well.  I'm at least reasonably sure I landed around the average of slightly above.  Hopefully those scores will be posted tomorrow morning so we can at least know the damage.  

We had a clinical lecture today about skin cancer.  Newly added to the list of disease I would never want to have: malignant melanoma.  Those were some NASTY pictures.  Yuck.  Also, you'd think that the day after we were just tormented with 4 exams they might give us a slight break from life, but no, we had class from 9:30-5 today.  It's really hard to make your brain focus on histology and the integument when you're completely mentally exhausted.  Actually, I'm not that tired...I actually seem to have fared better and been much better prepared than a lot of people for the tests yesterday, but still.  It's cruel.  I need a holiday or something.  

There was also a meeting about med/peds residency today at lunch, which I found reasonably interesting.  Right now I'm most interested in going into pediatrics, but this did seem to have some good points about the relative merits of being board certified in both internal medicine and peds.  If you see patients, for instance, you have the advantage of seeing them their whole lives in continuity, you have a distinct advantage in the niche of adolescent medicine (wherein most pediatricians don't necessarily know as much about the issues of a 16 year old and most internists really don't deal with anyone under 18), and you get a nice variety rather than getting burned out on stuffy noses or hypertension as you might if you did one or the other.  Something to think about, at least.