Med School is a Crazy Thing

I feel like I'm not being nearly as productive in studying for the upcoming exams we have next week as I was for the last exams we had.  On the other hand, I'm taking practice exams for gross and doing FINE, so I can't force myself to be too much more concerned.  And so, in lieu of reviewing the pelvic viscera, I have decided to compose a list (one of my all time favorite activities). 

Things no one tells you you get to do in med school...because they're CRAZY. 

1. Saw into a body.  Literally.  We have successfully completed dissecting the abdomen and (almost) the pelvis for our practical exam in gross next week.  However, to really get at the branches of the internal iliac artery, it was necessary to find a..."better"...view of things.  And thus, we hemisected the pelvis.  When professors tell you you're going to "hemisect the pelvis," it sounds relatively benign and medicalized and stuff.  What it really means is that you're going to cut any organs in half with a scalpel and then take a giant hacksaw to the middle of the pubic bone until you hit vertebrae and head out the other side.  Then you take that same hacksaw right above the right hip and hack through until you have, for all intents and purposes, a leg.  A leg that is vaguely reminiscent of a scene from Jurassic Park, just sitting there all by its lonesome.  And then you can turn it all over and review all the arteries and such from various positions.  You can also carry said leg across the room for a professor to look at and help you identify things when you can't get anyone's attention to help you for three hours in the lab...or maybe that's just our frustrated little group. But yeah, the point is, they let you SAW A BODY IN HALF.  So cool. 

2. You get face to face with a whole lot of nastiness.  Like poop, for example.  And not just poop.  Dead poop.  Poop from the rectum of a person who has been dead for a good six months, just chilling out in the rectum until you saw it in half (see above) and all the poop spills out on your hacksaw and lab table and gloves and EVERYWHERE.  One of the girls in my group has a baby and deals with poop daily.  Even she was grossed out.  The entire room essentially just giggled our way through it.  Perhaps this is less appropriate a respect level than you might prefer around cadavers, but really....it's poop. 

3. You will study until your face falls off.  Well...maybe not quite.  But oh my lord.  Back at the beginning of the semester, I studied a good few hours every night and felt pretty good.  I would try to review most of the stuff from the week on the weekend.  In general, I felt pretty up to speed.  Now, for some reason, be it laziness or inefficiency or who knows, I feel like I'm studying all the time and not getting anywhere.  Earlier this week in histology, we had an hour and a half lecture on the eye and ear.  This lecture was based around 17 pages of lecture notes.  That's right...17.  17 pages which I turned into 114 flashcards (and probably could have been more, because by the end I was making some pretty darn loooooong flashcards in an effort to save time and preserve my sanity).  17 pages and 114 flashcards that will account for a grand total of SEVEN exam questions.  *weeps*  But anyway, the point is that you could study 24/7 in this kind of an environment and still not know everything.  And you somehow just have to come to terms with that and do your best. 

I'm sure I'll have more to add to the list later, but for now, this is it.  I'm falling in love with lots of other med blogs, which I should probably link up at some point to this, but I'm not sure how and I don't really have time to figure out right now, because I should really go review some histology.  Man, I will be glad when this course is done in another week.