I'm taking a little break to do something "therapeutic". Well, taking a break til tomorrow - I'm done for the night. A person can only study for so long in a day. I'm probably very weak in that respect, in that I really don't have a high tolerance for studying. I never have. I'm afraid that I may have reached an educational level where I'll finally start paying for that weakness. Ugh. I did study for about 9 hours today, but i definitely took a few breaks in there. Oh well, I can only ask so much of myself. Anyway, enough with the rationalizations.
So, my first exam is Monday. It's a day-long affair - 2-hour written exam in the morning, 2-hour dry practical after lunch and 2-hour wet practical after that. The "wet" practical is identifying tagged structures in the cadavers, and the "dry" practical is identifying structures and their functions/origins/relationships/etc on computer-based slides. Waaaa-hooooo. The exam content is based on three weeks worth of lectures and labs, which quite honestly feels like nearly two months' worth. But for now I'm just thanking my lucky starts that they give us exams as frequently as they do, because any more material than this would be downright unbearable. I was finally starting to find some kind of rhythm and balance to my new life as a medical student, and this exam is just really throwing a wrench into things!
But, all in all it really hasn't been too bad. I get up around 8, drink some coffee, watch some lame TV, maybe review the day's lecture notes/powerpoints (posted ahead of time), and leave for lab by 9:15 (I've been trying out the idea of skipping morning lecture in favor of more sleep and then working through the lecture recordings after lab at my own pace). I usually get home between 12:30 and 1:00, I have time to run a few errands if necessary, watch an episode of Las Vegas (TNT at noon and 1:00 every day!), have some lunch, fool around on Facebook a little, and then watch/study the lectures from that morning. Sometimes it runs over into the evening if the lectures are particularly complex, but there are many days where I'm done by the time Ben gets home from work! Pretty sweet life, I have to say. I know it won't stay like this forever, but for now it's made for a relatively easy transition and I definitely appreciate that!
Once the exam is over, the second-years have arranged a post-exam party for us down in Federal Hill, so I'll probably drag Ben to that (it's a reason for him to celebrate too - he can finally have his wife back!). I'm looking forward to a few fun school-related things next week too - a meeting with one of our career counseling Deans who happens to be an Emergency Medicine physician, a dinner with the Pediatrics Interest Group at a professor/pediatrician's house, an info session on the MD/MPP program with UMBC (masters in public policy - seriously entertaining the idea!), and my first ICM (intro to clinical medicine) small group meeting where I believe we'll be learning how to use out stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs and fun stuff like that :) So between all the fun stuff and the exam being over, it should be a good week! And next weekend we're having crabs with all of Ben's siblings - the icing on an already fabulous cake!
So that about sums up my life these days. The kittens are still alive (though they have developed a healthy fear of the spray bottle), the apartment is still standing, we're still married... it's all good :)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
HOLY SMOKES it's been a while
This may be a new record - two weeks between posts. I do apologize, but my life has changed quite a bit and blogging has become a much smaller part of it!
So the biggest change has been school. I do LOVE school. I really love it. It's the material I've been wanting to learn all along, without all the B.S. I don't care about (for the most part). Even the stuff I don't like studying is still stuff I "care" about, I just don't enjoy trying to learn it ;) Like tissue types, for instance. But the anatomy and embryology stuff has been really cool. Cadaver dissection has been by far the greatest lab experience of my life. Every structure you see sticks in your brain that much better because you're seeing it on a real live person, and just the act of dissecting it is something you don't forget, which makes it that much easier to remember the structures along the way. Sometimes it feels like I really can't control what my mind deems "worth" remembering, but apparently it has decided that cadaver lab is definitely worth the brain space because I seem to remember everything from lab very well. We have some GREAT instructors in the lab (there are at least 8 or 10 of them milling around every day) that are just excellent teachers, and the main course director who teaches many of our lectures is also AWESOME - he's been teaching the course for 15 or 20 years so he's definitely got it down to a science and he's just very good at relaying the important information. There are several other instructors who also give lectures, depending on their specialty, and they vary in their teaching abilities, but we haven't had any "bad" ones at all. Today we had a "clinical correlations" lecture - they intersperse these throughout the anatomy lectures to remind us why we're learning this stuff - from an orthopaedic trauma surgeon. Really cool. He focuses on the spine so we got to hear stories and see images from several different cases and a 2 minute clip of a microdiscectomy (removal of a herniated disc via a very small opening in the spinal column). The cases ranged from a motocross accident (broke the column clean through and severed the spinal cord - paraplegic) to breast cancer metastasis to the spine, to tuberculosis infection in the spinal column, to staph infection in the spine from dirty needles in a heroin-addicted patient. Crazy and very cool :)
We have our first exam on Monday the 12th, so I have one more week's worth of lectures after this one to cram into my brain before I have to spit it all back out. And next week is short because of labor day! YAY! Every lecture in med school seems like about 3 or 4 lecture's worth of material in undergrad, so it's definitely been an adjustment. It's much more like a full-time job than college was. I go to class 8-10, lab 10-12, lunch when I get home, and then study til ben gets home around 5 or 6, then have dinner, and then usually study a LITTLE more before bed. Of course there are little distractions along the way - I don't literally study solidly for all those hours (I'm usually forced to take at least a 45-minute nap somewhere in there when I can't keep my eyes open anymore!). But it's definitely a lot of work! Just trying to figure out the best way to study is my biggest source of stress right now. I'm just afraid I'll get behind if I don't figure it out soon, and I probably won't really know how well my current methods are working til the first exam but I don't want to bomb it in the meantime! Ugh we'll see. I don't really feel like I'm doing a very good job at the moment, I'm just not sure where to go from here.
The kitties are doing well :) Cute as ever, and growing little by little! We just love them to pieces. I'm SO glad we brought both of them home! They still can't seem to behave enough to let them sleep in the bedroom with us (I invariably wake up to Eddie pouncing on my toes or Lewis purring 2 centimeters from my face, or sitting on my head or something ridiculous like that!). But they've started using the kitty beds that we got them, which makes me very happy - it felt like a pretty giant waste of money initially when they weren't even remotely interested in them ;) Here's an updated photo...
I also got a new haircut today (and a little color as well)! I've been wanting to do this for almost a year now, but I got engaged and had to let my hair grow for the wedding, and then we decided we wanted to do a re-shoot after the wedding so I had to leave it long for that. We finally did our re-shoot last week (here's a link to some of my favs! they turned out so well! http://picasaweb.google.com/jenna.bonner529/DayAfterSession?feat=directlink) so I decided I could finally treat myself to a much needed hair appointment. It's shorter in the back and longer in the front, and it's dark brown with a reddish tint. The back is actually shorter than I've EVER had my hair I think, so it was a big step for me but I'm VERY happy with it :)
So the biggest change has been school. I do LOVE school. I really love it. It's the material I've been wanting to learn all along, without all the B.S. I don't care about (for the most part). Even the stuff I don't like studying is still stuff I "care" about, I just don't enjoy trying to learn it ;) Like tissue types, for instance. But the anatomy and embryology stuff has been really cool. Cadaver dissection has been by far the greatest lab experience of my life. Every structure you see sticks in your brain that much better because you're seeing it on a real live person, and just the act of dissecting it is something you don't forget, which makes it that much easier to remember the structures along the way. Sometimes it feels like I really can't control what my mind deems "worth" remembering, but apparently it has decided that cadaver lab is definitely worth the brain space because I seem to remember everything from lab very well. We have some GREAT instructors in the lab (there are at least 8 or 10 of them milling around every day) that are just excellent teachers, and the main course director who teaches many of our lectures is also AWESOME - he's been teaching the course for 15 or 20 years so he's definitely got it down to a science and he's just very good at relaying the important information. There are several other instructors who also give lectures, depending on their specialty, and they vary in their teaching abilities, but we haven't had any "bad" ones at all. Today we had a "clinical correlations" lecture - they intersperse these throughout the anatomy lectures to remind us why we're learning this stuff - from an orthopaedic trauma surgeon. Really cool. He focuses on the spine so we got to hear stories and see images from several different cases and a 2 minute clip of a microdiscectomy (removal of a herniated disc via a very small opening in the spinal column). The cases ranged from a motocross accident (broke the column clean through and severed the spinal cord - paraplegic) to breast cancer metastasis to the spine, to tuberculosis infection in the spinal column, to staph infection in the spine from dirty needles in a heroin-addicted patient. Crazy and very cool :)
We have our first exam on Monday the 12th, so I have one more week's worth of lectures after this one to cram into my brain before I have to spit it all back out. And next week is short because of labor day! YAY! Every lecture in med school seems like about 3 or 4 lecture's worth of material in undergrad, so it's definitely been an adjustment. It's much more like a full-time job than college was. I go to class 8-10, lab 10-12, lunch when I get home, and then study til ben gets home around 5 or 6, then have dinner, and then usually study a LITTLE more before bed. Of course there are little distractions along the way - I don't literally study solidly for all those hours (I'm usually forced to take at least a 45-minute nap somewhere in there when I can't keep my eyes open anymore!). But it's definitely a lot of work! Just trying to figure out the best way to study is my biggest source of stress right now. I'm just afraid I'll get behind if I don't figure it out soon, and I probably won't really know how well my current methods are working til the first exam but I don't want to bomb it in the meantime! Ugh we'll see. I don't really feel like I'm doing a very good job at the moment, I'm just not sure where to go from here.
The kitties are doing well :) Cute as ever, and growing little by little! We just love them to pieces. I'm SO glad we brought both of them home! They still can't seem to behave enough to let them sleep in the bedroom with us (I invariably wake up to Eddie pouncing on my toes or Lewis purring 2 centimeters from my face, or sitting on my head or something ridiculous like that!). But they've started using the kitty beds that we got them, which makes me very happy - it felt like a pretty giant waste of money initially when they weren't even remotely interested in them ;) Here's an updated photo...
I also got a new haircut today (and a little color as well)! I've been wanting to do this for almost a year now, but I got engaged and had to let my hair grow for the wedding, and then we decided we wanted to do a re-shoot after the wedding so I had to leave it long for that. We finally did our re-shoot last week (here's a link to some of my favs! they turned out so well! http://picasaweb.google.com/jenna.bonner529/DayAfterSession?feat=directlink) so I decided I could finally treat myself to a much needed hair appointment. It's shorter in the back and longer in the front, and it's dark brown with a reddish tint. The back is actually shorter than I've EVER had my hair I think, so it was a big step for me but I'm VERY happy with it :)
Maybe next time I'll go a tad shorter in the back to get more height out of it, but I was a little nervous this time around!
Yesterday was Ben's 25th birthday, so I gave him his wedge set that I got about a month ago but made him wait for (for you non-golfers, it's a set of three special clubs that they use for chipping the ball onto the green when it's too far to put and too close to use an iron), a license plate frame that says "I'd rather be driving a Titleist" (we saw that on the road one day and he thought it was just the coolest thing he'd ever seen so I made a mental note and found it online later - he was thrilled), a DuClaw Misfit Red t-shirt (his favorite DuClaw beer), and I took his "growler" (big 2-liter container for holding lots of beer) to DuClaw and had it filled with Misfit Red for him. And made his mom's meatloaf recipe :) It turned out alright. I think it needed more ketchup. ANYWAY, I'm having a party for him this weekend so we're having a bunch of friends over, which should be TONS of fun. Except for the fact that we're a little poor (ok, A LOT poor), but I made it BYOB to help with that aspect of it ;) We actually went out for dinner last Friday with his sisters and their husbands for his birthday, and his mom had a cookout for him this past Sunday, so we're really dragging this thing out! But he's a pretty great guy so I suppose it's worth it ;)
Speaking of the birthday boy, he's finishing up cleaning up in the kitchen (he always does the dishes when I cook because he's wonderful like that!) and is hell-bent on playing one of his new Wii games tonight (last night it was Wii sports resort, from which his arms and shoulders are now sore today... lol) - Tiger Woods Golf 10. It's gonna be a long evening, I can see it now ;) Wish I could update you even MORE, but he really wants me to play. Later kids!
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