Skyrates

Since I should be studying for my exam, I have instead decided to update my blog with a small procrastination tip.  Med school is intense.  That's not news, but I'm just reiterating, it's tough.  There are days when large amount of free time are hard to come by.  As you might imagine, this can seriously cut into the usual time-wasting activities that involve an internet connection.  Especially that most addictive of time-wasting activities: the online game.

Starting a game with any sort of complexity beyond the level of solitaire is dangerous.  If it's story-based, you have to know what happens next.  If there are levels, you must defeat them all before you go to sleep.  If there's a timer, you always have to play just one more time to see if you can beat your best score.  How, you ask, can a medical student possibly play an engaging online game and still pass anatomy?  Skyrates.

Skyrates is a exercise in sporadic gameplay created by a group of Carnegie Mellon grad students.  You create a character and fly a plane between "skylands," trading goods and doing favors to make money.  Along the way, you run into pirates to fight.  And it all takes place in real time.  As in, it may take at least an hour (or even day) to reach a certain skyland.  You spend a few minutes deciding what to buy and where to go, and then you wait for your character to fly there.  You can't spend hours at a time playing this game, because it won't let you.  You have to wait for your plane to get to wherever it's going.

I started playing over the summer, and my playing time has stayed pretty much the same through my first month of med school.  Definitely worth checking out if your real life prevents you from giving too much time to your virtual one.

Surface Anatomy

Surface anatomy is kind of fun.  You get to draw on your classmates and poke them.  Of course, they also get to draw on and poke you.  Fair is fair.  Though it is kind of strange to walk to a class with a bikini top on under your shirt.  Never had to do that in organic chemistry.

Fond Memories of Hox Genes

I'm so glad I took developmental biology in college.  We just started a series of embryology lectures that are included in our anatomy course.  I don't remember much detail (since it was two years ago), and we didn't focus on the embryology of all the systems as much, but at least knowing what all the words mean is helpful.

It's too early in the year to really be able to say what the best way to study is for me, but I can say that being familiar with the vocabulary is a huge help.  Just reading through the PowerPoint the night before and making a mental note of any big words I've never seen before.  Then when the lecturer blows through that part of the lecture at 350 miles an hour, at least I have a vague idea of how to spell some of the words he's using.

The other day I forgot the word "faucet" in the middle of a conversation.  That's because words like "splanchnic" and "mediastinum" have replaced words like "faucet" in my limited mental vocabulary space.

A Dream

Last night, I dreamed that my mom came to visit me, and when she left, I found that she had left me a huge roasted chicken on my counter.

I think my subconscious misses the days when I didn't have to cook for myself.

Dissection

Our first dissection was the back.  A good place to start, but rolling the cadaver was a little awkward.  We only did the superficial back.  The other group will go deeper, so we actually didn't see much more than muscles and fat.  A lot of fat.  Most of dissection is removing fat.  It's not nearly as gross as you think it is, though, just time-consuming.

My overall impression of med school after one week: I like it.  I'm still adjusting, and probably will be for a while, but it's an adjustment I genuinely want to make, not just one I have to make.

The most valuable piece of advice I've received so far: Work out after anatomy lab, because you smell anyway.

An Excuse to Wear Heels

Today we met our first patients.  (Well, our first living patients.  Our first patients are really our cadavers.)  We had to dress professionally, which I could understand for the afternoon stuff, but not the morning.  In the morning we watched a pediatric oncologist take a history from a teen-aged cancer survivor.  They were at the front of the lecture hall.  They could only see the first few rows of us.  It should have been Dress Professionally If You Sit In The First Four Rows, Otherwise Anything Goes Day.  But really, that lecture/history was fascinating.  It was another experience that made med school feel real.  The people who accepted me actually believe that I am capable of doing this kind of stuff myself one day.  It's not the same as when I used to tell people I wanted to be a doctor, and they would say things like "Good luck."  I don't need luck.  If doctors got their degrees only by luck, I'd never let any of them near me.  Also, I respect any fifteen-year-old who's willing to discuss their medical and social history in front of over 250 complete strangers who are all listening closely and taking notes.  And, um, blogging about them.

Which is why, by the way, I'm avoiding ever saying where I go to school.  I don't intend to ever reveal any more than the vaguest details about any patient I ever see.  There are too many med students who have inadvertently violated HIPAA by saying too much on their blogs.  So in the interest of airing on the side of caution, not to mention politeness and human decency, I'm not even mentioning the state I'm in.

We spent the afternoon in smaller groups talking to different patients.  We weren't really given a guide for questions; we were just encouraged to ask about whatever interested us.  Then we got together with some fourth years and fit the information we'd gotten into a history.  It was kind of cool to realize how much we'd learned about these people just by asking a bunch of questions in no particular order as they occurred to us.  You'd never want to take a real history that way, but it was an interesting way to start.

First Day of Class

Today was mainly Welcome to the Course, Here's How Everything Works lectures.  Actually kind of frustrating, because I've been in medical school for a week, and I haven't really had a real lecture yet.  We had our first lecture on taking a medical history, but it was more about the importance of taking a good history, which is still pretty introductiony.  I just want to start a real class.

We did, however, get our printed syllabi.  We get print-outs of the slides for each lecture, and the first three week's worth of lectures (the material for the first exam) have been bound together in one book.  We'll get another one for the next four weeks, and then another one after that.  But when they first handed it to me, I thought it was for the entire anatomy course.  Then I noticed the dates on the cover.  Nearly 400 pages of two-per-page PowerPoint slides for three weeks worth of material.  Oh my god.

I Actually Look Pretty Cute In It

This morning was the White Coat Ceremony.  It was cool, but I would've enjoyed it more if I hadn't been so exhausted.  We've had orientation lectures all day every day for the past week, plus the mixers at night.  I went to about half the mixers, and I'm still exhausted.

But it is cool to have the white coat.  Not that we'll wear them very much the first year, but I like seeing it hanging in my closet.  It makes this seem more real.  Sometimes, I still feel like I only just took the MCAT and I'm waiting for the scores to see if it's even worth applying to med school.  But I'm actually here now.  I have a white coat.  It nearly fits me (I'm a little petite for it, but it's pretty close).

My Dove Peanut Butter Chocolate Promises are telling me to "spoil myself" and to "listen to my heartbeat and dance."  I don't like it when my food tries to give me personal advice.

On Having a Negative Net Worth:

Today's biggest orientation lecture was about medical school loans and dealing with debt.  I was expecting it to be more of what I've read online and was told in undergrad, but it was actually the most helpful lecture we've had so far.  And I thought I'd share the most helpful thing from it.

http://www.mint.com

This website is awesome.  If you need to create a budget and manage your loans, you should create an account and try it out.  It keeps track of your debit card transactions, your credit card balances, your loans, and your monthly expenses.  It automatically categorizes most of your transactions (and pretty accurately, too) so you don't have to go through everything and add up each category yourself.  If you set your grocery budget as $300 a month, it calculates the total amount you've spent at grocery stores in the past month and shows you via slider bar how close you are to your spending goal.

I hope that was a helpful, if incredibly dull, entry.

She's Not Very Talkative, Though

This morning, I met my cadaver.  And it wasn't nearly as weird as I thought it would be.  It was still weird.  But I really expected to feel...something intense, and I really didn't.  I guess it just doesn't feel real yet.

No actually, there is one thing that made it feel real: she still had pink nail polish on her toes.

Like many medical schools, my school has two groups working on one cadaver.  There are eight of us, split into two groups of four.  We alternate dissections, and someone from the first group shows up for the first few minutes of the second group's dissection to teach them what their group did.  I like my group of four.  I think we'll do well together.  And I think when you're dissecting a cadaver for the first time in your life ever, you need a good group of people with you.

Disorientation

First day of orientation.  I have received my schedule for the first block of classes (anatomy).  Wow.  Just wow.  I haven't seen a course schedule like that since high school.  9 am (and sometimes 8 am) starts?  This is going to smack me pretty hard in the face after carefully planning my undergrad experience to avoid classes before 10 am as much as possible.

The mixer last night was surprisingly fun and un-awkward (for the most part).  That's something that's kind of cool about progressing up the education scale.  I went to a public high school, which meant that the students in attendance were just the kids from the area.  No one had to apply and be selected; we were just a random assortment of personality types.  Then I went to a small, private liberal arts college.  The kind of college that attracts a particular kind of person.  Also the kind of rather selective college that only accepts a particular kind of person.  So most of the people in undergrad with me were, if not cut from the same cloth, at least purchased from the same fabric store.

But medical school is even smaller and even more selective.  It seems like just about everyone I met last night had something in common with me.  It sounds cheesy, but I honestly clicked with everyone I talked with.  I had a pretty easy time making friends in college, but I've never wound up with so many new numbers in my phone at once.  Now if only I could remember at least half the faces that go with these names...

Welcome to Med School, Here's Your Flask

Orientation starts tomorrow.  There's a mixer tonight at a local bar.  Looking through the social schedule they gave us, we seem to have social events at bars every single night of the week.  They list the starting times as 10:00 pm for most of them.  But then the next day, we have orientation lectures starting at 8 or 9 am.  I kind of get the sense that the welcoming committee is getting us used to med school via the Baptism by Fire approach.  Get us used to being slightly sleep-deprived all the time, and start us on our ulcers and dependency problems early.  That's thoughtful of them.