miss akay

Neuro-heavy day with Meg and Kirs

This morning started with a horrible two hour session devoted to statistics and medical studies. It is interesting stuff and all... but let's face it... there is much cooler stuff to do than count beans and forcast drug efficacy.

Today, I taught visual neuro science to the girls in my study group, as it is afterall my forte! How nice it feels to stand up and knowledgably spout about something! We studied the Cranial Nerve III-- Occulomotor nerve and how it decusates at the optic chiasm, continues to the lateral geniculate nucleus (or suprachiasmatic nucleus, or superior colliculus, or Edinger-Westfal nucleus) then takes either Meyer's loop or temporal lobe route to radiate to the calcarine cortex. I am thankful for taking Visual Neuroscience while I was at Penn. That was a challenging course, but it all paid off!

Then Kirs taught Meg and me about the auditory system and portions that pertain to Cranial Nerve VIII-- Vestibularcochlear nerve. It basically is responsible, not only for hearing, but for balance and posture-- sending information directly into the cerebellum. Flocularnodular lobe, to be exact. The cerebellum has got some of the weirdest sounding anatomy. Vermis, Floccular, Globose, Emboliform and Fastigial... I will be lucky if I remember these nuclei and regions beyond our next exam! The Rhombic Lips?! It is all very complicated and overlaps a great deal. Of course it doesn't help that our class handouts are horrible and conflicting. I actually went to the librarian and asked her to direct me to a few textbooks to reference... the horror! There is still a lot to parse through. Finally, Meg took us through the Vestibular system and we discussed nystagmus and vertigo. Even talking about it made me seasick!

After our afternoon group study, we had 3 hours of Physical Diagnoses class, where we watched two videos on how to do lung and heart portion of a physical examination and then went to our fake exam rooms to pretend to be doctors. Inspect, palpate, percussion and auscultate. We are all still learning to use our stethoscopes! Today while I was doing my physical on another student, it wasn't until I was nearly finished that I realized my stethoscope wasn't twisted on. No wonder I couldn't hear her lungs! Pshhh... such beginners.

This evening, I met with my friend Sarah and we went through cross-sections of (what I call) the Invisible Man. His real name is the Visible Male. He was an inmate, who was put to death by lethal injection. Once he was dead, they sliced him up and put him on the Internet. I'm SERIOUS! And we study him and will be tested on much of it next week. The images are pretty outstanding. It's fascinating how they did this. I seriously now have an intimate knowledge of this man's intestines, rectus abdominus mucles, liver, heart, spleen, pancreas, and so on. We've been cruising through the layers, for two nights in a row. Last night was the abdomen and tonight was the thorax. Man, were the great vessels difficult to distinguish! The heart compartments were preschool, relative to the aorta, pulmonary trunk, inferior and superior vena cava, etc. We'll have to review it all over again, before next Wednesday.

But there's soooo much other stuff we still have to get to. Not to mention the many hours of lecture we have over the next few days. You know, this saying that medical school is like drinking from a fire hydrant is fairly accurate. I am learning an incredible amount, but as my friend said the other day... we end up forgetting the same amount of material in school that most people learn during their entire lives. It is unbelieveable how much I have learned! I love it. I really, really, really do. Now if I can just keep it up until this next round of exams is through... then I get to chill and relax again. The next round of exams end on my birthday... It will be quite a celebration, I am sure!

posted by miss akay @ 10:58 PM