I've been trying for a week to put this post together, but first I couldn't get my pictures from my phone to my laptop, and then my copy of Elements has apparently decided to crap out forever and all time, so here we are. I've crossed to the dark side and resorted to using PicMonkey to throw pictures together in a collage. I'm not happy about it.
I'm feeling particularly scatter-brained thinking about what all happened during the month of November. We finished up our ENR module before Thanksgiving; I ended up with my best miniboard score so far, which is a particularly validating feeling considering I cared so much about this material. MSK is making me a bit nervous so far, but I did well on our abbreviated anatomy unit last year so I'm hoping I can pull myself through this without too much of a problem. Fingers crossed!
A few highlights from the past month:
- Skin grafting workshop held by the surgery interest group. SKIN GRAFTS ARE HARD, MAN. We got to experiment with performing the whole process, starting with shaving very, very thin layers off the provided giant slabs of pig skin, prepping the grafts, and then stitching them onto smaller pieces of pig skin that we had "injured." The tool they use to harvest grafts is like a funky saw, and it is quite difficult to operate when you don't really know what you're doing. It took me a few tries to gets a graft, and even then it ended up slightly thicker than it should have.
- Finishing up endo/repro and starting up musculoskeletal | we're two weeks into this new module and have already spent the majority of the time in gross anatomy labs, slowly taking apart our cadavers. I love the process of gross anatomy, as getting to actually visualize the paths of the different muscles and nerves and blood vessels helps me so much with remembering what everything does, but there's no denying it's exhausting. Between standing on your feet for hours and bending over a table digging out tiny structures from mountains of fat and connective tissue, it can really take a physical toll on the body.
- I really miss endo/repro. I enjoy anatomy a great deal, but pretty much nothing can ever match up to my love for reproductive biology. It's a large part of what me to medical school in the first place.
- Finishing up the most recent module also entailed taking our third OSCE [briefly discussed here]. We're due to actually get our scores back within the next few days, I think, so fingers crossed everything went well.
- Mobile County medical society holiday social, held this year at the Battle House Hotel downtown.
- Med school "Tachy" Christmas party | like tachycardia, get it? Ha ha ha. I'm really not a fan of tacky sweater parties, but this seems to be the theme they choose every year so I'm stuck dealing with it for another two holiday seasons.
- We have our first MSK exam on Monday - half written, half practical. Eek. Thankfully after that we only have a few days of class before holiday break!