Just a brief recap this time, as December proved to be a short month within the realm of school.
Prior the Christmas, we took our first exam/lab practical for our musculoskeletal module. It was difficult. That's all I have to say about it.
Other than that, we've had a bunch of lectures and completed a bunch of dissections in the gross lab. Our first exam period covered the back (superficial and deep), the upper extremities, and the lower extremities; we've been covering bony landmarks, muscles, vasculature, and nervous innervation to everything [side note: I hate nerves. I really and truly hate nerves]. This area of dissection was particularly interesting as so many of the structures are huge - the contents of the femoral sheath, for example, are of a very solid diameter; it's mindblowing to ponder the scale of such major nerves and such in a much larger animal if they're already so sizeable in humans.
The last week before Christmas, after our exam, we worked on the neck, and this week we've started dissecting the face, which is an entirely new and even weirder experience within the already high level of weirdness of working with cadavers. Coming up in the next few days we're going to be sawing through various parts of the skull and removing the brain for later use, and I'm feeling quite wigged out by it all. Staring our donor in the face has taken some getting used to, as the faces are normally covered by a cloth while we're working on other parts of the body, but thankfully once you're in it wrist deep, scraping away fat to uncover tiny structures you start to lose the creepy feeling that OMG THIS WAS A HUMAN.
I also reunited with my summer clinic crew for their annual holiday party, held at Felix's Fish Camp down here in Mobile. These really are some of the friendliest people I've had the pleasure to know, and I'm already looking forward to returning to clinic next year on my family medicine rotation, if I can swing it.
The rest of January is going to be spent on MSK, with our miniboard scheduled for February 5th. From there we've got our neuroscience and behavior block...then Step 1 [gulp]...and then third year! Commence freaking out now.