Almost a year

It is the end of a year of medical school and, dagnabit, it is time I started blogging about it. So, for those of you who do not know, medical school is where you go to lose your mind, get lost in books, bid adieu to your social life, contract the most miserable case of hypochondria possible and become completely useless to society.

Yes, after one year of schooling in the basic medical sciences, I am now utterly useless. My mind has been filled to overflowing, emptied, refilled, re-emptied, refilled, scattered, addled, and finally, utterly emptied. So, if you were to become severely injured in front of me, after a great deal of hemming and hawing and making faces that tell you I am probing the very deepest recesses of memory and existence, I could tell you what muscles were damaged or what nerve you may have severed. I would be powerless to communicate any of this information to you in anything like a meaningful way. And I could not put on a bandage or think to dial 911. That would only interfere with my making faces. But at least I could identify your injury with approximately 20% accuracy.

To close out my year here at a respectable medikel kolledge, I am studying the brain… which looks a bit like a walnut. Unlike a walnut, however, each fold of the brain has a name. Some are easy. The precentral gyrus and the postcentral gyrus, for instance. Some are not. The Amygdala does not look like an almond, nor does the name sound like an almond. The hippocampus, once again, nothing like a horse. But, apparently hippo is horse and amygdala is almond in latin or greek. And who the heck knows what a genu is, but it certainly does not look like Napoleon’s hat… no mater how many professors say it does. So, if you are considering a career in medicine (not recommended), consider Latin for fun and profit.