Dunisms

As of now, I am a second year medical student. It is amazing how much these little victories mean, but in ten years, when I look back, I will remember moments of this year and some of the struggles, but I will not look at it as a momentous event just to get to my second year. But right now, I feel accomplished.

I actually kinda went out with a bang this year. As I was studying for Neuroscience, and trying to understand how the brain works and memorize all the pathways involved, I realized that was not working. So I changed tactics. I treated the last test as a word association game. I went over the syllabus and the study materials and tried to get a good idea of what words and phrases were next to each other. Then, come test time, I simply went in there and if the words in the question matched with the words in the answers, it was right. Yeah, I may have also applied a little old fashioned memorization, but mostly it was word association. And it worked.... very well.

On an unrelated note, all of us have lost something and then spent hours looking for it. Sometimes even enlisting help. Sometime we have even wished that we could have used a bloodhound. What if what you lost was a bloodhound? I saw a poster for a lost dog, a bloohound. Now how are you going to find that.

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.

Tree falling-ism

So, what if someone wrote a blog and there was no one out there to read it. Would it then still be a blog? And would the writer still be a blogger... am I in fact blogging. Now my head hurts and I have sixteen biochemistry lectures to read over.