I Passed!

Thank you all for your good thoughts and emails following my previous post. I received my results from my Course 1 final exam and I passed with flying colours. I was very happy with my result. It doesn't matter in the long run as all we will see on our transcript is a Pass or Fail but it was still nice to see that I had a solid margin above the minimum pass. With that I've put Course 1 to rest, but not fully. The topics we learned about - liver disease, blood, clotting problems are still relevant but they are just taking a backseat to our most recent course the Musculoskeletal System.

MSK is intense. This unit is likely to be our busiest in terms of anatomy memorization. In twelve hours we covered virtually all the muscles, bones, and ligaments of the hand, arm, shoulder, spine, pelvis, leg, and foot. Suffice to say, after three four hour sessions our brains were well and truly stuffed with information. This is the only formal instruction we are going to have specifically about the anatomy. The synthesis and further understanding of it we need to gain on our own through time spent with text books, in the lab with the cadavers, and optional sessions run by some fellow students and one of the anatomy instructors. The moral of this story is that I'm thinking about muscles and bones more than I ever have before. When I see people who are really thin and fit I'm tempted to stop and ask them if they could flex for me to see if I can identify the muscles I'm seeing.

The first week of this course was somewhat overwhelming and definitely different than Course 1. The course chairs and primary teachers are different and it shows. I suspect that I'm going to reflect on Course 1 with fondness for the rest of my education here at UofC. We are now getting into the clinical aspects of the muscle and bone. Today was all about trauma, Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS), fractures, and incident prevention. We also had a presentation from a patient who had been in a severe motor vehicle collision suffering multiple fractures and then had to go through five months of intense and painful rehab to regain function. It is days like this that make med school interesting. The orthopaedic surgeons are also doing their best to make Trauma and Orthopaedics sound like the best specialty. I'm not entirely convinced but they are definitely making a good effort. We've also had some incredibly painful lectures about topics like the physiology of bone growth and healing - not nearly so glamorous but just as relevant.

This afternoon was also super cool. We learned how to draw blood and insert IVs. While we understand that this is not necessarily something we will do a lot of (depending on location and specialty) it was still really cool to practice. We didn't have the opportunity to practice on each other but the stimulator arms we practiced on 'bled' when we poked them so it certainly felt real and we will be getting some real practice in the near future I believe. Being in the lab today playing with needles or 'sharps' definitely made me feel quite doctor like.

Anyways, it is Friday night and I'm off for the weekend...to the hot springs to study some anatomy.