Ambling along

The entirety of my weekend was spent with my nose in a book. Actually, it was spent typing out notes on cell biology and DNAreplication/transcription/translation, but you get the picture. I'd spent a lot of time handwriting them - which is great for my learning style, but absolutely terrible for time management. I've heard it said that the difficulty in medical school comes not in the form of the conceptual difficulty of the topics, but rather the volume - it's like standing in front of fire hydrant, having someone open the valve, and trying to take it all in. One can't drink slowly, so I'm going to have to figure out a better way to get it all down. I'm going to try to type everything out, print it up, and then just go over it - staying on top of all of the reading is a task in and of itself.

To perhaps make these posts a tad more interesting, I figured I'd share a few things that I'd learned each day (so you'd believe I was really becoming a doctor and not a beach bum). I don't want to bore you with the kind of rote memorization I've gotten myself shackled into, so you won't see anything about eEF1 or 2 (elongation factors in protein synthesis) or tiny ligaments (like the transverse one that holds the odontoid process in place against C1), but rather, I'll try to pick out the cool stuff. This is kind of diffuclt, because, here at the beginning of the basic sciences years, there's little of clinical relevance. I'll say this, though - any disease they throw out to us make it easier for me to pay attention to the myriad names of enzymes. That being the case, Tay-Sachs disease is a deficiency in the enzyme Hexosaminidase A, which breaks down glycolipds in lysosomes. It's prevalent among populations of Eastern European heritage, and is characterized by rapidly declining mental functioning, paralysis, and eventually death, manifesting after the first few years of life, and marked by rapid decline.

It's only the third week of class, but I feel I haven't really gotten into too much that's new - I saw so much of this in MERP, but I guess that medicine builds on medicine. The information is just going to go deeper and deeper, and It's my job to keep up with the nit-picky detais doctors may never use. I've put together a high-energy play list to pump myself up when I'm writing/typing notes - it helps keep me in the zone (although, when I'm actually studying, I need serious quiet and concentration). The point, though, is not only to get it all stick, but to make all of the pieces fit together so that the human body - and what can go wrong with it - make sense to me. Where I stand now, I have a few pieces of the puzzle - but as I stand in front of that fire hydrant, those pieces should beome clearer, and I'll be better able to see how they fit. Somewhere down the line, I'll see what DNA replication, Gap junctions, apoptosis, and the suboccipital triangle have in common.

I've got to say that, thus far, it feels like they're getting us off to a well-rounded start. Sure, I spend most of my time staring a a screen or a page, attempting to fit little words and numbers into my neural folds. However, that time is broken up in the anatomy lab - where I actually get my hands inside "my first patient" - what used to be a person. I thought it was going to be a bit more....uncomfortable than it was. Granted, I've been a party to the dismemberment of various game animals since I was knee-high to a pollywog, but this is still a person. Though we're working on the back, there is a face on the other side. Nevertheless, I feel comfortable and a little bit excited as I'm peeling back fascia, muscle and bone - it's like I'm finally visiting a country of which I've only seen maps and travel brochures. There's something refreshing about finally setting foot upon that one-time distant shore, and no longer looking at the splenius capitis in pictures, but holding it in my own hands. The geographical analogy seems to fit very well - the first thing they had us to was find bony "landmarks" - the inferior angle of the scapula denoting the level of T7, etc. Rohen, Yokochi, and Lutjen-Drecoll are my new heroes (and the editors/dissectors of my anatomy atlas).

In addition to the books and bodies, we've begun cell histology this week. It's not only important for me to be able to recognize chemical reactions on a page, or the dorsal rami - I've got to be able to recognize microscopic structures, and call them by name. I like this well-rounded start they've given us - I really can't complain. Teeny cell types, while interesting, are not the primary peers I wish to surround myself with - I don't think I'm being called to a lifetime in a laboratory.

In other news, today is the first day I'm actually getting my laundry done since leaving Texas on the 2nd of January. Maybe I shouldn't have waited so long - everything takes forever here on the island, and if this laundry thing isn't done today, I'm down to wearing scrubs to class.

Today's going to be a big reading day - hopefully we'll take some of those facts and make them stick. Later on, I'm going in to watch group C demo their dissection of the suboccipital triangle.

I miss the bookstore.