Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Vertebra Prominens is not an empty vessel

Now begins the stressing - the lab practical is on Friday, and the first mini-examination is on Monday (don't let the name fool you; it's a big deal). We had our practice lab practical on Sunday, and it was a near-fiasco. 2nd or 3rd Students put it together, complete with wrong anwers. What runs through the paired transverse foramina of C7? The answer is not nothing - the answer is small accessory veins. There's a difference between nothing and nothing important. Also, who tags a vein and asks "what runs through here?" Give me a break - how did they get to second semester if they couldn't tell the delto-pectoral triangle from the cephalic vein? Not a difficult distinction. I like the anatomy - I just don't like when it's run badly; I'm not throwing myself into a lifetime of debt for shoddy lab-practicals.

I'm torn between force-feeding myself the new coolness of embryology and the muscles of the forearm; and reviewing enzyme kinetics, cell biology, and the distinctions between anomer and epimers (anomers are always cyclic, btw). So I'm reviewing hardcore now, and I've got to do a bunch of questions just like in MERP, and make absolutely sure I'm ready for this. I'm not to thrilled about the pedigrees, because they don't come to me as intuitively as some of the biochem (I know, that's a shocker), and it's not as interesting as some of the anatomy, but I'll brute force it until I've got it down.


Aside from that, not much is going on. I've gotten into the mindset I need to make absolutely sure I cover everything I need to. It' kind of like prison, only I'm enjoying myself -rather, it's like I'm relishing my assimilation into a new culture (med school, not the island - they can keep their slow-pokedness). Nevertheless, I'm going to include a picture of another famous island prison:

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