In the last month or so, I've started anatomy (lots of cutting and pulling at flesh/fat/tissue, exposing arteries, viens, nerves and defining muscle groups...), scored the winning goal in the graduate school soccer league finals , visited my god parents in Poughkeepsie NY with my girlfriend, studied harder than I ever have in my entire life, been completely destroyed by exams, and become the next director of the Sharewood Project , a free health care organization that Tufts med students run outside of Boston once a week. Simply put, its been really really busy and I've done nothing about blogging. Oh, I also had an amazing Thanksgiving weekend with family outside of Seattle.
Since that's a lot to cover, I'll just write about anatomy for now... maybe in the next couple days I'll start getting into some other topics.
Before entering anatomy the lab (a large cold room lit by fluorescent lights with light blue cement walls covered with cabinets with bones, organs in containers, and other samples, and lined with sinks to wash up with) many people worry about the shock of seeing a dead body. That was not a factor for me. Instead, my biggest gripe is that it SMELLS. It smells like formaldehyde and whatever else dead bodies smell like... It's also juicy at certain points. Our body - the youngest one in the lab, which has roughly 40 cadavers - was a woman who died of an aggressive metastatic cancer in her 40's and she was not frail and weak. She had plenty of extra fat and tissue to be cut away. I'll say other than the smell, yellow human fat is my other least favorite aspect of the lab. Along with my other group members, I equate the fat and other tissue to food almost every time we are down in the lab, and for your sake, I will spare the details... it can seriously make eating certain foods on lab day difficult... for example smoked salmon after my first day in lab... ANYWAY... no seriously, some stuff legitimately looks like foods human consume... moving on...
The point I'm trying to get to is that at first anatomy is slightly uncomfortable for everyone on some level, but you get over it very quickly. You have to. The first day one of my group members accidentally had a piece of fat flung into his face, and some more in his hair (I imagine he showered as soon as he had the opportunity to). For the reason of getting covered in juice and tissue as well as the smell, we wear scrubs and a set of shoes that we know we can throw out at the end of the course. You also get over being uncomfortable because effectively learning the material and doing well requires spending lots of time with the bodies. We've covered the lower limb, which is the most simple part of the body, and already I must say the body is amazing and pretty complex! Who would have thunk it? There is a lot to learn!
The knowledge I gain from anatomy is incredibly relevant to health care, but more importantly, working out! During this break I've finally had the opportunity and time to work out consistently. While at the gym, I was using the rowing machines and one of my butt muscles became really sore - my gluteus maximus to be precise (its the big one on your butt). For this reason I wanted to stretch it. "How do I stretch my gluteus maximus?" I wondered to myself, which was when I remembered, "the glut max is used for hip extension and lateral rotation! Ah, just do the opposite to stretch the muscle!" So I pulled my leg up toward my chest and rotated it in. BAM! Stretched! Doctored! Awesome!
On a more professionally relevant note, anatomy is important, especially if I pursue a specialty like Emergency Medicine where I need to make rapid physical diagnoses (along with anatomy we are taking a course called physical diagnosis, the content of which corresponds to anatomy). For that reason, I'm always trying to think in terms of, "A patient walks in with this hurting, what is the diagnosis?" The great part about Tufts is that the exam questions are clinically oriented. For example, "A 24 year old med student was walking across the street and tripped while walking onto the curb causing her ankle to invert. She limps into the emergency department with complete sensation on her foot, but pain with inversion. What might she have damaged?"
Seeing as its christmas eve, I'm going to get back to hanging out with the family. We had our traditional fondue dinner:
First course: Cheese fondue with veggies and bread to dip
Second Course: a broth for cooking small pieces of chicken and steak
Third Course: a soup made from the broth with raman noodles and veggies
Fourth Course: butterscotch fondue with fruit
I hope you're having a great holiday season!
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