Day 31: AMWA merchandise, recovery and moving forward2 min read

Because I am a huge fan of shameless plugs, I thought I’d show you guys the awesome t-shirts that the AMWA branch at OUWB has available for purchase:

Aren’t they lovely?! For only $12, you can help support the AMWA branch at OUWB [“Like” us on Facebook!] and get this awesome t-shirt. We have them available in Small, Medium, Large and XL. Interested and in the metro-Detroit area? Contact me!

[/end shameless plug]

Today’s inane image of the day:

S, being the awesome and amazing person she is, made these for our recent post-exam gathering — how cute are these “limes”?!

I definitely needed the last couple of days to recover from that moster of an examination. Although we had an anatomy assessment yesterday [essentially equivalent to a small quiz], I couldn’t completely kick back and relax on Monday night. I cannot believe that we had our first exam and that it happened only two days ago — it feels like at least a week has passed!

Although I did complain a while back about my energy levels after a draining day of class, I am starting to appreciate the way things are set up. I do not represent my entire class when I say this, but it seems that after finally getting settled in, spending a full day in lecture no longer results in complete exhaustion [although I am still tired]. One of my downfalls for this first exam was that I pay terrible attention during class — this has always been a problem of mine, but I have never had a big enough reason to change it… until now. Medical school truly is a different beast, and in order to keep up with the pancakes, I need to force myself to be an active learner in class. That’s the only way I’ll be able to keep up.

Anyway, yesterday we also had Anatomy lab. Although I was definitely affected by my first encounter with our cadaver, I didn’t have any strong reactions to the experience. This time, I felt a lot more prepared to work with her and discover what lies within the human body. Perhaps it was the fact that we had more to do [last time the first group did most of the work and pretty much only left us with pec minor to retract…], but I just felt more alive. We were assigned to dissect out the brachial plexus and after many sniffles and watery eyes [our cadaver went through particularly potent embalming chemicals, which tends to irritate my eyes and nose], we were able to isolate and identify the roots, cords, divisions and nerves that we committed to memory just weeks [or days, in my case] before. It was absolutely fascinating.

I still need to catch up on some sleep and finish a reflective writing… time to get on that!