A Sort of Homecoming

Hello blogspot, it's been a while...

The break was relaxing, it was nice to not think about school for 2 weeks. While away, I learned that I passed the NBME - although we don't know what grade we got. I saw a lot of family over break that I hadn't seen in a while, and I probably gained 10 pounds from the never-ending dinner parties. For Christmas I mostly got cash and clothing, which is perfect. I also got the Inception bluray and an 8 GB ram upgrade for my notebook from my parents. The highlight of the break was spending 3 days out on the ranch... the weather was perfect, and although I didn't shoot anything, it was therapeutic to get out of civilization for a while.

Monday we jumped right back into things. They gave us an overview of the next year and a half... Phase II will be quite different than Phase I. First of all, we must pass every single aspect of the phase, and anything that we fail must be retaken. Also, it will be more fast-paced, there are no more labs, and most of our classes will be in the morning. We will get 3 months off for summer, which I plan to take advantage of in its entirety. As for classes, the next few months will be a block entitled "Intro to Disease". This will be followed by our neuroscience block, and then we take another NBME exam and are off for the summer. Next year will be broken into blocks according to the remaining organ systems. Our first lectures of the block were in immunology, which seems like it will be a cross between histo and biochem (a terrible combination). The first lecture was over innate defense mechanisms, followed by organs and cells of the immune system. Not very difficult, but who knows how long that will last...

This morning began with an intro to pediatrics, which consisted of how to examine and take down a history for pediatric patients. This was followed by a triple lecture in pathology... While it was pretty grueling to sit through a 3-hour lecture, the material itself was quite interesting. We basically went over all of the things in the environment that can kill you: everything from common poisons and physical trauma, to external factors such as temperature, electricity and radiation. The presentation was accompanied by tons of pictures that demonstrated various indicators of the cause of death, which was very cool. Tomorrow we start clinical skills again, although this time we will be focusing on performing physical examinations instead of taking patient histories.

You may have noticed that all my blog posts to this point have been named using a song title... As it is getting more difficult to find appropriate titles, this may be the last one that uses the convention unless I start using album titles as well... or maybe movie quotes. We shall see.