I'm just getting this post in under the midnight wire. I'll probably be up all night studying but that's alright - there's nothing else I'd rather be doing with my life right now. Maybe sharing it with someone special would be nice but that's not currently the case. I did get a nice visit from my parents tonight and got to share some things with them which is always fun.
Unfortunately, I forgot my Dad's birthday yesterday and didn't get in touch with him until the wee a.m. hours this morning to wish him a happy birthday - kinda made me feel like a big bucket of you-know-what ....
I've got three test tomorrow and one of them is a take-home test that I'm still working on. I'm on #18 of 30. I also still need to study my Histology lab slides and get them memorized so I can get a decent grade. After that, we have an Anatomy test tomorrow and I've already announced to the world (my world) on Facebook that I wasn't going to shave until I got an A on an Anatomy test. :)
6 test in a week - if that doesn't keep a person out of trouble then nothing will.
One of the purposes of this blog - in my initial conception - was to share what I was learning and I'm not sure how good of a job I've been doing with that. I don't live with anyone so my interaction with other people is pretty much limited to the people I see at school or with people at the gym whenever I can make it in for a workout.
What the heck did we do today?
Oh yeah - in Spinal Analysis we watched some videos of necks and spines via some kind of x-ray movie. I'm getting to know the body pretty well but I'd have to say I am going to be an expert at the spine. I like the idea of being an expert at something but, even then I do realize that being an expert is relative to other people who are not experts.
Before Spinal Analysis we had biochemistry - we're learning about sugar - glucose, fructose, galactose, maltose and seeing them in Heyward projections. We're learning about anameric carbons and adding together glucose with fructose to obtain sucrose which is basically cane sugar and it really doesn't matter if you have regular sugar, brown sugar or powdered sugar - you still have sucrose or cane sugar. But, we can make it sound a bit more impressive by saying we have alpha 1 - beta 2 sucrose. So far, I understand all of that except for where the 2 is coming from and I was thinking it should be a 1. I'll get that straightened out though.
Biochemistry is really amazingly interesting and it's hard to do it justice in this blog. I keep having a goal in my head of wanting to learn 1% of what's in our teacher's head but I'm not sure I'll be able to learn that much, after all, he's been at this for 30 years and that's after he got his PhD in biochem but, I'll do my best :)
I'm in group A for dissection and today was group B's turn to dissect and normally I would have gone to the ampitheater to watch the prosection lecture but I knew I needed to study more for our Cell Bio test ...I'm not sure what to say about that test but I'm glad it doesn't make up the bulk of my Histology grade - no excuses, I just didn't do as well as I would have liked.
We had Anatomy after Cell bio today but the class got started a little late because so much of the class was mulling around in the halls after our test. I think most everyone was a little shell-shocked. I know I was. I'll just have to do better.
We mainly went over the bones in anatomy and I still need to get them all memorized - from clavicle and scapula down to the tips of the fingers in the arms. Just learning the basic names of the bones would be pretty simple (relatively speaking) but, if we consider a simple small bone like the clavicle then we also need to know the 8 different regions on the bone, what the regions are for as well as the end names and the names of the joints the bone makes with other bones. Even that isn't all that difficult - it just requires time ....
I did some counting yesterday and realized a couple things -
One thing is that I have a total of 12 different classes and labs I'm having to juggle this first trimester of the DC program and the other thing I counted were the number of syllables in some of the words we use in anatomy - the first word I counted had 8 syllables and that kind of explained to me why it does take a bit of time to get used to these words. The word I checked out was "acromioclavicular" from the acromioclavicular joint which is between the acromion process of the scapula and the clavicle bone and, of course, at the other end of the clavicle we have the sternoclavicular joint. The words are OK once you get them down but they don't exactly roll off the tongue when you first come across them - not for me anyway - not yet. For now, I feel like a grade-school kid just who has just learned their ABC's and are trying to form words for the first time.
A neat artery we came across in spinal anatomy was the "Great Radicular Artery of Adamkiewicz" Good name, huh? :)
I guess that's a general overview of today. I hit the library after my classes and picked up some bones - two of them were human bones which is kind of cool and the other was a model of the arm bones. Wow - I've really got a lot to learn - I better get another cup of coffee - this night is going to fly by and I've got to learn all I can to make some respectable grades tomorrow -
It's tough - it's a really tough program. Some people in my class have had dental anatomy and it seems like everyone under the sun has studied micro-biology and numerous other -ology type courses. I've had two years of calculus based physics and over 100 hours of mathematics. Good stuff and it certainly works the logic areas of the brain but leaves me wanting a bit with all the stuff we're learning. Of course, you never can really tell when something is good or bad when you're going through it and usually only perspective from a distance can provide anything close to a reasonable answer as to whether something may have been good or bad.
OK, coffee awaits ...coffee, 12 more spinal anatomy questions and three powerpoint presentations with around 100 slides that need to be committed to memory in the next 9 hours.
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