08/07/2004 01:57 -0500 GMT

Wake Up Call

I think the second day of medical school should be called "Holy Shit!" day. Like the Yahoo! trademark, the exclamation point should be a requisite part of the logo. The second day of medical school is the day when I woke up and realized that, Holy Shit! that's a lot of information. We started off easily, defining planes of transection for anatomy, anterior, posterior, inferior, superior, lateral, medial, etc. Easy stuff. Stuff we'd heard before.

By the second day, we were into dozens of ligaments that support the vertebral column, all with attachment points that are critical for their function, all with specific attachment points on bones that I had only had to name as a whole, not as their parts.

Holy Shit!

By the third day we had described all the muscles of the back, from superficial (5) to intermediate, to deep, a layer which has further superficial, intermediate, and deep layers, and all of which have origins, insertions, actions, innervations, arterial supplies, and oh by the way, sometimes when a muscle is held fixed by accessory fixator muscles, then their origins and insertions are reversed. By the end of the third day, those muscles were ancient history and we had described the entire peripheral nervous system, and were looking toward embryology.

Holy Shit, again!

So my Friday night, along with my new best friend Brad Coker, was spent learning, knowing, being the vertebral column, all it's aspects, facets, ligaments, functions, curves, maladies, accessory parts, etc. That is, at 23 hrs on the fifth day, I was comfortable with the knowledge of the first day, and some of the second and third, to be fair.

Fear is a wonderful motivator. Our first exam will be two weeks from now, and we have already covered half an undergraduate semester's worth of material in this first week. And you know, I have been fairly conscientious. I've been studying about four hours a day, perhaps in more detail than necessary, with an unknown first exam pending, and I am four days behind. How does that happen?

Did I mention that Anatomy is only a third of the courses we're currently studying? There's also Medical Ethics, Introduction to Clinical Medicine, as well as Anatomy Lab, Clinical Anatomy Case Studies, oh, and managing life like getting parking permits, paying bills, spending quality minutes with my lovely, amazing, wonderful wife, maintaining the yard, checking email, getting some exercise, sleeping, eating, brushing teeth, showering, and ensuring clean laundry.

Holy Shit!