And the score at halftime, Derrick 2, Med School 0

My name is Derrick Antoniak, and this is my blog about being a first-year medical student.

On Monday morning Dr. Binhammer came into the lab and said something to the effect of, "Welcome to the second half of gross anatomy. I know some of you are behind by a couple of touchdowns, but we have time to make a comeback." So today is Friday, which means we finally know just what that score is. Like after the first exam, I'll just say that I did fine. I won't break down the numbers, but I had almost the exact same percentage score with a slightly lower percentile ranking. So, moving on...

Last night was Kylee's birthday party at the Upstream and then the Crescent Moon, which means that five days into the thorax and abdomen unit, I still have barely done any studying. I didn't feel as bad, though, after we got to the Moon and about 10 of our classmates were already there getting hammered and talking about going back to some frat house to shoot some whiskey. I do have a lot of catching up to do this weekend. Today I took Joanna out to lunch and, despite my best intentions of coming back to the library for the balance of the evening, I wound up going home and taking like a three hour nap. So now it's 6:30, and instead of leaving campus having studied for the past 5 hours, I'm just getting here. And if I'm not far enough behind, I've now spent the last ten minutes writing this.

Anyways, I sent out a couple of emails yesterday trying to shadow this neurologist Dr. Singh, and this orthopedic surgeon Dr. Garvin, both of whom emailed me back and said to set it up with their secretaries and they'd be happy to have me. That's been one of the most impressive things about my med school experience so far. I have contacted faculty members at this medical center in departments all over campus, asking to shadow or participate in research, or whatever reason, and not once has it taken more than a day to respond. And the response is always an enthusiastic "of course I'll help you in any way I can, just call or stop by". And you look at the list of things these people are doing and wonder how they can even check their email that often, let alone send a response or take a student under their wing. So I find that impressive and encouraging.

Yesterday we got to look into each other's eyes with the fundoscope. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do, and it will take much more practice than we were able to get yesterday. But basically, the back of your eye has some interesting things to see that can be useful in diagnosing problems totally unrelated to the eye itself. It's the only place in the body that you can look directly at and actually see the small blood vessels, so often you will have a fundoscopic exam as part of a diabetes diagnosis, for example. The problem is you have to look through the pupil using this magnifying glass/flashlight tool, and, if you know anything about the pupil, it constricts when you point a flashlight at it. So it ends up being like looking through the old-school keyhole, where you can see a tiny window, and if you move your head up, down, left, right, you can move the window around to see different parts of the entire scene back there. The other problem is that the instructor can't exactly see what you are looking at. So, I think I was able to trace the blood vessels backwards and see the optic disc (landmark we were told to look for), but in reality, I'm not sure, and the TA has no way of confirming or denying it for me (he also has no way of denying it if on the exam I say that I see it, but that won't help me much out in the real world).