October 25

I survived another week.

The microbiology quiz went well. I was relieved to have the micro unit over with for a few minutes, but the relief soon left when we began the infectious disease unit. It's just more micro.

We began a new unit on Evidence Based Medicine that will involve epidemiological type studies and of course us writing a paper. I'm not looking forward to it. We had one lecture on Stats, which I was dreading. It was actually not as bad as what I had anticipated. The first thing the lecturer said was to the effect that the stats lecture would be similar to an art lecture, where upon completion nobody would be expected to sculpt a David or paint a Mona Lisa, but that we should go away with a better understanding of the art itself.

We had an incredibly long lecture on Antibiotics, which I am not really looking forward to memorizing. I think we have 57 antibiotics that we will be expected to know the generic name, trade name, category, mechanism of action, and indications for each. The exam is one week from tomorrow. Yikes!

We also started our Cardiology unit, which is something that I am excited and scared about. Cardiology is one of the specialties which I am considering. The bad thing is that I think it is going to be pretty tough. It is a long unit and we have three weeks of lecture before an exam.

We had our last topic in Physical Diagnosis which was the musculoskeletal exam. This Friday we have a review for the complete physical exam and then I perform the exam on The 20th of November with Ashley as my patient.

We dissected the back in Anatomy. My group actually did a really good job dissecting out the muscles. Then we preformed a lamenectomy (cut open the vertebrae) and exposed the spinal cord. It was pretty neat.

This week we have a hematology test tomorrow and an Anatomy test on Wednesday with a bunch more lectures.

On a lighter note, I was able to go to the first Duke Basketball game on Saturday. It was fun, but Ashley wasn't with me, so it wasn't as fun as it could have been. Duke destroyed the team they played. They honestly looked like a high school team. Duke looks like they will have a pretty good team this year, but based on their recruiting class for next year, they will probably be even better then.