Another "A"

I passed my anatomy practical with an A apparently, and I am beyond excited. Now, normally of course, yes, this is exciting news, but it's more exciting because I thought I failed the practical. The tags on the practical were awful. They told us they weren't going to test us on the female breast, but they had 2 questions on there about it. Now, I still knew the information, but that's just not fair if you were a student who didn't. They said they weren't going to test us because not every cadaver in the lab was a female, so if yours wasn't, the only way you could see one is either through the pictures given to us in class - which are NOT realistic or you were supposed to go to lab on your own time and look at it if you were interested. Now, I did because I mean, it's cool to see what you're carrying (I AM a female - this is NOT up to discussion from any of you) and two, Im giving honest thoughts to OBGYN and that's kind of important in that position. So anyways, that was just one flaw of the practical, others included them trying to trick you in EVERY way they could like twisting an arm so that you really had to look where the muscle was/what it was. They cut other muscles so close to where they inserted that you couldn't quite tell that anything WAS cut, so you thought that what you were looking at was the top layer, but in reality it was the bottom/deeper layer. I mean craziness. I just NEVER, ever understood why teachers went to such extremes. They're supposed to be there to educate us not teach us how to mess others up - I know the information, but don't hide things in such a way that I can't figure it out. Some might say, well they do that because in real life you might miss something in a patient so this makes you be more careful and really look at things, but in real life, I would also be allowed to touch the person and move things around within the cavity (in surgery for example) if I wasn't sure what I was looking at - on the practical you can't touch anything and a lot of anatomy terms change based on landmarks within the body. So an artery changes names when it passes under, beside, over, etc. something, but if I can't see that something I can't really know for sure. You have a general idea of what area things are in, but when you give me two answers choices within that same area and nothing else to go off of, then I'm sorry but I doubt even YOU could answer the question had I done the same to you. So anyway, got an A but as you can see, the test upset me because I know a lot of people who did VERY poorly, but studying with them, I know they know most of their information and that test doesn't define them as a good or bad future doctor but in their minds, it's sort of like that - we tend to take things persnally here.

Oh and when we got the scores emailed to each of us, we were sitting in a lecture dealing with suicide, where one of the statistics was that female doctors kill themselves 3x more (rate) than male doctors because we tend to take things personally and really feel like we're not going to be good doctors if we do poorly, and that med school students are very in risk because it's such a stressful environment. For us, the teacher said it's even worse because we have to live on an island away from almost everything/everyone we know and care about that could be a support system. I mean the irony of it was a bit funny, but to some, it could be serious.

My Problem-Based Learning teacher is actually an emergency counselor on campus and she told us that thus far this semester, we have had more cases of suicide threats than EVER before on the campus within the time frame since school began (aka 1.5 months). No one has actually committed suicide, but some have been sent home/left school she said because they were honestly on the brink. So in all, needless to say, I was a bit nervous to check my email and when I did, I was thoroughly relieved.

On another note, there was another boxing match between the cows yesterday and this time, they were in my way as I was walking home on my path. I stopped, they stopped, they looked up, moved out of the way, and proceeded with their "fun" as the dogs egged them on. It never gets old - hehe.

Thank you all also for the constant emails and words of encouragement - they keep me going and they remind me that I'm NOT alone (don't worry, no suicide thoughts in mind).

Love you all!

Barbara