Thursday, September 04, 2008

Clean Caribbean air?

I've been felling much better lately. Even though I'm waiting on the lingering effects of my allergy to subside, I only had to take the steroids for 1 day. Today was my marathon day. On Thursdays I have 4 hours of anatomy lab and another 4 hours of lecture with only an hour break for lunch. To up the ante, we had a few power disturbances in the morning for only a few seconds at a time, but this seems to inactivate the ventilation fans in the anatomy lab (I never understood why they simply didn't restart.) For the "wet lab" portion where we get to view the structures on the cadavers, there was no air circulation thus resulting in a room filled with formalin fumes. You'll be surprised to know that it not only has an unpleasant effect on your eyes and nose, but it's also a carcinogen. Luckily I only have to hang out in that place once a week for the duration of this term. I feel sorry for the professors though. Tomorrow is a pretty easy day since we have bioethics for half of our lectures. All you have to do for that class is think like a good doctor, so it's a small respite from the unending memorization of my other classes. My other 2 classes besides Anatomy and Bioethics are Biochem and Histology. So far I'm very pleased with the curriculum. It's all keeping me interested and it seems clinically relevant. They don't make us learn something just for the sake of learning it which was what I found disenchanting about undergrad. I'm looking forward to pathology (even though it's 13 credits) next year so I can finally find out about all the things that can go wrong with us. So far we just get to hear about diseases if they're peculiar examples related to our current topic. For now I'll just have to be satisfied with knowing how everything looks when it's running smoothly.

No comments: