path studying

I think the reason systemic pathology is so hard is because it completely fails to be cumulative. I'm not talking about the exams. The exams are the worst sort of cumulative, because they're two to three hundred different things to know. The class itself, though has no underlying direction. With clinical pathology, you have to know lecture 1 before lecture 2 will make sense, and the same goes for labs. It's easier to keep track of what you know and don't know. With systemic path, however, they really do just keep throwing names of diseases at us. With reproductive and dermatology it's especially bad, because although the diseases are different, all the symptoms seem to be pretty much the same. There's swelling. There's erosions. There may be keratin! And then you differentiate based on...well, based on whether the notes match up word for word with the picture's caption.

Studying after the first ten hours is just frustrating, when you're STILL just scrolling through disease (it's not even that they're diseases, they're specific symptoms which may or may not have a known disease attached).

But for a bit of a change, my kitchen sink clogged up! I used up the last of the drain-o, it's still not draining right, and my entire apartment now smells like rotting eggs. I think it may be time to take my notes to the gym and enjoy the ellipticals for a while.

It's a plan!

I got called in yesterday--which worked out really well, in fact. Realistically, I would not have gotten around to studying anyway. As it was, the surgery was relatively quick (a back--over in three hours!), and fortunately there was no backlog of pans to sterilize in the CS for clean-up.

Also, one of the older surgeons was supervising. He was one of the ones who seems to have endless patience with students, always able to offer a bit of advice in such a way that you're glad to take it. He helped with the teching, which was good--I haven't been called in since fall, and I wasn't moving efficiently enough to have kept up with four surgeons (eh, two of them were students) and the anesthesiologists.

Today, though--I must study! But all my good intentions will run away if I don't set up a study plan, since I keep forgetting how many classes I have.

So!

1. Anesthesiology: set up a chart of the drugs we learned last week, review the calculations. Our first exam is Wednesday.

2. Parasitology: Chart out this week's life cycles. My goal is to hang them on the walls when I'm done, and I have a lot of wall space to cover!

3. Pathology: Review cardio, probably by looking at pictures and reading my notes aloud.

If I feel like it, I will tackle the most recent lecture, which had a lot of diagrams with horrible 60's era typeface. I have trouble keeping up with the professor, who rattles off the complicated proceedings of the endocrine system like an auctioneer at a cattle sale. But without repeating anything, ever. If you were a good student, you'd be paying attention and get it the first time, right? (To be fair, he's perfectly willing to stop and repeat something; it's just hard to recognize when you, the student, need to have it explained again. After all, the professor knows what he's talking about, so it sounds very reasonable when he says it.)

4. Clin path: Technically we have homework due tomorrow afternoon. Hm. In contrast to systemic pathology, the professor for this class has splendidly lucid lectures, so I can probably get away with reading through the notes.

5. And if there's any time left over, making flash cards for all of the above!

Pathology 1, me 1

After about a month, we got back our scores on the previous path exam, on which I got an amazing beyond-a-B A! And then we got back our scores on the most recent exam, which completely kicked my butt and handed me an amazingly low 64. Which once again puts me at the very bottom of the class. Granted, this was the section where I was horribly sleep deprived for most of the lectures, had no lab partner for half the labs (because she didn't "like the disgusting pictures"), and was called in for fifteen hours a few days before the exam. I shouldn't blame my lab partner, of course, but seeing as she obviously did better on the exam than I did, I feel a little bitter.

Oh well, back to work.