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.