#studyinganatomy

I'm past Back and Thorax, and have jumped "head"-first into our Head and Neck portion of anatomy. Let me tell you, when they say that the information comes fast and frequently, they aren't kidding in the slightest. I Undergraduate class work was strenuous, certainly, but I still don't believe that I was prepared fully for the amount of time I spend with my eyes glued to a book, computer screen, white board, or cadaver, all to solidify information that I learned the night before. 

And that's just it, you really only have about 24 hours to have that roughly memorized, because there is always more to learn tomorrow! 

Thankfully, the regionally-based anatomy course allows you to review relationships as you move from osteology to muscular to vascular to nervous. Were it not for this God-send of a review, that first exam could've been catastrophic!

But I passed! They can't kick me out yet, and I have new friends at school to share that success with! 

The people you meet in medical school will become your second family. You were close with your college roommates? Nice, but unless you spent most of your waking time with them, reviewing, reading separately, attending lectures, looking at bodies in the wet lab, and executing study breaks (ice cream runs, Game of Thrones episodes, bike rides, intramurals, etc.), you might not quite understand what I mean yet. Heck, we're already cooking for each other...

I can say that no where before I have felt like I belonged more. Each of these people are driven and focused on their studying, almost to a fault. At the same time too, each wants to get the most out of the free time that they allot themselves. When it's time to work, we work. When the exam's finished, and you've spent the last two weeks studying 12 hours per day, it stands to reason that you've earned yourself an evening of doing nothing that involves excessive mental stimulation. We're pretty good at that too. 

I wish I would've taken gross anatomy before getting here. Things would've been much easier, assuming I took the time to commit everything to memory. That said though, I'm keeping pace with my counterparts who were in anatomy labs before.

I guess my closing thought would be this: I walked into the first few weeks of medical school unsure of my abilities compared to my peers (and that's normal I suspect). I can tell you now that we are all in the same boat. Yes, some have more clinical experience and some more theoretical knowledge, but we are the same; we all share the fear of failure, of embarrassment, of someone exposing us as frauds. Because of this, we double our efforts to succeed and validate the fact that someone said that we were worth attending.