State of the student...

I wrote about test anxiety/panic attacks back in September and then made the post private because I felt vulnerable having documentation of that experience out there while the situation was still fresh and I couldn't get an appointment with a counselor for a couple weeks.

In more recent news I've been prescribed a very useful anti-anxiety medication. It is immensely helpful. On Monday we had a Gross Anatomy test and there was a section on autonomics, which was both a weak area for me and a surprisingly long section of the test. It would have been a huge trigger for me if I hadn't gotten help, instead of moving on and doing the questions I felt better about I would have just stayed on that one section getting more anxious, changing my answers and constantly second guessing myself. Instead I went ahead to the other questions and then went back to that section and tried my best. Since the practical was immediately after the written, I'm particularly glad that I didn't get too stressed out over the written part.

We have a multi-week gap before our next test and I am seriously looking forward to a weekend where it won't be 100% about studying. I'm still going to study some but it'll just be a few hours each day to go back over the material from this week.

Hopefully mine turns out something like this!

And since we don't have an upcoming test, I thought I'd invite everyone over for dinner and boardgames. Hooray! I invited the second years as well, and a handful of medical students and the evolutionary anthropology graduates students that two of the PA students were paired with for gross anatomy. They very nice and since they're just with us for this class they don't know any of the med students. Plus it is kind of weird for them to be thrown together with a bunch of strangers who all know each other. So we've tried to be friendly since we're friendly kind of folks :-) I don't have that many chairs but I think we'll all at least fit in the apartment.

The menu is mostly Filipino (I'm going to try to make Sinigang Na Baboy for the first time!) with some American food thrown in because one of my classmates has mentioned a couple times that she wants a corned beef brisket. One of our classmates is going to make a Vietnamese dessert that I'm excited about because it is pretty similar to Filipino dish called Halo halo that I don't make a lot because it requires a lot of ingredients. Someone is baking bread and someone's wife is making a pumpkin roll (yum!). Oh, and I will have a scaled down cheese plate because it just isn't the same without cheese (and cold weather just always makes me want a nice capricho de cabra).

It should be fun, maybe a bit loud but luckily I'm on the outside corner of my apartment building and my bedroom separates my living room from the neighbor most likely to be disturbed by noise. I'm not sure what games people are bringing but we should have several options and enough people that we can be doing different things.