Planning for test 2

There are advantages to having tests every other week. For one thing everything is still relatively fresh in your mind, for another you get every other weekend where you still study but you can decompress a bit and relax.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to plan out my studying for next Monday so that I don't end up cloistered in my study room this weekend. We are done with classes at noon tomorrow and on Friday, so I am going to try to utilize those afternoons to go over the material from last week. I am still trying to figure out if there is any advantage is streaming the lecture more than once or if I should just stream once and then just use the annotated slides.

The workload remains steady, consistently busy but not horrible. I'm still withholding judgement on the educational value of the team based learning exercises. Some are more useful than others, but overall I worry that I get more out of studying on my own. It is a strange shift in perception since I've always preferred classroom learning.


In other news I finally have access for the slides to my autopsy case! We're going over them on Thursday, and it should be good since it was such a complex case. My lab professor is actually presenting the eyes to some of the ophthalmology staff today but I'll have to miss it for class. I will have to check back in with him to find out if they were able to diagnose the anomalies they found (which were oddly enough, not the anomalies they were expecting to find). This was an amazing case to be able to see/be able to present.

Eyes - Thoughts on loss of autonomy

I grossed an eye last night. It was a veterinary specimen as are most of the eyes we receive where I work (While we do occasionally get human eyes for things like melanoma, it is much more likely that we get eye parts like corneal buttons, schlera and conjunctiva), so I grossed it. The important thing to remember is to use a brand new blade (so it is very sharp) and to--in the abscence of a large mass--make sure to submit the optic nerve. We get a bizarre number of specimens with absolutely no clinical history, I'm not sure if it is a case of "make the pathologist guess why we cut this off!" or what. The paperwork for this case just read "L. eye" which was not particularly helpful.

My days of relative independence are sharply numbered. Our veterinary pathologist trained me and for the past couple years I've had a fair amount of freedom in grossing her cases. Occasionally I do have to consult with her to find out what to do with a particular specimen but months can go by without that happening. With our human specimens, as long as it is something I am signed off to gross I will do it or one of the other two grossing techs I work with will.  Anything larger either gets the on-call pathologist called in or it is held for one of the hospital PAs to gross the next morning. Very rarely anymore do we ever have to grab a pathologist and ask them how to do something.

But I'm going to be a student.  I need to put aside pride and what I think I know how to do. I will have months of school before I ever start grossing anything, it is time enough to forget the rhythm and cadence of my dictations. I am not so old as to be set in my ways or think myself so perfect that I feel like I don't have anything else to learn. I'm pretty sure the first few months of didactic learning will be humbling enough to make me realize there is lots that I don't know.

I am going to be graded, I am going to be challenged, I am going to be tightly supervised. I will not be a relatively experienced grossing tech that can be trusted to do her job without direct supervision--I will be a student awaiting instruction because getting as much out of the program as they are willing to teach me is so much more important than my ego.

This is my new perception of self