8 Days into Body and Disease

I said before that I was going to withhold judgement on the all TBL all the time format that we were going to be using for the five month Body and Disease portion of our didactic year, and I still am. Honestly it is still changing/being refined. The downside to being the first group doing anything is that all the kinks have to be worked out. I have no idea how many meetings have occurred between the students and the course directors, the students and the student leadership, the course directors and the administration, and the students and the administration. Then there have been the one on one conversations, the emails, and even the random run-ins in the hallway that turn into a feedback session.

The format started out with an IRA (individual quiz) followed immediately by the TBL groups discussing the questions to reach a group consensus. We got confirmation on the correct answers only after the group answers were submitted. Then there was an instructor guided Q&A session after that, some of which were more lecture-like than others, with a focus on addressing information related to the most commonly missed questions.

As of this morning we have moved to at-home IRAs (we are on the honor system to take the IRAs closed notes/book/online resources), no group quiz, and the class time being used for a clinical application problem (ie: a patient presents with these symptoms and test results so what is the disease, what causes it, what is the treatment, why would you run these tests, etc) in addition to the Q&A session.

The course material is from reading assignments and from previously recorded lectures (the 2010 and 2011 lectures are both available) that can be streamed online. The actual time in class is a lot less but that is balanced out by the time needed to stream lectures. I do like having the at-home IRA available the night before the TBL session since I was able go through the lectures, immediately take the quiz, and feel done for the day. With studying the night before and having the quiz the next day I felt like I had to use the time before class in the morning to go back over the material. Now I can use tomorrow morning to go to the gym *guilt free before heading to path lab.

Pathology lab has been interesting. My instructor is fantastic, he is funny and is good at reasoning through the case histories and questions. And he always has relevant information from actual cases to contribute.

Immunology has been so-so. I have to completely restudy the overview of immune response and inflammation for the test next Monday.

Meanwhile, I don't know if the microbiology lectures have just been really good or if I just really love microbiology... Hard to tell. But I want to say that they have been good overall and that microbiology being my favorite non-pathology subject has just made me more likely to enjoy them.

Oh, and interviews start on Friday for next year's class. It is exciting!

*I have honestly felt like **everything that I have done for the past week that wasn't studying was detracting from studying. But that sort of attitude is how you burn out... so yeah, not good. 

**Including blogging, sorry about that.

My day was cooler than yours

I don't want to come off as weird or morbid or gruesome, but I had the coolest day ever today at school. I got to cut our cadaver's head off! It was amazing. It just isn't one of those things that happens very often and I'm glad that I got to do it. Would I want to do it a lot? No, probably not, but it was still really cool to get to do it once (The dens is really hard to cut through, by the way.). I got to stick my finger through the foramen magnum while we were checking our position and it was just so neat to trace the path of the spinal accessory nerves, the spinal arteries, etc. It is not an experience that most people will ever get to have and I feel lucky to have done it. I will never again have the opportunity to dissect a body so thoroughly. And for everyone who didn't come to gross anatomy (I'll talk about this in a separate blog entry) they missed out on that. It is completely their loss because that has been the best gross anatomy lab so far.

Quick, name all the structures!

This week is strange. We're not having a lot more new information presented but we're having clinical case information given to us and by taking patient history we're supposed to be able to go through the differential diagnosis process to decide what to test them for. They are mandatory for med students (well, mandatory-ish, since they aren't taking attendance) but optionally mandatory for us. The one today did go over some of the material and we will probably remember that course material better than the things we didn't have in symposium, but for the time it took it wasn't high yield study time. Oh, and when you ask a bunch of PA students what tests to run on someone with abnormal uterine bleeding you get answers like "Let's do an endometrial biopsy!" in addition to the blood tests you're probably after.

It looks to be a fairly light week, which is good because everybody is in a state of semi-panic over the upcoming exams. It is a terrifying amount of information to be tested on in just one week. It should be doable. I keep telling myself that it is doable. I am hopeful, oh so hopeful... and yet so very scared at the same time. I spent this past weekend studying, I'll study tonight after I finish writing this, I'll study for two hours tomorrow morning before class starts, an hour over lunch, and all tomorrow night.

My kids started basketball week, but my dad is taking my oldest for practice tomorrow and my husband and my dad will take both kids to their separate practices on Saturday. I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to study on campus or holed up in my study room with headphones in at home.

And then there were three...

A year ago, if you'd searched the internet for a pathologists' assistant student blog you wouldn't have found any results.You would have been a few weeks too early to find Forrest's first post as he was preparing to start at WVU's program in January. But now we are up to three, representing three of the nine NAACLS accredited Pathologists' Assistant programs.

If you're reading this you've obviously found my blog, but you might also be interested in reading the other two:

Forrest is a WVU student, and his blog is The Making of a Pathologists' Assistant.

Paul is a future Drexel student, due to start in May (I believe), and his blog is No Job Too Gross.