Happy Birthday Blog!

Soooo, around this time last year I was at work and thought it would be a super good idea to start a blog to document this whole PA school experience.

In one year I've posted (including this one) 96 entries, but have written 102.

I've had 16,187 total visitors.

My highest number of visitors for a 30 day period was 3,268 and my highest in a single day was 237 (application season was a particularly busy time for blog traffic). It used to tickle me when I broke 25 viewers a day, so while I don't know who all of the readers are I think you're all awesome and I'm completely amazed that you are out there reading.

This post on interviewing at Duke is my single most popular with 986 views, followed by the posts on TBLs.

I'm glad I started the blog, I hope prospective students have found it helpful and the random curious folks have at least managed not to be too bored :)

I hope you all hang around until we finish up our didactic year in June and can start in on the very exciting clinical rotation year. :-D  Thanks for a great first year!

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.

Eyes, Brains, Fertilization

I was right, our brain wasn't well fixed. My classmate that's had the most autopsy experience did a really good job of getting it out though. It involved four sets of hands and a bucket to catch the runoff, but it came out in one piece. We put it in fixative for a few days, but when we checked it today it was still mush. I didn't have high hopes, but we figured it couldn't hurt to try to fix it and it did firm up the parts that were less liquified. Oh well, there were a lot of really nicely fixed brains around so we were able to see all the nerves in person and I don't feel like I missed out on much.

Today we did eyes. One was left in place but the skull was dissected above it so we could see the superior muscles and the other one was taken anteriorly, which exposed all of the inferior muscles. The ear was optional but we didn't get to it today. I've done ear enucleation specimens in the gross room before but only from animals, so I do want to be able to see a human one to be able to compare them. I might be able to get to it on Friday, we're scheduled to do the neck but I can be in the skull while other people are working elsewhere.

Colorful, fuzzy brain worms.

One of our classmates took our bone box replica skull and marked the various foramens and canals with labeled pipe cleaners. I have to share a picture of it because it is fantastic.

Meanwhile, I'm up for notesgroup notes tomorrow for a lecture on fertilization. Luckily we are done with classes at noon tomorrow, so I am going to throw something together for the family to eat for dinner tomorrow and plan to stay until 8ish. It will give me a chance to do my notesgroup notes as well as go back over the lectures from Monday and Tuesday. Friday goes until 5, with both a microanatomy and a gross anatomy lab so I know I won't be in the mood to stay late then. I am planning to spend the weekend studying in the library or the PA room though since there are only two weekends left before final exams.

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.

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.

I meet my cadaver tomorrow

Not just my cadaver of course, I will be sharing it with the other PA students. I can't wait to see if we have a man or a woman. Which ever gender we have, I hope one of the groups with med students we're friendliest with have the opposite gender.

Autopsies are no where near as involved as gross anatomy so this will be a completely new experience for me. I am excited about it.

This anatomy chart will not be helpful at all, but our second years have been really helpful in letting us know which dissectors are more useful. I'm going with Netters. Plus the PA room has a copy for us to have in the anatomy room (which no one ever wants to touch without gloves) as well as dissecting kits so that is less money we have to spend.

I'm wearing scrubs to school tomorrow. I didn't think to get any from the hospital but I should have some from home somewhere.

Pretest mood: Surprisingly not stressed

Procrastination Horse is eating my note cards :-O  Bad Horse!

With the exception of one class last summer I've been out of school for a long time (I graduated in 2007), so getting back into studying has been strange--especially studying on this scale.

This is our third test and I'm feeling okay. I don't feel rushed or that I won't have enough time to study everything.  I managed to make it through the weekend without completely neglecting my family or driving myself crazy.

I have about 3 hours before I go to sleep and I have one last note set to look over. I also have the old tests printed off to go over, but my timeline is pretty good. I'll also have some time in the morning to look over my flashcards.

The silly thing is, having this ridiculous stuffed horse on my desk has helped. If I find myself slacking off he's staring me down (you have to admit it is a disquieting stare) and it reminds me to get back to work.

After my test tomorrow I have to take my youngest child to the doctor for a school physical and then it is time to study up on my histology slides. I feel pretty good about the histology exam, but that isn't an excuse to not study for it!

And then Tuesday night and Wednesday are going to be amazingly awesome!!!!!!!! Why? Because for the first time in six weeks I won't have to feel like any time I take for myself is time away from studying. We will have a day and a half of downtime. Delicious, delightful downtime! I'm going to catch up on laundry for the first time in a month (I have 4 Ikea bags full of clean but unsorted/unfolded clothes), deep clean my apartment, and on Wednesday night I'm having my classmates over for dinner and game night. Yay! I'm making Filipino food again, but different kinds of Filipino food because I polled everyone and that's how the votes fell. At some point I'm going to have to figure out how to feed the second years as well! I feel bad not including everyone, but I don't know that I could fit everyone into my apartment.

The kids are going to go insane, because there's nothing they love more than strangers in our house. Massive amounts of excited over stimulation!!  But hopefully they'll still be able to go to bed on a normalish schedule. I might have to set up a sleeping area for them in my study room which is more removed from the living room than their bedroom but we will see. :) I have to survive these upcoming tests first!!

Class Schedule AKA There is no typical day in the life of a PA student!

The first six weeks of PA School at Duke (and to be technical, a first year medical student at Duke) are spent in a class called "Molecules and Cells." The first five weeks have included courses with names such as: Pathways of Signal Transduction, Chromosomes and Cytogenetics, and Action Potential Generation. We have a test every two weeks and a TBL session on the weeks we don't have tests.

Days can run from 8:30 to 4:30 with an occasional delightfully short day when the med students have something in the afternoon that we aren't required to go to. Most of our days are filled solely with lecture but a few times a week we also have histology lab which is usually on a structure we've studied in class. We can have one to five different lecturers on a given day. Sometimes the day's lectures are distinct topics, but you can also get two part lessons as well. We did have that one week that covered metabolism in depth (I cannot stress how much it helped to have the doctor we had teaching it teaching it. *He was fantastic!), but that's been the only time we've had something that distinctly inter-related over that long a time period.

There are one to two clinical correlations a week. The format is pretty similar--a physician comes in and gives a presentation on a given disease, followed by a patient who is generous enough with their time to come in and discuss their condition. The clinical correlations are really interesting and hopefully give the future physicians some perspective into the patient's point of view. 

There are two half hour Q&A sessions each week which are pretty free-form, some days have more questions than others. Last year's med students voted to discontinue them but this year's still seem to be utilizing them. Attendance is not mandatory and they start before the normal class time so it doesn't hurt to have them.

We usually have an hour for lunch and 10 minute breaks between classes. Since we stay in the same amphitheater and it is right by the food court and restrooms the 10 minutes is usually more than enough. The labs, which are also where we have tests, are up on the forth story in a different part of the building (not that far as long as you don't get lost, and I don't get lost nearly as much anymore!).

Our parking garage is a ten or fifteen minute walk (depending on how fast you walk) from the amphitheater. Sometimes in the morning I will take the bus if it is there when I arrive, but since the time waiting for the bus plus the time it takes to go through its route is longer than the time it takes to walk waiting for it doesn't make sense. In the afternoons we usually tend to walk back to the parking garage in a large group chatting and socializing.

Then I get to go home, feed the family, do the dishes, make an effort to keep the laundry levels under control and study enough to keep from having to cram before tests. This weekend is the first time I'm ever having to play catch up, so I'll have to see how much time that takes.

It is busy, the days are full, and every time we have a clinical correlation I have to wear business casual clothes but I really do love it.  I'm happy. Every other weekend I am intensely stressed out about the upcoming test, but every week that passes is another week closer to grossing again.

Now that my overview is finished, and my husband has made it into town (3.5 hour drive for him) I have to go get ready so we can go out to Chapel Hill with some of the med students and some of the other PA students (two of our number are out of town, and one's wife is running a half marathon starting early tomorrow). Hope you guys have a good weekend! I'm going to go off and enjoy maintaining my life/school balance for a few hours ;-)

Studying and My Kids

My youngest child started kindergarten today and asked me if I was going to be at his school since I'm in school now too, which was cute :) I then explained to him about how older kids (or--in my case--grown ups) go to different schools.

Me and the kids on a Merry-go-round

I hope with them both being in school now we will have more of a schedule and they will need less *direct interaction at night. The past two weeks I've been trying to make up for them being stuck at home during the day with my dad (who has been taking them for daily playground outings, but they're used to being at daycare all day and having more variety) by taking them out at night or going to the pool, etc.

I am really going to have to start staying and studying in the PA student room. Tomorrow will be a good day to do that, since we're finishing at noon. Studying at home while the kids are awake is really difficult since even though I have a separate study room that they're not allowed in they still manage to interrupt every five to ten minutes. This past weekend was a struggle since they were tired of being in the apartment and the rainy weather from the hurricane meant having to find something to do indoors.

We have a test next Tuesday and have a long weekend coming up (and labor day is my birthday!). My dad is heading out of town to visit my mom and my husband is coming up to spend a day or two with us. Sadly I'm probably going to foist the kids off on him and hole up in my study room and then after he goes back home I'll probably give the oldest child unlimited computer time and rent some Wii games. Not my finest moment as a mother, but it is my best chance at having uninterrupted study time.

I would like to get the bulk of my studying done Friday, Saturday and Sunday day so I can take off Sunday night/Monday morning with Monday evening reserved for reviewing my notes/flashcards. It seems like a reasonable schedule, especially since Friday's classes only go until noon.

*It isn't so much the outings take up a lot of time, but going out for an hour or two pushes back dinner preparations and since we do homemade meals every night and sit and eat together as a family starting later than 5:30 means dinner wraps up right around the time bedtime routines start.