Toads-in-the-Hole

I’ve been neglecting many things these past weeks: My health, my personal appearance, my personal hygiene, my commitment to making the world a funkier place (though the previous two desertions may have propped up the latter), and, of course, this weblog.

My excuses are the same as usual: schoolwork. There are things that I will continue to do during a period of intense studying- eating, drinking moderately, getting seven hours of sleep, and playing computer games come to mind- but blogging does tend to fall by the wayside. In this way, I’ve yet to hit my groove as a contributor to the Ever-Expanding Knowledge-Base of Humankind, or whatever the blogosphere thinks it is these days, and can only look on enviously as my friends spin out multiple quality yarns in a week.

Whinge nearly concluded. Suffice to say that the last three weeks of exams were grueling, but I did fine. Better than I expected (or, from a karmic perspective, deserved) in microbiology, a little worse than I expected in pharm, and a little worse than I hoped in pathology. The pathology exam was the last of the bunch, and the most cumulative, and I was pretty sick of studying when it came time to gear up for it. Too bad, really, as it’s still my favorite course.

Alright, whinge totally concluded. I’ve had an interesting life outside of studying this past month. We’ve been practicing physical exam techniques on each other, and I’ve been able to take another crack at a lot of techniques I’d supposedly been taught already. For example, when a student (or anyone) peers into your ear with an otoscope, the only way you can tell if they’re doing it wrong is if they really screw up and you feel your eardrum being ruptured. So, when it came time to demonstrate my skills for an instructor last year, I did what countless med-students have done before me: I faked it. “Do you see the fercudor?” the instructor would ask, and I’d peer into the otoscope’s tiny window at a blurry shadowy world of folded ear tissue and mutter, “Hmm... yeah. There it is. And there’s the... [wracks brain furiously] ... the little cockroach-thingy. The Grubman Complex! Right! That thing!”

But it turns out that, like so many other skills, it was just a matter of time and repetition before knowledge arrived, unbidden, into my brain. I was peering at my classmate’s retina through the ophthalmoscope (another exam technique that’s impossible for an outsider to judge whether you‘re actually doing it) muttering, “Hmm... yeah. There it is.... and... Wait! Holy Crap! There it is! There it really is! The fovea cup-lookin’ thingy! Ah, yeah!” My instructor, bless him, managed to stifle all but the smallest of snickers. And then I actually saw the structures of the middle ear. And, eerily, felt the edge of the liver slide past my fingers on an abdominal exam.