Exam 2: Time to re-evaluate again

Okay, I actually failed my first fundamentals block exam pretty badly. New plan: study the lectures the night before and re-enforce by going to class!

We had our first blocks last week. That means, we had a full week of exams... as such:

Monday: OMM lab practical exam--> at 3 stations with 4 minutes each, 1) find 4 landmarks on the body, 2) do a soft tissue technique, 3) do a lymphatic drainage technique, and describe what you are doing.

Tuesday: Fundamentals exam from 8am-10:30am. 92 multiple choice questions and 12 histology slide identifications. I took a nap at 4:30am and I think knowing more actually impeded my performance because I second guessed myself on about 10 right answers and changed them to wrong ones. :(

Wednesday:  Doctoring practical exam. This was no biggie. We had to either find all the cardiac listening spots and areas you could take a pulse or describe and point out where all the lobes of the lung were, in 6 minutes.

Thursday: OMM theory exam in the morning and anatomy lab practical in the afternoon. The anatomy lab practical involved us going around the cadavers and ID'ing the pinned/tagged body part or what it does. There were 64 identifications and we had 1 timed minute at each station before rotating. There were always two people at each station and one would ID the red pins and one would ID the yellow ones, so we would all do 2 laps. I don't get why they don't tag things with pins all the time because it would be so much more effective to learn by seeing it in 3D!

It was a huge relief to finish all that... the weekend was a nice break. A highlight was going to the Mare Island Museum. The island has a ton of history! A Marine veteran showed us around and told us all the stories of what used to happen here. 44,000 people used to bus or ferry in every day to work on Mare Island in the Naval Shipyard. It was mostly civilians that were building ships and submarines for Uncle Sam in the war effort. A lot of things have changed (buildings gone or now out of use) but it was really interesting to see how things were in the heyday. Some of the old battle ships are still around too. 

So after the exams and the weekend, we are back to class for a few more days before fall break. I just wanted to throw out one interesting tidbit from studying today (I think I'm going to try to make this a consistent thing): 

Striated muscle cells in skeletal muscle and the heart can only undergo hypertrophy (cell swelling/increasing in size) because they have a limited capacity to divide (cannot undergo hyperplasia like smooth muscle cells). Therefore, the ripped bodies you see on weightlifters are not muscle cells multiplying but instead just getting larger, as a response to an increased workload. WHO KNEW! For more o' dat, you can read up in chapter 1 of Robbins Basic Pathology.

Cheers :)