The First Exam

Well, this Monday afternoon is my first exam in medical school. There is a clear air of anxiety about us first years. In my personal opinion, the anxiety level was actually highest at the beginning of the week. This was the time when most of us realized that we hadn't been studying either enough, or efficiently, or both! The hand is what drove it home for us.

You see, this block we are learning the back and the upper limb. That means that we have to learn all of the muscles of the back, the shoulder, the forearm, and the hand. For most of these muscles, we also need to know their origins (the places they connect and have little movement) and their insertions (the places they connect and cause movement to occur), as well as their innervations. Add onto this a knowledge of the fascia, major arteries and veins, etc. and you can imagine that we are feeling overloaded. Oh yeah, and the course is called Gross Anatomy, Imaging and Embryology; so that means we have to read some basic x-rays and also know a whole bunch of embryology stuff too.

So, about the hand, it has 19 muscles for us to learn. We learned them all in one day. To give you a comparison, the forearm also has 19 muscles, which we did in 2 days. The shoulder and back have 19 as well (kinda crazy coincedence, huh?) and that was spread out over even more lectures. So, when we got to the hand we all felt overwhelmed. For example, there are the flexor pollicus longis, flexor pollicus brevis, extensor pollicus longus, extensor pollicus brevis, abductor pollicis longus, abductor pollicis brevis, adductor pollicus and opponens pollicus. Eight muscles just to move your thumb!

I feel like my brain is going to explode. I am trying to find solace in the fact that first year medical students historically do very well on this first exam. Still, trying to keep it all straight is a challenge.

So enough about academics, I have some interesting news for those more faithful blog readers (all two of you!) We have to keep a journal for one of our classes and this blog seems to be a perfect way for me to accomplish that. I will be writing about some of this principles of clinical medicine (i.e., actually practicing medicine) and how I experience them through this class and through my work with my preceptors. I'm sure it will make for some interesting reading.