Histology or herstology?

Well, it's been crazy these past few weeks, hence, why I have not posted. Let's see, the last time I posted was before thanksgiving, but most of you who read my blog saw me at thanksgiving, which is one reason why I didn't have a huge incentive to post.

So we just completed our 5 or so week tour of histology, AKA microscopic anatomy. Histology looks at the major tissue/cellular components of the body and how they are organized to create organs and muscles and all the big stuff we saw with the naked eye during gross anatomy. It also meant hours of peering into a microscopic at slides so ancient that even our anatomy professor (who is retiring this year) used them when she was in school here! The key to histology is pattern recognition and that comes by careful observation and looking at the (many times) subtle differences between how things look--their color, organization, structure, size, etc. and a LOT of repetition. To say the least, I COULD NOT be a histologist and do this every day for my whole career. In our tests the prof would flash up a random picture and have us identify the organ or cell type. Lemme tell ya, it was a whirlwind tour. I think the most fun lab was on blood where we got to prick each other's fingers (and thankfully I had a little experience from last summer, even though I had to prick the guy twice--he just wouldn't bleed enough!) and do a hematocrit and blood smear (put the blood on a slide, stain it with chemicals, and then count all the different kinds of white blood cells which actually look pretty cool).

Now we've moved onto biochemistry, which is mostly a review for me because that was my major in undergrad. It is CRAZY though, the pace we are going at! We have had 4 hrs of lecture a day, covering 200pgs I think in 1 week. In undergrad, class was 3 hrs of lecture a WEEK, and so we cover in 1 day what we covered in undergrad in a week! However, it is on a somewhat more superficial level, but not that much so. I'm glad I like this stuff!

I will make another comment about school that I've been meaning to share for a while now.
So you see, when I was in undergrad and even in high school with some classes, a lot of the learning I did was foundational. That is, it taught me how to think, basic ways to think about the world and how it works. But pretty much, I will likely never remember or fully use all that time I spent in physical chemistry learning about statistical mechanics or wave-functions. I still remember a lot of what I learned in the sciences and in math and writing and such (or I wouldn't be here!) but the details of the fungi life-cycle I don't remember. Percentage-wise, for the number of hours I spent in class I remember very little. The focus of learning seemed to just be to get through the next test and then to finals, get a good grade, and hopefully take away something on the grand scale that maybe you'd use in the real world. But med school is different because now I know I will actually have to know this stuff and be able to use it, which is both exciting and scary. The professors often comment on how "you will want to know this because..." and "just keep this in the back of your head." That's why I'm glad there's a lot of planned redundancy in the courses, and each course builds on the previous, allowing us to slowly put the pieces together. By the time we get to 3rd year we're supposed to know this stuff, but I hear that THAT is when the learning really begins. Anyhow, it's something I've been thinking about, and it's definitely an added motivator so that I don't try to just rush through this stuff by sheer memorization but actually try to understand and know it.