JOSH: Dissecting My Life – Or – My Life Dissecting

Hey again, everybody! I just got back from an amazing two week break in which I was able to sit back and reflect on the whirlwind that was first semester here at Emory. It was amazing to think how much I’ve learned and how many new experiences I’ve had in such a short time.

To give you a blitzkrieg recap of where we’ve been so far, our “healthy human” module – a week-by-week progression through normal human physiology – has come and gone, and we’ve moved on to the real reason we all came to medical school, human disease. Furthermore, we’ve begun our Outpatient Experience (“OPEX”) internships in which we work side by side with doctors to integrate our new knowledge in a clinical setting.

However, as hard as we worked last semester, I’m now realizing that it was just med school spring training. If, on your interview day, you notice a group of bewildered looking M1’s stammering through the halls in surgical scrubs, it is because anatomy has officially begun to consume our lives. I’ve heard anatomy described as “the best time you never want to have again,” and I couldn’t think of a better way to put it. Yes, at times it can be incredibly frustrating as we spend hours a day searching for a particular nerve or vessel that often bears little resemblance to its picture in the text book, but at the same time there is something very special about being down in the lab, late into the night with your fellow students, taking part in a centuries-old tradition of medical education. After years of putting blind faith in textbooks, it’s very rewarding to be able to explore the human body first hand.

And just for fun….

Top 10 Signs that Anatomy is Consuming Your Life:

10) The first thing you notice when meeting a new girl/guy is surface anatomy

9) Everything you eat tastes like formaldehyde.

8 ) The sun wasn’t out when you got to school…or when you left

7) Your motivation behind mapping out your cadaver’s vasculature is to determine which of your peripheral veins would be ideal for your intravenous coffee drip.

6) When people see you in scrubs, they think you must be important…until they

smell you.

5) When your buddy says he’s going to the gym to work out his biceps, your response is “femoris or brachii?”

4) You don’t have time to round out your own top-10 list

To the untrained eye, this probably looks like Jessica Alba. But as per #10, all I can see is the sternal head of her sternocleidomastoid muscle. It’s just as pretty.