First Day of Musculoskeletal and Neuro Block

The upperclassmen had warned us before break that this was going to be a tough block, and they were right. The reading load for the next few weeks is absolutely insane. We're doing bones this week, cartilage next week, and muscles the week after. Then we have four weeks of neuro, followed by the gastrointestinal block, which is also four weeks. To add to the madness, we have two anatomy labs this week: one today and another tomorrow. Dr. Drake in particular just went crazy with assigning us chapters to read. On the bright side, we don't have any FCM this week. I'll happily take an extra anatomy lab over FCM. Speaking of FCM, the administration has apparently decided to stop having us go to Case and to give us more small group time during our FCM sessions. They sent out an email today telling us about these changes. The next FCM session is in a week, so we'll see how it goes.

In today's anatomy session, we covered the upper limb, which is a fancy way of saying the arm, along with the back. It's a lot to learn. I need to study which nerves innervate all of the muscles. Apparently this is an important topic for the Boards. One other nice thing is that we get an extra ten minutes now in anatomy lab. We used to end at 9:50 AM and then start PBL at 10:00, but now we end at 10:00 and start PBL at 10:15 on Mondays. I went back to the anatomy lab this afternoon for office hours, and since I was the only one there, Dr. Drake went through all of the cadavers with me again. Some of this stuff is finally starting to stick.

Our PBL case is about a patient with a sore back due to problems with her vertebrae. The session today was unusually long. Most of the time, the Monday sessions are pretty short, but we were kind of in a rush to finish today. This week I am the computer scribe. My last PBL group had two scribes, one for the board and one to take notes on the computer. This group only has a computer scribe. I don't have a learning objective for Wednesday, but I'm still going to be plenty busy these next couple of days. We have a ton of reading for our seminars tomorrow and Wednesday.

I registered to take one of my MS courses today also. Unfortunately it is being offered on Thursday mornings, so now I won't have my Thursdays off any more for the next few months. The other not so nice thing about it is that it's going to be graded. All of the CCLCM classes are pass/fail, but several of the MS classes are graded with the normal A/B/C/D/F scale. On the bright side, if it winds up being too much for me, I can drop the class with no penalty. I hope I won't have to do that though.