YL5 Week 13: Ear, Nose and Oral Cavity There's a lot of noise, or at least it seems so. That's kind of how it feels when in medical school sometimes, especially when it gets overwhelming. One gets engrossed in studying that even things that may sound pleasant appear as noise. And it's just something to drown out with studying until life flashes before one's eyes. My aunt from the states came earlier this midweek after hearing her mother's passing, just around the time that, after a lot of work, grade calculations came through to ensure that there's no danger of passing. This module had a lot of team based learning (TBL) that helps keep one accountable at least to contribute what one studies into the team, it's quite fulfilling– especially as we studied the oral cavity and ear. At the same time, one learns in medical school that not everything can be managed, and it is sometimes even good to be inconvenienced. It's hard to say no to some things, especial...

  YL5 Week 12: Head and Neck, Eyes and Nose (eyes and nose) To commemorate the completion of the 3rd month of medical school, the month long anatomy heavy course of "muskuloskeletal and integumentary system" brought its big brother "Head and Neck". Additionally, my MBA class and group did our final presentations and submitted our final papers for the whole course– it was an emotional goodbye that felt more fulfilling than we had thought we'd get out of it when the course started.  There has never been more repetition I had to drill in myself than what I went through this week along the tune of head and shoulders knees and toes compared to what I had in the entire MSK module. It started with the skull, then the muscles of the face and scalp for the first module. Then we moved on to the muscles of the eye as well as a short break from memorization with eye physiology. To end the week we went back again with more memorization with the neck muscles as well as touch ...

 YL5 Week 11:  Facing Death– Cadavers and Dying to Oneself I started jogging when this week began. Why? I realized that even spending a half day at ASMPH (including the 1 hour travel time there and 1 hour travel time back), my sedentary lifestyle was not suited to lasting so long. Last monday, we just had a live version of Team Based Learning (TBL) which includes individual assessment of a quiz first then the same quiz discussed in a group context. Even after just this, when I got home I napped for 2 whole hours.  All things considered, this week was relatively relaxed at least in the sense of academic stress. The second day of face to face (Tuesday) was a histology lab where we looked at the same slides we did in our very first face-to-face. I remember trying to contain my blue rosary on my left hand as I looked at the slides while praying (not the other way around). I'm thankful it was this meditative aspect of prayer that helped me learn a few things. We knew that hist...

  YL5 Week 10: Skin-Superifical Can't believe it's already been 10 weeks of medical school! I've been working on trying to get an appropriate balance for studying-relaxing. Seriously, I've been more on over-relaxing than over-studying. It's a veil of fallacy to think that since I'm passing anyway then I'm good. The real question should be am I learning ?  The question is apt for being in MSK, which is a month-long module where one thinks all there is to it is the upper extremity, lower extremity and vertebral column (back). But this month I realized we had a module on the skin. I was a bit confused until I realized MSK isn't just short for Musculoskeletal but the full name of the module is "Musculoskeletal and Integumentary System". Integument– skin. I looked at it superficially. Either way we started the week first with an exam on the back and vertebral column then had 2 days to prepare for a summative exam (no more formatives!) on derma and h...