false start. fifteen minute penalty. still first down.

week 4, day 1.

i'm at home in pittsburgh currently on labor day break. i'll evaluate how exactly my time here went once i'm back in philly. i'm kind of sad...steve irwin died today from a stingray barb to the chest during a dive in the great barrier reef. while that's indeed pretty gruesome, i'd be willing to bet that steve would have preferred death by stingray instead of death by carcinoma. or car accident. or even quietly in his sleep.

this past friday was my first exam. i was well-rested going into it. i put on my game face around noon, suited up, and went to school. i had the practical portion of the exam first. for those who are unfamiliar with the term 'practical': half of the exam is being able to identify specific structures on the cadaver or on bones or diagnostic images such as x-rays or CTs. a few rules of the practical: no touching anything, you get a minute to look at whatever the question is and jot down your answer. sometimes the question wasn't to just identify what the arrow was pointing to, sometimes it was 'what is the function of the muscle that inserts here?'. so not only do you have to figure out a) what the arrow is pointing to but also b) what muscle attaches to said spot and then c) what that muscle does. all in a minute. but wait! that's not all. sixty students take the practical at the same time. we have twenty-eight cadavers, twelve computers, roughly twenty 'rest stops' and two skeletons. they marched all sixty of us into the anatomy lab and set us each at a different station. i ran straight to my group's cadaver figuring that if i knew anything at all about anatomy, it was going to be on this lady. she was question #7, so that's where i started on my answer sheet. because there is only a minute per question, you have to pay attention to where the person ahead of you is. so we are sitting here ready to start and the proctors are making sure everyone's set. waiting to begin that exam was the worst fifteen minutes of my life. i've never had that bad of an adrenaline rush before and to be honest i can't remember how bad it actually was. now in retrospect, it couldn't have been that bad or else i would have quit school. perhaps that's how it is with certain kinds of voluntary physical pain. pain so bad that if you really remembered how terrible it felt at the time, you'd never agree to experience it again. pain a la childbirth, marathons, skydiving.

and if waiting to begin wasn't bad enough, something went awry during the first minute so that they had to stop the clock. so yes, more waiting. hey! how bout another giant bolus of epinephrine straight to my heart? at least i had more time to sit and second guess myself on what i'd put as the answer to my first question: "was it really semitendinosus? i'd spent fifteen minutes cleaning the fascia off that muscle on tuesday. it looks like a tendon. what if it's the other one? did i spell that right?" mindlessness.

so whatever went wrong was fixed and we started again. it was all over in forty minutes. everyone gathered their belongings and headed downstairs to take the written portion of the exam. that was considerably less nerve-wracking, but by then i was fighting a massive stress-induced headache.

i need a 70% on the exam to pass. fifty-six questions out of eighty.

i'll know soon if i trained hard enough.

but for now, it is important that i ran when the cannon went off.

(even if they had to stop us dead right off the line. grr.)