8.17.06

This past Monday was my first day of medical school at OHSU... so instead of sending mass emails to inform all of you about my progress, I decided to start a blog!

School/Orientation began on Monday morning at 8:30am. I got ready at home and Ryan drove me up to the hill... don't worry, it wasn't until after I had a nutritious bowl of oatmeal and took a number of 'first day of school' pictures at the apartment.

Our first half an hour was "coffee and donuts" with mingling. We then went to a lecture hall (the same lecture hall that my class will be in all year for all of our courses) and heard a number of welcome lectures. By lunchtime, I had found about 8 other U of O kids that I either knew or recognized from classes in Eugene... a number of us were all in the Kaplan MCAT class together! I also found two people that graduated from Clackamas with me and one girl that I had met at Creighton when we were interviewing. Needless to say, having so many familiar faces made the stress of the first few days much less!!! We concluded the first day with taking our "White Coat Pictures" (kind of like yearbook pics that will follow us all four years) and then got our new name badges. Ryan picked me up around 5 and I came home to eat and then sleep.... I was exhausted!

On day number two we had more of the same welcome and information talks. In the afternoon we got an introduction to our first course and then got to down to the cadaver lab to meet our lab groups, meet our "first patients" (the cadavers), and get our scrubs for lab. We also got two sets of lockers and a bone box that contains all the major bones in the body so we can study outside of the lab. By the end of day two, I was ready for the weekend! Luckily, they gave us the rest of the week off to tie up all loose ends, which is what I spent yesterday doing...

I still have some immunizations to take care of, but I've bought my books, my school supplies, etc. As for next week, we have a combination of more orientation and the first two lectures and labs of our first class.

The curriculum works like this... all 119 of us take one course at a time together. Our first course is "GIE: Gross Anatomy, Imaging, and Embryology". For the next 11 weeks we'll be learning about the anatomy of the human body (through reading, lectures, and labs), leanring how to view the body on radiographic images, and learning about how the body develops. Although I've taken anatomy before and have experience in a cadaver lab, this will be much more challenging as the course goes twice as fast AND we have to dissect the bodies. At U of O, the cadavers were dissected for us so that we could readily see all important structures. At OHSU, we are in groups of 4 and starting on Tuesday we have to actually make all of the cuts (through skin, bone, fat, whatever!) ourselves in order to get to the relevant body part(s). It will be challenging, but fun too! My cadaver is an 85-year old man who died of natural causes. I'm going to have class everyday from 8-12 and then one day a week I'll have an afternoon small group class and one afternoon a week I'll go spend time with a doctor in the community.

Well, I guess that is it for now! I'll keep ya'll posted on how things go =)