Melissa's Bio

Melissa's Diary

Now that I’ve had enough time to recover from my semester I’m ready to tell you how it ended.

I studied steadily after Thanksgiving break. Our finals week consisted of 4 exams (3 with lab & lecture components) in 4 days. This meant that we had to try to spread out the studying for a couple of weeks in advance, but once we got to finals week, we only had the night before each exam to do the final push of studying. The schedule was: Monday-anatomy, Tuesday-biochemistry, Wednesday-Osteopathic clinical skills (OCS), and Thursday-histology.

Most of my advance study time was spent on anatomy since it was 10 credits for the semester and was also one of the classes that my study partner & I were trying to get our struggling classmate through. Our final was over the leg & head/neck (always grateful for finals that aren’t comprehensive!). Unfortunately, the lab smelled awful. At the beginning of the semester the smell was all from the formaldehyde & toluene, but by the end some of the bodies simply smelled awful. I had a hard time staying in the lab to study. My other dilemma was the fact that my study partner had to be gone the weekend before finals! (He’s in the guard and it was his weekend for the month.) It messed up our normal study routine, and left him with significantly less study time.

I survived the anatomy final and desperately needed to move on to biochemistry (I wanted to raise my grade), but was starting to feel like I had an ear or throat infection. I’m sure it was due to the long hours I had been keeping, but I really didn’t have a choice. By Monday night, I couldn’t swallow without notable pain. Being a good medical student, I stayed and studied late into the night. By the time I got home, I was clearly sick. The worst part was that I was unable to sleep well because every time I swallowed I’d wake up because my throat hurt! Now, one of the perks of being in medical school is quick access to the school’s clinics. Tuesday morning I took full advantage of that perk & was told that I had pharyngitis (medicalese for throat infection). I also had a lymph node in my neck that was basically the size of a ping-pong ball (I showed it off to any classmate that was willing to look at it!) I was sent away with a prescription for an antibiotic and a list of OTC drugs that I was to purchase. After my trip to the pharmacy, I met up with my study partners for the final push before biochemistry (this was our one final that was in the afternoon). I studied for a while and then pulled up 3 chairs to lie on and took a nap. Somehow I made it through the exam.

After biochem, we started studying for OCS. We had spent some time the previous week reviewing for the lab exam, but we had pretty much put off the lecture material until then. Fortunately, we knew that there was significant overlap between lecture and lab. The lecture portion mainly consisted of rationale and procedures for treatment while the lab consisted of actually performing the treatments. For the lab part of the exam, we were divided into groups of about 12 people and from there we were randomly assigned to a partner (we drew out of a bucket). We then went with out partner to our assigned “exam room” where the physician/instructor gave us each a sheet showing us which body region we had to examine and treat for the exam. We each had 5 minutes to examine our partner, find a dysfunction, and treat it with the appropriate method we learned during the semester (depending on what type of dysfunction we found). After we finished in one room, we moved across the hall to another one and were given another skill by another physician/instructor. My partner for the exam and I both got through the process without any problems.

The final push came Wednesday night. By this time my antibiotics had kicked in quite well and I really didn’t feel terribly bad anymore, although I was quite worn out. My regular study partner and I didn’t have to do really well on the histology exam to keep the grades that we already had, but we didn’t want to make any stupid mistakes and our struggling classmate needed to do well. We had not spent any significant advance time studying for histo, so that meant that we needed to cram. We found ourselves a spot in the library, ordered pizza to be delivered, and ended up working until around 3 am! Ugh!!! Fortunately, it was time well spent as some of the information that we didn’t get to until after 2 am did show up on the test.

After the histology final on Thursday we were done! My study partner and another classmate celebrated over lunch and then went home to relax.

Friday morning I got up to take my daughter to school and then promptly returned home and fell asleep for a couple of hours! Friday evening we had the official school end-of-semester bash, known as the Holiday Ball (or as our class president kept calling it: med school prom). This was a semi-formal affair at a local hotel. We had a nice dinner, casino tables, and music. It was great to get a chance to spend time with classmates and spouses/significant others without worrying about school itself! We managed to get at a blackjack table with a really inexperienced dealer who would sometimes pay out on losing hands or overpay on winning ones. Needless to say, once we figured this out we stayed put! The “winnings” were used to bid on an auction of items that had been donated for the event. My husband and I didn’t come away with anything, but all in all, we had a very good time.

The next few days consisted of lots of catch-up sleep. I’ve also been catching up on other things. I’ve been reading some novels and working on some cross-stitching. We went to visit my in-laws for an early Christmas with them. I also had to do all of my Christmas shopping and get the Christmas cards out. To top things off, we got a significant snowstorm (10 inches…a lot for Oklahoma) which took away some Christmas preparation time, but did give us a white Christmas.

I’m enjoying my time at home with my family. It has been quite easy to slip back into my stay-at-home-mom routine! The month-long break is much needed and appreciated. By the way: my grades were sent to me at home and I ended up with all of the grades I had been working towards! One semester down, 7 more to go!

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*Some names have been changed.