This new format is great! Thanks, Sethina! :goodvibes:

I just wanted to leave a quick note to let you guys all know that I haven't dropped off the face of the earth. MS2 is going well, but there have been a lot of other things that my time and attention has been going to.

I promise that I will get completely up-to-date after finals are over.


BTW: the archive of my previous diary entries is here .

I'm finally back to begin fulfilling my promise to catch you all up. I apologize for my long absence. :guilty:

Second year has been much more enjoyable than first was. The stress level is so much lower, the classes are more interesting because they're more clinically relevant, and I feel like I'm more settled overall.

I changed my study schedule to better fit my family. A couple of weeks into the semester I began getting up at 4 am & going to school to study. That enabled me to come home before my daughter went to bed. Life is much better when you find a way to fit in time with the kiddo and husband. As the semester progressed, I did adjust the schedule...I found that I was able to do some early-morning studying at home but I had to adjust back to nighttime studying at school when it came time for finals.

I still have the same friend I study with. He attempted but didn't make the early morning shift. We still study together in the afternoons/early evenings and whenever I stay late to cram for a test.

As far as my classes went, here's the breakdown:
pathology, pharmacology, psychiatry, clinical problem solving (a PBL class), multicultural health, clinical skills, health promotion/disease prevention, and osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM). All of these classes except multicultural health continue on for the spring semester.

Pathology was the time-consumer. I have an incredible professor (who does board reviews around the country) and learned a bunch. I find the class quite enjoyable. Pharmacology is basically a bunch of memorization, but it okay. I keep being told by students further on that we don't really learn pharm until we're in our clinical rotations, but I'm hoping that all the stuff I've crammed in my head will help me out sometime. Our PBL class consists of 4 hours of lecture/week by specialists about various topics within their specialty. We then spend another 4 hours in small groups working through cases that have something to do with that area of medicine. The groups are student led with primary care physicians there to help us along. Psych is psych. I really don't know what else to say about it. Fortunately, it is only a 1 hr class. Multicultural health was an odd class with no exams, but a book report (have you done one of those anytime since 6th grade?!?!). It also was the only class with an attendance requirement. They brought in a couple of interesting guest lecturers, but the lecture was usually a waste of my hour. Too bad, because I think it could be done much better. I did get to spend some time in an Indian Health Services clinic for the class, though, which was a nice experience. I shadowed a public health nurse on a newborn home visit to an American Indian household. We were supposed to get to experience how another culture can affect healthcare/healthcare delivery. The family we visited wasn't traditional in any way, but I did get to spend time talking to the nurse about serving an American Indian population (she's Indian herself). Our health promotion/disease prevention class (we call it hippy dippy) is a basic public health class. We started with pregnancy and infant care and are moving through the life cycle. Most of the class is pretty much common sense information (especially for a parent in the sections covering children). Believe it or not, I skipped the second half of the semester of this class and managed to get 100% on the final. :goodvibes: The clinical skills and OMM classes were continuations from the semester before: more physical exam skills and manipulation.

The testing schedule this semester was much better than last spring. The only time it got crazy was during October, when we had midterms mixed with regular exams. We still had plenty of tests, but it wasn't as grueling as the previous semester.

Now you may be wondering why I didn't manage to keep you up to date when school was going much more smoothly. That really comes down to everything else that was going on in my life during the semester. Let me give you a rundown, pretty much in the order things started.

1. Over the summer I managed to somehow injure my wrist. By the time school started I really couldn't use it & had to keep it in a brace. I ended up being sent to an orthopedist and having an MRI. It turned out that I had fluid between the carpal bones & the scapho-lunate ligament had gotten stretched out, allowing the scaphoid bone to move around too much. I'm still dealing with this issue, but if I continuously take max doses of glucosamine/chondroitin/MSM/Vitamin C, I can use it without much discomfort. The trick is making myself take all those pills every day!

2. Because med school just wasn't chaotic enough for us :laughing: , we decided to remodel our kitchen and living room. This involved removing walls, moving appliances, custom cabinets, new floor, etc. For about a month our entire downstairs was unusable, but the end results are wonderful! I discovered that I'm able to study at the new kitchen island, so that let me avoid driving to school at 4:30 am.

3. My grandfather's health took a big turn for the worse. He has heart failure, prostate cancer that has metastasized, and early liver failure. There were a number of times that I was ready to drop school & fly to the west coast to see him, but he stabilized and is still around. My family just returned from visiting him. It was a nice visit, but it was odd to think that in all likelyhood it was our last. I'm very thankful for the time my daughter, husband, and I got to spend with him.

4. In early October (my midterms month), I got quite sick: fever, achy, abdominal pain. I went to my family physician, who felt a mass on my ovary and scheduled a CT. The next evening, (before the appointment for the CT) I felt something odd, accompanied by racing heart, drop in blood pressure, and blacking out. Paramedics determined that my blood pressure stabilized, so I decided to go home to recouperate (mind you, I had a midterm the next morning, so I didn't want to spend the night in the emergency room). I had the CT the next day and ended up going to a gynecologist who determined that I most likely have endometriosis, with a large mass that ruptured (endometrioma) on my ovary. I was surprised at the amount of pain and discomfort involved, but after about a month I was feeling mostly better. We're attempting to hormonally control the endometriosis, which appears to be working thus far, thankfully.

These everyday-life events really complicated my semester. Everything has turned out okay, but med school was more challenging with all of this going on (not to mention that my ability to deal with all of these things was hampered by med school).

Fortunately, I know what to expect from this next semester since the classes are the same. I'm still enjoing the last week of my vacation, but I'm looking forward to starting back up.