Round One

Round one of finals week is over. No sleep to speak of last night really made it nice to try and think early this morning and on into the afternoon. The first exam was our lecture final in clinical laboratory which consisted of 96 questions of blood analyses and pathologies associated with heightened chemicals. This consisted of 75% new material and 25% old material. I knew about the 75% but hadn't a clue about the old material. I have been "busy" during some of the lectures and missed one where he talked to the class about this 25%. I knew the answers to the majority of the old questions, so no issues came up. There were a few I scratched my head during a long fixated stare at the wall due to 2 hours of sleep. Fun stuff!

The second exam was a venipuncture and urinalysis. I had a great partner with huge veins. Before I stuck the needle in his arm, I thought, this is going to be easy. I sadly stuck through his vein and got NO blood! This has happened twice this term out of 11 punctures! I continued as if I was getting blood and changed out the vials so he could see I could do the procedure. He scolded me for uncovering the needle too early, even though I handled it with care. No points were deducted for that. My partner, however, successfully drew 2 full vials from me and all was good. We proceeded to the urinalysis section where a vial of piss sat ready to be dipsticked. This part was easy because you simply dip a pH-like stick into the yellow, dab it, then watch for the multiple absorbent markers to change colors, indicating the presence of a chemical. You record what seems to match in color to the chart and hope it's right. Quite subjective but useful in detecting wildly high abnormal urine metabolites.

We then practiced adjusting the neck for about an hour and decided it was time to go into the lab and see if we could get in early. Within a 15 minutes we were on our way to being tested on over 300 adjustments for the neck, the thorax, lumbars and pelvis. All were randomly selected by our instructor and we hadn't a clue which would be on the exam. I did really well on all the adjustments, only screwing up on one which I believe was scored by a cocky new DC. Regardless, I made it to the 3rd station of four adjustments with enough points to end early. I decided to go ahead and do the remaining two ending with 59 points. A passing score is 48.

I am glad it is over and now I can get some rest. It is weird how stress changes your routine. Any medical student, no matter the discipline, deals with the overwhelming nature of the program's demands. Some quit because it is too hard for them and others continue no matter how hard it gets. It's all about endurance.

14 exams remain. Five of which are board exams this weekend. Three are scheduled for tomorrow.

All for now