Sunday, October 01, 2006

7/208 a Doctor

Gutenmorgen Aller!

I’m currently celebrating Oktoberfest, in case you were wondering.

Friday was our test, which I’ll comment on a bit. Well first I’ll comment on the utility of anxiety. As I prepare for a test I have two types of anxiety. The first is for the test itself. The second is for the studying process preparing for the exam. I both dread taking the exam, and the countless hours of studying leading up to that point. Both of these anxieties are somewhat useful. If you had no anxiety you wouldn’t prepare or take anything seriously, and thus would never get anything accomplished in your life. However these two types of anxiety often have a reciprocal effect on each other. If you’re really nervous about the test you’ll get over your studying anxiety and make yourself do it. If you’re dreading the studying you’ll avoid it by telling yourself the test isn’t going to be that hard so you don’t need to study. Unfortunately I hit a point in the middle of the week where I lost all anxiety for the test and the only thing remaining was a dislike for studying. It’s nice to be able to go through the actual exam without any foreboding feelings, but they’re really necessary for the week beforehand.

Luckily I managed to study anyway and did relatively well on the exam. In the words of my roomy we “rocked it like a hurricane.” And of course the Scorpions who sang that famous metal anthem were in fact German and we listened to them on the way to Oktoberfest Friday. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The exam consisted of five parts. The first was Physician Development, where we actually practice doing physicals on actors. The most noteworthy part of this part of the test this week was that they tricked us by giving us female patients. Finding her heart sounds only involved moving her breast a little bit, but when I had to measure her liver I spent a couple minutes tapping and pushing her ample bosom around. It’s not exactly that I’m being immature about the procedure, but it just hadn’t factored that into my daily schedule. The second part of the test involved identifying body parts in the cadaver lab. It is pretty incredible to me that I can now identity most every muscle, bone, artery, vein, nerve and duct from the neck to the waist. This is however my least favorite part of the exam. I much prefer the computerized testing where I know there is some clue as to the right answer in front of me. We took an additional anatomy exam, an embryology exam and a biostatistics exam, none of which were very noteworthy. Then we were done and we don’t have to worry about testing again until Monday.

Our celebration Friday night was Oktoberfest. Oddly enough there was also an Italian festival going on at the exact same time so we had to decide which nationality was cooler. Italian sausage vs. bratwurst? The bratwurst mein freund. Unfortunately we didn’t actually bring any directions with us so we spent about an hour finding the German Village portion of Columbus. Once we got there it was late enough, the line was long enough and the prices high enough that we opted not to go in. So what did three single guys (and one married guy) do on a Friday night? We went to Bed, Bath and Beyond of course. To be fair we went to a tavern and walked around while we waited for a table to open up, and they happened to be the only store that was still open. But it was still mighty lame.

Saturday I did approximately nothing. I got nine hours of sleep, watched a session of Conference, went to the post office and watched some Scrubs reruns. It was quite marvelous.

Song of the moment: “Rock it like a Hurricane.” The Scorpions.

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