First term OVER!!!!

WAHOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gods, what an awful week! Not this one; the finals one...

So you know the story with biochem and histo. Still couldn't sleep after that, but at least didn't wind up in the clinic with the psychosomatic crazy shudders again. Words can't describe how pissed I am at myself for that! And now the biochem exam in August!!!

The night before the anatomy exam was similarly horrible, and I had the whole rocking back and forth "can't sleep; clowns will eat me" sensation through the whole night. Why can I never sleep????? My mom plied me with pictures of New England while I tried to keep some semblance of sanity. I did manage to NOT harass David for a change that night, trying to give him some respite from my needy ass. Yeesh; poor guy, and then he couldn't sleep anyway!

We can say farewell to Ishie's "A" in anatomy though. I didn't really think I was going to keep it, but alas. A "B" for first term med ain't bad though. Going into the exam, as David and I amusedly surveyed the unshaven, sweat pants clad zombie bodies of our classmates (not excusing us of course), I thought, well.... head and neck are my bitches. I know them cold. That made up the vast majority of the last part of the term, plus I know leg pretty well, so that will cover my complete ignorance of embryology (which David sums up accurately as 'we come from babies' with subsequent 'foldy' impression) and perineum (I'm so embarrassed!!!)

Open up the text booklet... prolly half embryo/perineum. What in hell is the ductus venosus again? I'm pretty sure the bulk of that was pre-midterm. Sigh.

While I did not walk out of the exam crying panicked or anything like that, I walked out with the sort of begrudged war veteran "Well now... that certainly didn't go well" and hoped to preserve my "B".

Then came the long wait for the practical, and we were in the last group to take it. This sounds like a blessing, but when you haven't slept since... infancy, you just want it over, and David had apparently caught insomnia from me (though not manic high maintenance insomnia) so we decided to go study for the practical together to net some extra points.

Riiiiiiight. So a few rousing Monty Python songs later after a wide-eyed in fear/close-eyed in sleepiness attempt at watching dissection videos, we had abandoned the thought of netting any extras and just concentrated on staying awake and guessing probable tags (between Monty Python and old SNL skits). Turns out either they're nice, or we're bad guessers. No tertius? Really?? Anatomists LOVE that muscle, mainly because it's weird. But all right. No nasociliary either, which is fortunate, because while I can nail the tertius, I have trouble differentiating the nasociliary from the frontal nerve when you're looking onto the top of the orbit, depending on how grody the cadaver is.

But the practical turned out to be really fair, I thought. I was more afraid of the practical consisting of looking at the slides than the ones of the prosections because those tend to be multi-part tertiary questions where you have to have an intrinsic knowledge of fourteen different structures to answer the question.

Apparently they knew it was the end of the week/end of the semester and we were all burned out, because instead they had things like X-rays with "What's this?" "Uhhh... ankle?" Yes! "Whew".

So I did better on the slides than on the wet lab portion, which still wasn't as well as I thought I'd done (on the practical; I knew I'd screwed the written), but was sufficient to maintain a decent grade.

In retrospect, it's good to get a solid B. Being borderline for anything sucks, so if I'd been all well slept and well rested, I STILL think I would have gotten the same grade but would have been that dreaded "close to an 'A'" that feels bad versus the "Oh thank the heavens above I frigging passed that" revelry.

I didn't go to the memorial ceremony because I'm a bad person and I was completely wiped. I did get a second wind from somewhere because I was NOT staying in on the night of the official END OF FIRST TERM! We're gonna be doctors!!!! I was initially planning on going to Guyave for Fish Friday because it's the one thing so far on the island that is really uniquely Grenadian and not yet another student function run by people used to students for students. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but a break from Banana's to experience the real island is always a break, plus I've been trying to get there since I got to the island. I love that stuff. I also wanna try oildown. I can't believe I haven't yet, and it's the national dish, but I'm a culture whore. Know it, love it. Though from experience here, I was beginning to think chicken rotis were the national dish.

Unfortunately, the function is pretty far away (hence the separation from the university subculture) and closes pretty early so we didn't get to go, which made me actually really sad, but we had a decent dinner at Coyaba (spelling?) and then Dave and I headed to Dr. Groom's where we were planning on heading for the after party anyway, which is an AWESOME place. A guy in line mentioned that heading down to it looked like when you're at a theme park winding through the "jungle" to go on the water rides, which is the most accurate description I can net.

I think the entire population of the school still capable of walking was at that party. It was kicking! The traffic jam lined up before the place was so intense that the 50 people CRAMMED onto the bus just got off and walked up around the lines and lines of cars. Crazy. It was on the beach with a great architecture that I tried to take a picture of but probably screwed up. Eventually, Dave and I succumbed to exhaustion and pennilessness (EClessness?) and headed back to watch South Park, but still pretty damn cool.

The party continued the next day, but that's a story for another entry.

But the moral of the story: I frigging passed! But I still have to take the biochem exam in August! Wahhhhhh!!!!