but where's the beat?

Hello my lovelies, time sure does fly fast, innit? I've been here winding down my well-wound whirlwind winsome wintry semester with a smorgasbord of studying. October is almost over (jeez, it feels like just yesterday she was taking her first steps and eating crayons) and exams are nigh. We have one more week of classes, then a week and a half SWOT-VAC (the ugly-guttural acronym denoting the Study WithOut Teaching Vacation period) followed by several exams. On the weekend we have our MSAT - the practical examination. What it will consist of is several stations with different tasks. It'll be 2 stations where we have to take a history, 1 station where we have to demonstrate clinical reasoning, 1 station where we do a physical exam of some sort, 1 station where we impress our knowledge of life support/procedure stuff, and then 1 communication station. Clinical reasoning is the one that's different from last year and is pretty cool. We get a sheet of paper with a fake patient's medical history and then the history of what brought them here. We then give our top differential diagnoses, defending and pointing out holes in those decisions, and then get narrowed down by asking about physical exam stuff and investigations and what those lead to. It's almost like being a doctor... weird. The communication one will be a bit trickier this year. Last year it was pretty much "talk to the patient who has some non-medical problem and don't be an asshole". This year it's going to either be breaking bad news to a patient (you have cancer! your son has 1 year to live!) or doing what's known as motivational interviewing - the process that assesses how willing someone is to change habit X (their obesity) and trying to get them to understand why it's bad (because they're fat) and how to fix it (stop eating). They're both pretty tricky to do. The life support/procedure thing will probably be okay. It'll either be advanced CPR plus defibrillation and giving them adrenaline/epinephrine or setting up and reading an ECG. Hopefully.
Several days afterwards we have our written exams. Now I'm going to admit something that I'm really embarassed about. In fact, I have not talked about it with anyone who's not in school with me because it makes me feel ashamed. *deep breath* We write our own exam questions.
Our school got some grant to do some sort of psychological assessment on students' anxiety and stress associated with exams and are trying to test and see if students will be less stressed out if they've written and seen the questions and answers ahead of time. This is apparently an existant area of education research in which our School is dipping its feet. I wish they had given me the $26,500 grant and I could have told them, "yes, it will lower our stress". So the actual practicalities of this project is that each of the 40 small groups in our year had to write 1 multiple choice question and 1 short answer question. We also had to write a model answer and reference it, as well as decide what's the minimum amount of info to pass the question. We uploaded all these questions and their answers, after minute screening by the powers-that-be, and they are available for all. We were told that 25% of our final exams will consist of these questions. So essentially, everyone's memorising all the questions and the answers, because it's guaranteed to be a huge hit on the exam. There's SO much material we cover in a year and so a big problem is trying to study everything well and knowing what's important and so this is helpful. Yes, stress reduced. Duh. The project has met some criticism and in my opinion has some issues of its own. Some of the people in our year are total jerkfaces and write ridiculously specific questions that, had most people got on a regular exam, would be very tough to question. Some people are the kind of jerkfaces who don't actually put a real amount of work into it and therefore post a question with the answer being incorrect. Now is where it gets really annoying and tricky - once the questions are posted (up to a certain date) the school is legally bound to keep them up there, with whatever answer was written and therefore bound to give credit for whatever answer is online. This means, especially for multiple choice questions graded by a computer, that you have to memorise the wrong answer to get the point! The mechanism of ways a mind can get boggled is complex and poorly understood.
So there's that.
I've been studying a lot... it equates to everyother day being a late night. Monday was til midnight. Tuesday I had class 8-6pm and so took it easy afterwards. Wednesday I diddle around during the day and then had dinner with a friend and then went to another friend's night-shift work thing to keep him company and study. Studied til 3:15 which is far-and-away the latest I've ever studied. I was never one for all-nighters, choosing instead to follow the early-to-bed adage and make sure I'm functional in the morning for the eventual exam. His place of work was pretty cool and another shining example of good policy that they have here and it lacking in the US. It's a needle-safety program located in the heart of the city, with 24hour staff/nurse, that gives 100% for free and anonymously sterile needles, water, swabs, education, condoms, etc. They ask a few question for statistical purposes and then offload the 20pack of syringes the person just asked for. It's very cool and, especially on a Wednesday, chilled as well and so perfect for study. I'm afraid, though, that in the US this would be met with the same kind of knee-jerk reactions that fight giving condoms to teenagers for the risk that it will promote promiscuity. Thursday studied all day and then had a friend over for dinner. Friday class and study all day and then went out in the evening. A friend was having a fundraising thing for a trip to Africa this winter to help build schools or something and had a movie/hor'sdoeuvre's (however the fuck that's spelled) thing. I got there a bit late and quickly downed 4 glasses of wine before starting the movie. Excellent idea. The movie was called A Walk to Beautiful and was a nice documentary about an impressive hospital in Ethiopia that repairs fistulas (connections between uterus/bladder or uterus/rectum and any other combination) that occurs from long and difficult pregnancies. These women face enormous stigma and adversity in their villages and families and so, if they can, go there and get fixed and it gives them a new life. Powerful shit. Yesterday was Saturday and consisted of the usual markets, lunch, study, dinner with friends and some computer shit.
I've been having a (un)healthy addiction recently to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report lately. I discovered about a month ago that you can watch the most recent 3 weeks-or-so of episodes online, streaming, fast, with no advertisements on the show's respective website. The material has been so good recently, as well, that the episodes have no option but to shine. I'll watch between 1 and 3 episodes a day nowadays and am almost caught up with what's going on in this falling-apart world of ours.
Jesus, I didn't know that!1
Here's something that I was more than pleased to learn about: drinking diet sodas are associated with more weight gain than not drinking soda! That's right, several thousand people's drinking habits and subsequent changes in size. People who drank more than 3 artificially-sweetened beverages a day had about a doubled risk in increasing their BMI. I've tried to find why this happened and I've come to two reasonable but slightly contradictory ideas: a) the body is getting a sugar-like substance in terms of taste and so is acting like it's getting sugar (in terms of metabolism etc) but when the calories aren't there, it bumps up the craving thus promoting these people to go and get more sugar/calories from other sources and thus increase their weight or b)the body is getting this stuff that is like sugar and so is treating the rest of the intake (which isn't perhaps excessive taking into account the "0 calories" of the soda) like it is in excess and as such is promoting storage of foods into fat, getting ready for a famine or whatever. I think those make sense and am definitely happy to accept that that nastiness is not good for you. Definitely not a healthy food, considering there's nothing food-like in it.
Medical word of the post:
Anosognosia - ignorance of the presence of a disease; being unaware of one's own illness.