Cranium and Shoulders, Patella and Phalanges, Patella and Phalanges...

It's been awhile since I have last posted, thanks to school.

Class so far has been going well. I have finally reached the thankful point, in regard to being forced to drop Physiology. Strangely, this has coincided with preparing for my very first lab practical exam. Funny how that works out, isn't it?

For those of you who might not ever have had the pleasure of participating in an Anatomy lab practical, please allow me to explain it to you:

All of your seats at the workbenches in the lab have been transformed into small torture stations. Each desktop has some device on it, with an innocuous-looking little stick-pin plunged into some part of the device, a small flag with a number waving on the top of the pin. Typically, this pin is gauged into some poor preserved animal, arms and legs splayed on a tray, reeking of formaldehyde, all sense of pride and dignity lost.

The only thing you're allowed to bring to class on lab practical day is a pencil, and a Scantron, if your teacher is one of those multiple-choice types (mine is not). You start off at one station, and have approximately 2-3 minutes at each station. You must "identify the specific structure," "name the specific cell" or "indicate where this specific tissue would be located in the body." Note the use of the word "specific." In an Anatomy lab practical, specificity is the difference between an A and a B. It would be unacceptable to identify the specific tissue as "epithelium." Rather, you must go the full length: "psuedostratified ciliated squamous cell epithelium," thankyouverymuch. It is also unacceptable to say that the little pin is stuck in the "eponychium" (cuticle, to you and me). The correct answer is "eponychium of the NAIL." If eponychium occurs elsewhere on the body, we haven't gotten to that chapter just yet.

As if the pressure of specificity isn't enough, the worst part of a lab practical is when you've been asked to rotate stations, and you find yourself parked in front of a station for 2-3 minutes (which can either feel like an eternity, or a small blip in time, depending), recalling the names of all the structures and organs...except the one that the pin is sticking out from. It's akin to trying to remember someone's name at a party that you've met dozens of times before, and they've already greeted you with a "Hey Jen!" No amount of sweating (from your eccrine or apocrine sudoriferous glands, depending on where you sweat in moments of panic) will unearth their name from your mental recesses. Instead, you give that generic "Hey you!" And as we've learned, generic-ness gets you NOWHERE on an Anatomy lab practical.

There are typically anywhere from 30-40 of these torture stations, and in my opinion, the second worst are those involving a microscope. It never fails that the luddite in front of you jostled the microscope in some way, forcing you to use one of those precious 2 to 3 minutes readjusting the microscope image. Generally, my hands are shaking so badly at that point that getting any sort of image is a bonus - even if it's only a blurry, amorphous blob with no discernable nuclei or organelles. A pox upon your house, student who uses the microscope ahead of me!

No pox that could rain down upon someone's house is worse than an Anatomy lab practical. Afterwards, once the time has concluded, everyone grabs their bookbags and keys, and sort of shuffles out of the door, completely defeated by those little stickpins and tissue slides. It causes many a student to question their study skills, class attendance and participation, and sometimes, future career goals. Bad-mouthing the professor and his or her practical is almost a given following this experience. It's the only way students feel like they can take revenge on the beast that has just conquered them so adeptly.

I have been studying now for three days. My first lab practical is on Monday. We will see who slays the beast this time around.

We started studying the axial skeleton bones during our last class period, and it caused me to have one of those self-indulgent pity parties. I sat over our dining room table later that night, trying to identify these bones in the face and skull from a crappy 2-D lab manual. I felt very overwhelmed. Again, it's not enough to identify the temporal bone. I must identify the temporal bone and all of its parts: the mastoid region, the petrous region (or is that part of the sphenoid bone? or ethmoid bone?), the zygomatic process, etc. In other words, each bone has at minimum, 5 parts to identify. And heaven forbid should we be shown the bone "in situ" during a lab practical. We will instead be shown just that bone, removed from the face or skull...and we will need to note whether it is the left or right bone, and which end is "up" and which is "down." So yes - I was feeling overwhelmed.

I had to remind myself that I am responsible for my own decisions. In other words, I have chosen this career path for myself. My frustrations with all this identifying simply comes with the territory. I don't have it within myself to be the nurse who skated through her pre-requisites, or worse, her nursing school. It will not serve me well in the future, nor will it benefit my patients in any way. Sure, I might not have to identify an ethmoid bone removed from a skull in the "real" nursing world, but wouldn't I feel ashamed if that situation arose, and I couldn't do it? I'm not saying that I need to know everything; what I am saying is that I need to trust that my professors are not feeding me superflous information. They are providing me with the tools that I will need to succeed in the nursing world, and for now, I have to play their game. I have to play THE game. It is the choice I have made for myself.

Instead of wallowing for too long, I went online to eBay and looked at the prices of skull models that I could purchase and use at home to study. Good LORD, those things are expensive! I found one that was about $25, and I will likely purchase it over the weekend.

If it turns out to not really be all that useful, I can always use it as some sort of Anatomy lab practical voodoo device, and plunge into it little stickpins of my own.