Short version: I passed my first anatomy exam. Yay! It feels odd to have a different bar to aim for than as an undergrad. The stakes are higher and so is the bar in medical school. In college I consistently tried to ace every exam and get at least an A-. Things are different now. I'm glad I passed, and since the exam was so hard, I know that I'm lucky to have been able to. Shoot for the P, since Honors isn't happening in this class.
We had some strange units in class this week. We covered the topography of the skull and the cranial nerves, both of which will be covered to exhaustion in later units. Consequently, right after the exam it was hard to jump right back into the long study hours. I don't think that I was resting on my laurels (such as they were), but having such general sections kind of threw me off my groove.
Some of the hardest stuff to master this week, and I have by no means mastered it, was the deep face. The area behind the angle of the mandible (the part of your lower jaw where it changes from horizontal to vertical) is chock full of nerves, arteries and a couple muscles. The arteries are pretty tough because they are quite tortuous in their tracks. While this is handy in allowing you to open your mouth without tearing blood vessels, it makes tracing them and their branches difficult. Identifiying structures is doubly difficult because several things are named very similarly if not identically, for instance there are two buccal nerves which arise from totally separate cranial nerves; there is also a hypoglossal nerve, but a hyoglossal muscle. Keeping everything straight is pretty tough. It's hard when there is a long section to learn because you don't have any down time to catch up, you just need to study the next section hard so have a few hours to go back and learn the older stuff again.
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