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y’all ever get annoyed at urselves when a page of first aid ends up wayyyy too busy but happy with urself bc you bought polar seltzer

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Hi, my name is Rachel and I haven’t used tumblr in like a year. (Hi, rachel)

Met with our school’s learning specialist this morning to see if she approved of my Step 1 study plan. She did! And now my last couple days before second year include learning metabolic diseases that they didn’t find pertinent to actually teach us last year.

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A dope setup does not good study make. Watching >3 sketchy videos in a row makes my brain jumble. I’m talking to older students in my program and thinking too far. The future is making me nostalgic. I miss getting bouncy balls in goody bags at birthday parties.

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wow I have not been here in a hot second but here’s something fun!! go to a med school that lets you take online exams so you can pass physiology in Colombia!!

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word to the wise: if you ever reach out to an uppclassman or someone where you want to be for advice or whatever, just fake it and say how are you. i don’t care if you care, i know you just want advice from me, but if you won’t even pretend to be polite i don’t wanna help you 💁🏻‍♀️

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Master post: online resources for preclinical courses

Organized by course, of course. Sorry, I don’t have anything for Biochemistry because I just essentially let Jesus take the wheel on that one and I made it through somehow.

All are free resources unless they have an * 

Gross Anatomy

U Mich Practice Practicals

Visible Body Human Atlas*

Visible Body Skeleton Premium*

Histology

Shotgun Histology

Physiology

ECG simulator

ABG ninja

Pulmonary textbook outline

Heart Sounds Podcast Series

Neuroscience

Atlas of Functional Neuroanatomy

Cranial Nerve Study Guide

WISC Neuroanatomy 

Midbrain-Diencephalon 

Visible Body Skeleton Premium*

Eye Simulator

Pathology

WebPath

Pathoma*

Goljan audio

Microbiology

Sketchy Micro*

Pharmacology

Sketchy Pharm*

Tulane Pharm Wiki

Psychiatry

Online Med Ed

How to Doctor

Stanford 25 for physical exam skills

Some info on the paid resources:

1. Pathoma: 100% recommend it, 13/10 Dr. Sattar will teach you pathology better than anyone else. I wouldn’t have survived without him.

2. Sketchy Medical: I religiously swear by Sketchy Micro. Get it Get it Get it. I can’t imagine trying to study micro without it. And it’s not because I have a mega crush on Andrew. They’ve expanded into the pharm and path market as well. I used pharm for antibiotics, which was pretty helpful, but I haven’t checked out path so I can’t comment. I will say pharm is hella long, like 20-30 minutes vs the <10 minutes for micro, in case of attention span issues.

3. Visible Body: These are a series of apps I downloaded on my Macbook for when I was too lazy to go to the lab. I found them so so so helpful when I was studying to see everything in a 3d model, but they’re not *necessary*. I do recommend them if you’re a visual learner. And they’re currently 50% off in the app store!

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in my limited experience, med school is really freakin lonely if you are not

1. from an ivy league

2. into shit like climbing

3. in a relationship

4. living with roommates who want to make plans with you

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current med school block: immunology and pathology. i am already so happy with how everything is going. 1. it all makes SO MUCH SENSE. i never formally took immuno, and while i have a good grasp it’s all been pieced together through research, journal club, thesis reading, random lectures etc. and now someone is explaining it all in order conceptually and it CLICKS JUST LIKE THAT 2. path, although it’s new, is also pretty easy to follow, i like histology enough, and i’m living the pathoma life 3. i get to make really pretty study guides like this one

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word to the wise: if you’re trying to drill stuff from memory remember to consider real estate first.

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i did >500 ankis today 🙃

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it’s lit

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^^^

11 powerful photos show the faces of those struggling with invisible diseases 

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I️ hate biology because Rab, Rad, and Ran are all different proteins and are all on my exam tomorrow.

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an ode to radiologists

Walking into a night shift, you just never know. Most of my day shifts have a predictable rhythm to some degree, but admitting at night can be sheer madness or sleepy boredom or anything in between. 

Last night: madness. 

“Hey, glad to see you, so let me tell you about this lady in Bay 2…”

She had coded multiple times, and actually had time of death called at one point, but then regained pulses. Not brainstem reflexes, no hope of neurological recovery…but again with pulses, because modern medicine is extremely, brutally effective.

And now she was mine. Mine whose vital lies I was asked to preserve at the family’s insistence, mine to maintain on whirring machines, mine to push chemicals into, mine whose marbled veins into which I was to waste precious donated liquid flesh trying to keep her tattered heart beating that beautiful gift-blood to a brain that had already stopped functioning, to kidneys that hadn’t worked well for many years, to a liver that was oozing her own acidic blood because it had been torn open while her ribs were being broken during chest compressions…mine to “help,” mine to “save.”

And while I worked to brutalize what remained of her, the admissions kept coming. Two little old men with half-functioning brains, with different infected bits causing what little mind they each had left to flutter off, leaving me to guess at their histories as their tired families shuffled off into the night, maybe just tonight, maybe forever, maybe done. I tried to make stories from med lists. I tried to extract hopes and fears from what remained of these partial people, these small suffering remnants in front of me. I tried to be more respectful than my profession had been to them previously, but it was hard, because I was simultaneously trying to maintain the vital lies in Bay 2.

Another admission, still a whole body, most of a whole mind, but a world of pain. I am just a person and I don’t have a crystal ball but I know about crystal meth. I see the path in front of this man who can only look backwards. I was asked to fix his numbers too, just his numbers, but he is still a whole person and so he can still tell me what’s wrong, and nobody was listening because all they could hear were habits, but he was really so clear, it was like he was singing verse I already knew and his songbook was a textbook and the tired instrument of my mind which has been made to see red for so many years did what it has been programmed to do. The hammer hit my brain and the reflex was intact: I ordered a noncon head CT. STAT.

And then back to those vital lies, but the truth set her free. The truth that she was gone, that she was done, finally trumped our chemical and electrical engineering. Three more rounds of ACLS, but nobody’s heart was in it, most of all hers. 

The CT was read as normal by a person whose only job is to be right about that, and I wanted to believe it because I had so much writing to do, because I had been working so hard all night to push giants into different orbits and I had to show my work, so that the man who parks his Tesla closest to the door can have his arithmetic work out, so that the lawyers have no empty space in which to play with our lives. But I knew it wasn’t normal, because my instrument had processed the textbook-song, he had read the script aloud to me and I knew the ending. So I doubted and I looked, and there was a smear of bright white like a comet across his frontal lobe, and I wondered for the 48th time in my brief career, “what the actual fuck do we pay radiologists for?”

I may have helped him, my only victory of the night, but only with this one small battle. We won’t win the war. I still don’t have a crystal ball, but I remember crystal meth. I may not understand what an ode is, but I understand amphetamine. I know it is a brutal force upon a soft body just trying to survive in a world of pain. 

At some point during the night I cried in a bathroom, but my heart wasn’t in it. 

I called a daughter and told her that the terrible truth had won. 

I showed my work. 

I left, squinting at the sun, still in its orbit. 

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I’m meeting so many incredible women in research and GI and I️ feel so alive

I’m also very excited that my new dentist is russian and has a russian receptionist and i will never understand people who are so dogmatic that they can’t see why representation in science in medicine are important

(jk I️ do it’s because all their physicians and mentors in general look like them)

when just hearing a familiar accent on the phone is so :) gonna throw out that I’m white and can only support URM from my position of privilege but still russian speakers providing me health care YAy

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7.11.17 || I’m procrastinating writing up my boring protein lectures in favour of making a completely unnecessary revision poster for developmental bio… at least I’m being productive! 🦔✨