21st Day +

I only know it has been 21 days, because it was 3 weeks ago today that I arrived on the island. I was pretty unproductive today. But I hope I have given my body, and especially mind, a rest. I think one of the difficulties here is readjusting my scheduele. I have always been a night person and now I need to go to bed at a decent time more regularly.
After the blocks, the week passed by in a blur. We covered the embryology material for this block; cardiovascular and respiratory system development. I officially find embryology incredibly difficult. The way the embryo looks and changes seems to have no rhyme or reason, and the method by which the material is taught in the book and the professor I find disjointed and complicated, without a flow. I wish they would just teach it chronologically, but instead it was taught in pieces, and then clinical correlations thrown in willy-nilly. Not so cool.
Anyhow, pretty good week ending in an initial arm dissection. I though the arms would be easy, but the forearms have more muscles than you can shake a stick at and the palm is even worse. Not looking forward to this week a whole lot. But last week, we learned the brachial plexus which is the combination of ventral rami, connecting, intertwining, intersecting, joining and branching off on their way down the arm. We need to know what “root”, that is, what original nerve each muscle is innervated by. Interesting stuff. Seeing the nerves dissected out from the spinal cord really give you an idea of the complexity of the system.
Today, I personally dissecting out several nerves! How exciting! We looked at the back of the shoulder and the forearm muscles and some other relevant structures/spaces. My favourite part was finding the suprascapular nerve which was in the suprascapular notch that went to innervate the supraspinatus muscle on the top of the back part of the scapula. I love how all the names are the same. It’s great. It’s funny how dissecting and finding things will help you to not forget, as Dr. A had originally told me days ago.
This blog has been a composite of a couple of days and I am finding a little harder to write. I have to find more and interesting things to write about. There have been a lot of basic things going on, but also a lot of rumours. Now I know that things go around really quickly, you really have to be careful what you say, the walls are thin, and you only fully understand when you are here.
An example of this is probably a little mess up I made the other day – a couple friends and I went out to Windwardside (a little town about 15 minutes away from the school by driving), to look for a place to live for second semester. Through word-of-mouth, a friend of mine had found a house that was about to become available for the next semester. We went to see it, I really liked it , and we told the current tenants and landlord we were planning on signing leasing papers a month before leaving.
Unfortunately, a couple days later, after re-evaluating and speaking to my parents, I decided against this place. The location was in general impeccable, near this cute little organic farm where they apparently sold cheap fresh vegetables, it was in a quiet neighbourhood too, outside the main town. The main issue for me was the transportation. You see, even though the island is very small, due to the topography and location of the towns, the distance that has to be traveled on roads along the hillsides to the towns. Anyhow, long story short, you need to get some sort of transport. There is a school bus, but rumours of unreliability, as well as the limited transportation times dissuaded me from considering it as a viable transportation option. The idea was that all of us would get a car. But it is more complicated than that, shared between four people, things get financially difficult potentially – as well, it costs 200 USD$ to get a license here in Saba. One of my current roommates and I have decided to stay in The Bottom, the city in which the school is located. I feel pretty guilty, because I know our ex-potential roommates are not incredibly happy with the fact that we both backed out on the deal. If you guys are reading this, sorry about the trouble we caused you! Transport continues to be the main issue, as well as money to buy and maintain a car over two years on the island with four different equal owners.
That’s pretty much my life over the past couple days! My roommate and I had a fantastically fun time at the anatomy lab last night, we have a grand old time thinking about hilarious acronyms to help us remember muscles. To use the same example as above, we think of the suprascapular as the “super muscle”. It is “super” because the nerve exits the superior trunk of the brachial plexus, and is called the superscapular nerve (C5,6), it is located superior to the spine of the scapula, but it is also super lazy, as its function is only to abduct the arm from 0 to 15 degrees away from the body!
Sorry I don’t have anything much more exciting to share.
I will include a list of interesting things another day I promise!
:)