“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”
~ Albert Einstein

well, another block under our belts. and another set of exams survived. it feels really good to be more than halfway done this semester. only two more sets of exams to go. race you to Christmas!

[block 1 re-cap] [block 2 re-cap]

gross anatomy
- pelvis & perineum (bladders and prostates and triangles and continence)
- lower leg (from the femoral nerve to the deep fibular nerve between the toes that hold your flip flops in place)

>> most interesting thing learned: there are lots of things in your legs that can be used to fix or replace broken things in other parts of your body. hand muscles can be repaired with the gracilis muscle, which is your innermost adductor thigh muscle. tendons can be patched with the super long plantaris that stretches from the back of your knee to heel. and coronary bypass surgeries can use sections of the great saphenous vein in your leg because it conveniently lies close to the skin and is pretty much the same diameter for its’ entire length from foot to thigh.

histology
- respiratory system (how many times does it divide from trachea to alveoli?)
- immune system and lymphatics (natural born killer cells, like Mickey Knox)
- gastrointestinal system (mmm…. carbs)

>> most interesting thing learned: the immune system can be very good at targeting and tagging foreign bad guys, but more stuff stays in our system (sometimes for life!) than i realized. for example: macrophages are cells that eat up carbon particles (from smoke or smog or bad traffic jams) in your lungs. instead of digesting or imploding or firing up the flux capacitor, they just continue to float around with those carbon particles. like, forever. some macrophages even carry bacteria around and if they get damaged, that bacteria can get out and infect you!

embryology
- body cavities of the abdomen (like saran wrap on your organs)
- urogenital development (kidneys and reproductive ducts)
- gastrointestinal system (foregut, midgut, hindgut. and yes, they are really called “guts” this time around!)

>> most interesting thing learned: around week 8, the intestines actually develop too fast for the primitive abdominal cavity to hold them. so, they continue to grow OUT of the body through the umbilical loop, all the while rotating and twisting and getting longer and longer and more confused looking — for more than a month! somehow that whole mess retraces its’ steps and makes it back into the abdomen — giving us the super coiled small and large intestine. i always wondered how something so looooong fit into such a small space.

evidence-based medicine
- more MEDLINE search techniques

>> most interesting thing learned: how to find medical research on a particular topic in a place other than Google. cuz we all know how reliable internet resource are, right? that said, even legitimately published medical studies obviously have bias and errors. pretty much the whole point of this class is to teach us to try and determine validity of published results based on the type of study performed.

whew. what a block. am super excited to start all over again. : D

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