Studying for the muscle test have been a top priority for the last two weeks and it have pretty much postponed everything else such as buying groceries, working out, going out, cleaning as well as staying sane.
Looking into the fridge was rather depressing and living off white bread, defrosted lunch packages, egg and coffee have filled me with a crave for proper food.
In general it's not an overstatement to say that I've been studying for at least five to six hours a day after school.
I've even sacrificed lessons in Czech and lectures of biophysics to be able to participate in dissections.
The first week we pretty much broke down all the muscles of the upper limb into compartments of function, innervation and position.
We knew that the test was going to cover both the upper and the lower limb so what I did was to first focus on the upper limb and for the last week spend time on the lower.
This schedule was rather disturbed because it took me more time than I'd anticipated to cover the upper part.
The hand was originally the big bitch in the drama but later on it turned out that the forearm was a lot more complex than I'd imagine it to be and pretty much overtook that title.
The theory of muscles is massive. The upper extremity contains approximately 50 muscles and the lower almost as many. Remember that every muscle have at least 4 parameters (origin, insertion, function and innervation), big muscles often have more than just four.
If you add this up it's going to be a rather big number but note that much of the information is the same for some muscles and you can usually group them in subcategories.
During this time my colleges frequently discussed whether the test was going to be oral or a slide test.
First of all I just have to say it again; making up theories regarding such matters are just time consuming and you better spend that precious energy on revision. (Those who're closest to me know what I mean because I've kept saying that every time a discussion like that started - sorry for that but you got to admit that we all over projected the whole thing a bit, still it's easy to be wise after the event...)
During the last week we confirmed that the test was going to be held orally on the actual specimens of the dissection department.
At first I thought of it as really bad news but after a while I just started to like it more and more. I spent a lot of hours in the open dissections just orientating myself. I joined up with my colleges Solveig and Yonathan and together we tried to prepare as good as we could.
It's really hard to have practice on the dissected specimens yourself since there's no answers to what you think you're looking at.
You pretty much have to guess your way and compare it to the atlases.
There is no simple way of learning this great amount of information and the only tip I can give is that repetition is the key.
I'm glad I've been spending almost 12 hours in dissection because not only did it help for the test but it will be very useful during the future dissections.
Yesterday, the day before the test, I didn't feel comfortable at all. I didn't feel prepared and I know I didn't have all the facts straight to 100% which of course is what you aim for.
Me, my roomies and our friends were invited to Nabeel, a third year student, who had offered to help us before the test.
He held the revision and went through all the structures and compartments of the muscles very thoroughly and I can honestly say that I wouldn't have passed with such a good grade without his help - due to the fact that he mentioned all these small details that I otherwise would have missed. I was also very lucky during my oral test because my questions were on all these small details which I had fresh in my head from the night before.
Before the oral test we had to draw cross section schemes of the limbs, once again divided into three groups. Each group had different tasks and my cross sections turned out to be sections of the foot and the upper arm.
We got twenty minutes to complete these drawings and those minutes sure just flew by. My drawings turned out to really good and I was very satisfied it and left for the dissections with relief.
Tomorrow I'll also get the result from last weeks Histology test but today I'll just let my mind off the studies for once and go get a celebrating beer at the Pivovarsky Dûm with Solveig and Yonathan.
That's all for now, cheers!
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