It's That Time Again..

Midterms!

We have Path being served up on Monday, followed by a much needed 3-day hiatus which will be spent preparing for what will likely be an epic-ally horrid Micro exam on Friday. After which point I will throw myself over a cliff.

These exams are going to be as much a test of stamina as they are of knowledge. Path is 3 hours long, Micro is somewhere in the ballpark of that? I suppose I should get used to it though, seeing as Step 1 is a cool 8 hours. Gosh, it's like taking the MCATs (circa 2006) all over again! Fun.

So what have I been doing? A lot of re-reading, a lot of Robbins Review and WebPath, a lot of staring at slides attempting to absorb the high-yield points, and also a bit of freaking out, especially while in the shower- where I tend to go over random facts. For example, there are two separate conditions whose histopathological appearance both include whorled structures. I remembered one (Uterine Leiomyoma) but could not for the life of me get the other. After freaking out for about 30 seconds, I stood in contemplative silence until the lightbulb went off and it came to me- Silicosis! Which, incidentally glows a pretty blue under polarized microscopy. Not to be confused with the apple-green birefringence shown by amyloid deposits under similar microscopic conditions.

Okay, end nerd talk. The point of all of that was that I was concentrating so hard on testing my recall memory that I ended up shampooing my hair twice because I forgot I had already done it.

So basically, I'm running out of shampoo, and vacillating between wanting more time and just wanting to get this over with. I suspect that by tomorrow night I'll have firmly settled on the latter desire.

Flexner-Wintersteiner rosettes FTW!
(They're pretty aren't they? Characteristic of retinoblastomas)