It’s happened again! The bi-semester week of hell in optometry school. Last semester, a.k.a. my first semester of optometry school, I had vowed to improve my study habits. I was not stressed, but I was near burnout after 7 consecutive days of 14 hour learn-everything-I-should-have-already-studied with five 2-hour examinations in between. Then, midterm grades came out, (and I realized I had learned/understood the material), and soon finals rolled around. My first ever optometry school finals week was a helpless case of senoritis like the one I remembered from high school eons ago. I was less gung ho about reliving the intensity of midterm week; and as the week progressed, I found my motivation to study ebb and wane ad I lament my pathetic 10 days of winter break after finals. Soon, second semester began, and in a blink of an eye, I’m already mid way through another midterm week!
I know I have been slacking in my blog entries, I was missing in blogging action due to my sheer laziness and old procrastination tendencies. But right now, this feels like a good break from my study. Midterm began Saturday, with Principles and Practices in Optometry. This is a cumulative course where we practice all the skills a competent optometrist must master and learn the principles behind all the clinical procedures. Just a quick recap, last semester we began with basic theory/history behind visual acuity testing, calculating standing letter size on an eye chart, to how to test for color vision defects, extra-ocular muscle motility difficulties, pupillary abnormalities such as afferent pupillary defects, stereopsis, confrontation fields and other entrance eye exams and theories behind each finding. We ended the semester with the knowledge of taking K-readings with an Keratometer (ophthalmometer is the generic name), confirming the power of spectacles using the lensometer, and finding objective refractive errors through retinoscopy. This semester tests on all the fundamentals of last semester plus new knowledge of subjective refraction through the phoropter and epidemiology and research findings in common refractive errors of myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia, and astigmatism. I started studying for this course Thursday afternoon and finished going over everything by Friday at midnight. However, for some silly reason, I decided to stay up and go over all the material with my roommates once more and did not go to bed until 4 AM. But the exam was not until 3PM on Saturday, so I slept in and wasted a whole morning of study time. Saturday night I began going over the material for the Monday’s Anatomy and Physiology midterm for the first time. I was a slow and treacherous process, and I had to ignore my urge to go to Estate, a club in Boston, after hearing rumors that Jeremy Lin might be there with his Harvard buddies. (Oh Jeremy Lin, that’s for another post, maybe, if I feel like rambling one day.)
Sunday was a full day of burying my head in my notes with a couple of study buddies trying to talk out and make sense of everything we were supposed to have learned about physiology of the neuron, muscle, heart, lung, and I feel like I’m missing a few topics on this list. It was for me another miserable day trapped inside without fresh-air or sunshine. Oh how I miss my day-to-day luxuries of optometry school, where I get run freely through Boston’s many parks soaking up the warm winter sun after attempting to sit still through four and a half hours of lectures a day. Now, it’s 24 hours of indoor circulation with a meager attempt at exercise walk to the nearby bathroom by overloading my system with tea. I cannot wait for my liberation this Saturday at noon!
Today, I took my neuroanatomy midterm at 8AM. Good thing I had started to study this material a week in advance. I knew it would take awhile to fully understand all the tracts and sections of the brainstem! The exam was a challenge, I walked out feeling competent to diagnose any neurological symptom as well as a neurosurgeon, okay maybe not quite, but I am proud of my clinical reasoning skills by the end of that test. The exam tested our understanding of central nervous system at a whole new level. Not only did we need to know the function and the pathway forwards and backwards for the corticospinal, cortico bulbar, spinothalamic, posterior column-medial lemniscus, dorsal spinocerebellar and cuneocerebellar tracts, we had to know all the functions and pathways of the twelve cranial nerves. With that understanding, we had to diagnose possible causes for hypothetical patients presented with a set of clinical signs and symptoms. We also had to look at coronal cuts of the brainstem and spinal cord and figure out all that could go wrong with a specific lesion in that plane. It just made optometry school that much cooler than med school:)
Well, enough procrastination, I’m off to prepare for optics and diabetes and glaucoma!
eyedéologie 