my favorite anatomy lecturer (and some personal thoughts on the subject).^.^

          1. Though I'm a psychology graduate, I didn't have any idea about Anatomy upon  entering med school 'cause we didn't have it in our B.S. curriculum. 

          2. I am not really a Science person, like what other people think I am (hahaha..I'm more on the artsy type, actually) and

          3. taking medicine is not much of a personal choice. 

       I believe that these three are the main reasons why digging into the world of Human Anatomy for me, takes gruesome effort. Four long hours of lecture regarding medical jargon, clinical correlations, etcetera a day (and worst, eight) make me feel lost at times. It's like being a pure Ilocano having a Wernicke's aphasia sitting on a hard-core mandarin class--It's pathetic. I admit that for most of the time, sitting inside an Anatomy class makes me feel really confused/bored..and with instances like that, I can't help but to do either of these two:

1. Just read the topic on my own while completely ignoring the lecturer (for I understand it more that way) or if I haven't get enough sleep the other day, 

2. fall asleep. haha.  

     Learning something is hard when you don't have the intrinsic motivation to learn it (we did a research on this for our Experimental Psychology class but that's another story, hehe). That principle is so true between me and Ana. Boldly and directly speaking, though it's important and I'm curious, I'm just not interested enough.

     However, I said at times, most of the time and in general. This is because there are actually times that I find Ana intriguing..depending primarily on the delivery of the lecture. Not all teaching doctors are meant to be professors, unfortunately. Considering that, I thank God for a few who were efficient enough to rouse my latent interest for the subject..and one of those is Dr. Ramon Ramos III.

     Being the head of Internal Medicine in our school hospital, he said he is more of a clinician and not academician...but on my opinion, he did a greater job than the other lecturers we had who are supposed to be specializing in academics. Whenever he is our lecturer,

I listen intently,

I take notes and

most of all,

I don't sleep (even though I feel sleepy).

    We had our last lecture with him for this school year last week. I admire him so much, that after the session, I connived with my friends so that I can have a picture with him. hahaha. Ridiculous, eh? I consider myself as his stalker, in-the-making.

 

 

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can't take the brain out of my brain.

We are now in our neuroanatomy module and honestly, I’m anxious with our present and upcoming topics because apparently, the entire brain thing is not easy. Even Dr. Julius Caesar (the best dissector of his batch, an anatomist, and one of our highly-esteemed instructors) said that it’s the most difficult topic for him when he was in his first year. Huhu. Having taken the initial topics meninges, venous sinuses, CSF pathway, cerebrum, midbrain and diencephalon make me quite confident that I have fair chance of surviving neuro but when Dr. Ramos started with the complex, cranial hemorrhaging ascending and descending motor and sensory pathways (these explains how the messages from our receptors reaches the corresponding corteses in the brain and how it induce the appropriate reflexes/movements) hours ago, I realized that I was wrong to conclude early. Hehe. Pathways can be really quite confusing and demanding  especially that there is no other option but to memorize (and memorize by heart) loads of ganglia, neurons, etc. because in the brain, all is connected, all has function and all is complementary to each other and essential even the smallest fiber of a neuron!

Anyway, it was on the afternoon session, during our gross lab that I was suddenly shaken by the beauty of the man’s brain. Though it’s not my first time to see and touch one, it’s the first time that I appreciate it and pore over without pressure of an oral exam. Getting a grip of a real brain for hours is really captivating and to realize that it’s that mass of matter and vasculatures that controls and makes us humans is even more enthralling. That moment, all confusion and complications were changed into fascination. I’m just so mesmerized, that after getting familiarized with its sulci, gyri and other structures, I couldn't help but to keep on poking it while saying to myself “God, ang galing mo talaga!” I just can't imagine how He constituted all of those; component and functions in that mass of fibers, white and gray matter in such a way that it works in complete harmony so that we can feel, perceive, realize and act. He is definitely omnipotent and omniscient.

I would like to keep the brains beside me during the rest of the session but the stimuli from the formalin elicited synapses and sent messages to my olfactory center, so I stopped poking it after almost three hours. Haha. Even though studying it triggers migraine, I wouldn't stop admiring one of God’s unparalleled masterpieces—the human brain. It’s a pity we weren't allowed to take one home.