Seventh Week: Rat Race!

We began week seven with an afternoon lecture on washing hands. This is something that we generally take 'knowing how to do' for granted. Hospital-based health professionals wash their hands so much during a shift, it is a wonder they don't wash their skin off completely! If you hear multiple renditions (i.e. two) of Happy Birthday in the bathroom, you can safely assume that I'm washing my hands! That is how long you should spend washing (including drying) your hands (apparently).

We are rats on a race... not really. But there is a rat race, and we are the 'rats'. There were two exams this week: a Physiology Mastery Test (Wednesday) and the Neuroanatomy Rat Race (Thursday). The Rat Race was the most exciting. There were 50 stations, each with a neuro-anatomy exhibit or model. We had a minute per station and moved to the next station on the bell. Each station had two questions. For example: "What is the structure of label A? And what is its function?" or "What would happen if a lesion occurred to this structure?" Good fun, right?!

I was getting desperate for a picture this week, so here are the basics needed for sitting a written exam!

Because I had to revise content, you too will get a taste of some interesting bits!

• Did you know you can only taste five things? Bitterness, Umari, Saltiness, Sourness, Sweetness. You can also sense temperature, texture and pain, such is the case with with spicy foods! Flavour is really an olfactory sense.
• When you acutely hurt yourself, for example you stand on a pin, not only is there a withdraw reflex, but you are likely to hold the injury site to relieve pain. This will help relieve the pain due to a neural gating mechanism where pain receptor input to the central nervous system is overridden by your touch receptors!
• There are five stereotypical stages of sleep.  They cycle in a particular order (unless you are awoken). The first four are not associated with vivid dreaming, the fifth is and is called REM (Rapid Eye Movement). During this stage, if it weren't for the inhibition of volitional movement you might find the dreamer enacting their dreams, going for sleep-walks or in rare cases, murdering somebody.

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned that some lecturers have distinct personalities. Well, the lecturer taking us for respiratory physiology has a great sense of humour. Upon revising his lecture presentation the night before, he thought that some of us might find it a bit boring due to the many equations involved, furthermore he assumed that some of us would rather watch paint dry. Being the kind lecturer that he is, he allowed us the option to watch paint dry... literally. He used spray paint on a blank canvas, with a drying time of 30-40min... perfect.

Big group - neurology: the focus of this lab was an individual with an interesting neurological condition. The person had lost proprioception due to a multitude of events including tumours in his spine (and surgical operations gone wrong). The person allowed us to test our assessment skills as well as our concoction of experimental therapeutic techniques. We certainly valued the time this person volunteered!