mellicious | On to chapter 11! (Reply)

OK, so it's 3am and I just took the hardest test in my medical terminology class (blood and lymph and circulation and the heart, a big chunk of material there) and I made a 94 so woot! I really meant to take the test either earlier today or wait until tomorrow, but I was sitting here going over my notes and my little flash cards that I made and stuff, and all of a sudden I couldn't stand it any more and I had to go get it over with. (And the good thing about online classes is that you have the choice of doing such a thing!) It turned out that they give you two chances on this test, which tells you that people have been screwing it up, because normally you only get one. So that took a little stress out of it. There were a couple of questions that were confusing but not really anything I didn't know. They did not ask the difference between a thrombus and an embolus, which disappointed me because I realized earlier today that I didn't know the difference and I went and looked them both up and sat and looked at the definitions until I figured it out. (Basically, a thrombus is a clot. An embolus is an obstruction which can be a clot or can be something else, like an air bubble, or marrow, or whatever. And a thrombocyte is a cell which clots, i.e., a platelet.) Anyway, clearly I had enough of it in my head to pass the test so I am out of the woods on that one.

See, I am having to run on about this to get it out of my brain so that I will be able to go to sleep in the next hour (or hopefully less) - my brain is running 90 miles an hour and it won't shut up on command. Now tomorrow I get to start on respiration and digestion, very exciting.

I did have a head start on the subject of hearts, a bit, because of having been to the cardiologist yearly forever and ever (well, not recently but ALL of my childhood) and having had heart surgery and all that, so I had a handle on more of the vocabulary than the average person, I think. I had congenital pulmonary valve stenosis, which was diagnosed when I was a baby and was corrected (long, long ago) when I was 12. I have had two cardiac caths and a echocardiogram and god-knows-how-many EKGs and chest x-rays and all that stuff. I spent an entire day every year at UTMB running from one department to another to get all that stuff done, from the time I was three until I was in college. (After that they let me cut it down to every two or three years.)

Anyway, I will shut up now and go to bed. G'night!