July 8th

Today we were in class from 8 to 5, which made for a fairly long day. The first lecture we had lasted for about two and a half hours. We learned about rheumatology, joint anatomy, and musculoskeletal diseases. There was so much information presented to us, but it was definitely more interesting than the statistics lesson we had yesterday. The only downside to that lecture was that it was first thing in the morning, the room was probably over 80 degrees, and the professor was very soft-spoken, so it was very difficult to stay awake. After class we had a brief break so we went to pick up our security cards which were finally ready. Now the only problem is that my card doesn't have access to getting into and out of my building, which is a real inconvenience when I try to leave for class in the morning and I have to call the RA just to let me leave the building. Hopefully that will be sorted out tomorrow. After picking up our cards, we went back to the medical building for a lecture about surgery. I was expecting to get to see a lot of pictures about various surgeries, but it was a lot of less exciting introductory material. After that lecture we got lunch with the medical students, and then went back for a three hour lecture about fractures and joint injuries. We talked about all the different types of fractures and how to diagnose and treat each one. Most of the time I just kept thinking about the time I fractured my wrist last year and in my head I was diagnosing what type of fracture I had and approaches to treating it (even though it's been healed for over a year). We also learned about compartment syndrome and how they often result in requiring a fasciotomy, which I found really interesting because when I was shadowing a vascular surgeon a few weeks ago, I got to witness a case where a woman had that happen and I saw the result of the fasciotomy (which was not good, by the way, the patient ended up receiving an above-knee amputation that I also got to observe). Tomorrow I will be joining one of the Afrikaans students when she goes to the hospital. I received a white coat to wear and I was probably way more excited about it than I should have been, but I looked so professional and I can't wait until I have one of my own!