Moments to Savor, Savory Moments

Yesterday was mostly spent on anatomy. After some preliminary morning errands, I settled down to some alone time in front of the computer with the practice exams from previous years. Then a classmate and I headed over to school, where we went to each of the small group rooms with white boards completely covered in anatomy review diagrams, pictures, lists, tidbits, and various other "high-yield" points (I never really heard the term "high-yield" much until medical school). I walked from room to room, staring at white boards, hoping that there is truly such a thing as learning by osmosis.

So this post really isn't meant to be about anatomy, but I suppose that's the subject hanging in everyone's mind this past week. Anyway, to wrap up that part of the story, I ended up taking the exam last night, even though we have until 11:59PM on Sunday.

What really impressed me yesterday was going over to my classmate's apartment, which is right above the N-Metro train tracks to the side of our student dormitory apartment complex. I haven't been in any other apartment aside from my own, and when I mentioned that point, my classmate remarked that it's been true for her as well. Gone are the excited, adrenaline-charged college days when we'd run from dorm to dorm, room to room, checking out what other people's living conditions are like. When we'd order cheesy sticks in the dead of the night, and hover around a friend's desk or bunk, dipping the greasy cheesebread concoction into ranch or marinara sauce, watching a movie perhaps, or just striking up a "deep conversation," trying all the while not to leave oil stains on our host's blankets or school supplies. There were more of those days in college, than in grad school, I'd say. I remember when there was a total blackout at the Clark Kerr campus at UC Berkeley, where my dorm was located. The darkness had instilled some sort of adventurous electricity in the atmosphere, and students ran around the courtyard with flashlights or open cell phones, jovially joking with one another, the unanticipated darkness a reprieve from one's normal sense of composure. My friend and I sprawled out on the concrete courtyard of the campus, near a trickling fountain, and saw stars in the sky. I think it was the first time, and perhaps only, time I noticed them while I was in Berkeley. It was rarely dark enough, and not to blame modern technology, I rarely had the mood or inclination to look up at the sky.

Fast forward six years, and here I am in medical school, on a sunny but chilly autumn day. My friend's apartment is painted a vivid red, while mine is a lavender blue. I like both colors. She dashes around, taking butternut squash out of the refrigerator (butternut squash! Have I ever even tasted butternut squash?), fresh salsa from the nearby Wednesday farmer's market, Turkish yogurt that she uses in lieu of sour cream, and lovely, fresh, green kale. Not sure how to apply myself, I stand around flipping through Gray's Anatomy, reading a bit aloud about the nervous system. "The sympathetic chain...," I begin reading, "oh, and the prevertebral plexus..."

My classmate hands me a block of cheese and a grater. That's a better use of my time, for now.

What resulted from her efforts was a kale and butternut squash quesadilla! I felt like I should have taken a picture of it. It's rare that I get to experience a home-cooked meal these days, other than the stuff I scrounge up myself. Wash it down with a glass of apple cider, and I was all set to take the midterm.

On another note, I finished "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith yesterday, after I took the test. It's a lovely book. Many tweens and teens apparently read this, but it's still a classic nonetheless, and though I didn't actually read it myself while I was tween or teen, I definitely found myself savoring the book even now. What motivated me to read the book in the first place was visiting Brooklyn three times in the past month. Williamsburg - now a premier hipster enclave - is no longer the poverty-ridden tenement-housing locale that Francie Nolan grew up in. It has gentrified significantly. Yet the brownstones, the feeling of being near Manhattan, being Manhattan's closest neighbor, yet being apart from it all, has not changed. Francie would look across the river, the bridge, and wonder what lay across from her native Brooklyn. She grew up in abject poverty, the product of parents who married too young and were uneducated. She adored her father, who was a dashingly handsome singing waiter, but also the neighborhood drunk. Her mother raised her on a page of Shakespeare and a page of the Holy Bible every day, insisting on her children's education, and she succeeded despite the odds. Francie grew up loving books, loving the library, loving to write, but when she wrote about unpleasant (real) things, one of her teachers scolded her. She burned up much of her writing, promised to give up her writing if God would only insure that her mother stayed well through an illness. But she eventually comes back to it, and at the end, she skips the typical high school education due to having to work and support her family, and finally attends the University of Michigan at Ann-Arbor.

I found the book to be a satisfying read. Now onwards to "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery. Did I mention how wonderful the New York Public Library is?

Stand Up!

This morning, I woke up at 5:30am to practice yoga in my room. This was because I had to meet a patient at 8am in the hospital, and the only way I could finish my practice was to wake up that early. So, when my alarm rang, I rolled out bed directly onto the yoga mat parked right beside me. I moved through the entire series I typically go through, and at the end, I reached the backbend section. I paused to assess my surroundings, having never done dropbacks in my small Manhattan bedroom. It looked OK, so I proceeded to drop into backbends. And then. I. Stood. Up. I was able to stand up from a backbend! Another milestone for me. My teacher had been hounding me about it for days. Every time I neared the backbend part in my practice, she'd turn to me and say, "YoginiMD, you must stand up." There was no room for arguing with her. She said it like it was a clear, unwavering fact of nature. Of course, I'd push myself forward again and again, failing to do what she'd explicitly said. "Harumph!" her facial expression seemed to say. She says I have it. My other teacher says I have it too, that I'm so close. So today, it was nice to...just do it. "DON'T THINK!" she always told me. "You're thinking too much!" "Just do it!"

And, I did.

There's a certain thrill in doing something new and something unexpected and something you thought you'd never be able to do. This carried me through the entire rest of the day, which was definitely filled with some rough patches. I spent hours in lecture, and then hours in the anatomy lab, where we trudged through the laboratory exercise of the day as best as we could, but still got broken-down and demoralized in the process. We barely finished the first half of the lab in time. The rest we'll have to save for next week. One guest instructor paused at our table to see how we were doing. He started to dissect our cadaver, since apparently we still had not gotten far enough to see the structures he wanted us to see. He revealed a ligament, and asked us what it was. None of us said anything. He looked at me, and asked whether we knew what it was. "NO," I replied.

"Thank you for being honest," he said.

Sometimes I wonder at the whole process of learning anatomy in the way I'm learning it now. We are literally tearing down the body. I looked up the word for "anatomy" in the online glossary for anatomical terms. And here's what it says:

anatomy: Greek ana = up, and tome = a cutting, hence cutting up of a body (c.f. dissection)

So apparently, we are doing exactly what the word "anatomy" means, literally.