first anat prac

had my first anatomy prac today. after the physio lecture everyone crowded outside the anatomy hall to put on their lab coats before going in. what greeted us was a spacious hall with five rows of cadavers, a couple of skeletons and several preserved specimens. what hit me was that the smell of formalin wasn't as strong as i expected. i was bracing myself for pungent smell of chemicals, that smell that medical students all around the world know, but instead it just kind of wafted around, but it did leave some tast on my tongue. anyway, i wasn't affected by the formalin, whereas there were some people whose eyes kept tearing.


my group got prof ling, the head of anatomy as our tutor. again, i had this picture of him as a huge, stout guy with a deep voice, but he turned out to be a pleasantly amiable and fairly soft-spoken person. he said, if we tell him we have knuckles, he would knock us on our head with the head of his metacarpels. we went through the bones of the upper limb today, including the muscle attachments and the related muscles of the joints. gosh, i can't imagine adding the nerves and blood vessels to that, and later the rest of the body to my brain. it's running out of disk space.


after class i went down to yusof ishak house to collect my ezlink card, thinking my troubles would be over. but when i approached the seng kang mrt counter, i was told i had to buy the concession, forty-five dollars for a whole month. i mean, can't they just give a discount or something like that? i did my calculations just now, it'll save me about ten to twenty cents a trip. i had this bad feeling about this ezlink card, indeed it came true.


i'm so drained from the first week of school. guess i'm still not used to waking up early in the morning to travel to school and to sit through a lecture and be expected to soak up the equivalent of a month's junior college lectures in one hour. last night when hc messaged something about printing something, i replied with one about stretching. the impossible happened.


and think i should just mention that i'm so glad ronald susilo triumphed in last night's match, but that despite all the congratulatory messages coming from the relavant associations now, perhaps we should also recall that when he did very badly recently, no one, not a single soul came to welcome him home. if he comes back with a medal and they all hail him, i'll be thinking about that.