Right around this time last year, I was visiting for "second look" weekend. I had already been accepted, and the school was now trying to convince me to come here. (It worked.) I ended up staying with a guy in the class ahead of me, which gave me the chance to pick his brain about his experiences in medical school.
"What classes are you taking?" I asked him. CVPR. C-V-P-what? Cardiovascular-pulmonary-renal, he explained, and he talked about what kind of material they were learning. It all seemed way above me, I remember, like there were so many steps between second look weekend and CVPR that I couldn't fathom getting from here to there.
A year later, I've done it. We're in the middle of the CV part of CVPR, learning such bedrocks of medicine as interpreting electrocardiograms (EKG) and heart murmurs. This block is decidedly more clinical than either Blood and Lymph or Disease and Defense, a shift that has taken me a bit by surprise. It's a welcome change, though: a much more analytical approach to learning material that emphasizes the process of diagnosis based on clinical presentation (history and physical).
For a sneak peak into some of what we've been learning, here's the EKG Dance youtube video that explains different types of arrhythmias (when the heart doesn't beat in its usual coordinated manner): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asR2-sb27Vw
(Explanation: The heart has four chambers. Two ventricles pump blood to the lungs and the rest of the body, and two atria serve as filling chambers that help the ventricles do their job. Imagine the ventricles as this guy's legs and the atria as his arms.)
Very instructive link.
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