Finals start in T-minus....8 hours

As I head to bed for the evening, the evening before my first round of PA school finals, I am feeling sort of reflective tonight.  As difficult as this semester has been; as frustrating, maddening, and slow-going school seemed to go at times, I am in complete awe that I am here at the end of the semester already.  It's difficult to see how quickly time does pass when you live test to test, but looking toward the next 5 days of exams, I realize just how much I have learned in the last 10 weeks, and how much I stand to learn throughout the next two and half years.

The head and neck is a scary, scary region!

So, apparently I was a little too overzealous last time I wrote, and how excited I was about the head and neck.  REALLY overzealous!  I hate the head and neck...a lot.  It is the most exasperating, irritating, maddening, infuriating region of the entire body...although, still fascinating.  My head and neck exam is in 9 days, and it really feels like the pressure is starting to pile up.  We spent the last two days in Anatomy lecture going over the cranial nerves, the 12 nerves that start in the brain/associated structures.  For all non-science people, they are responsible for everything you see, smell, taste, hear, chewing, facial expressions, any sensation you feel on the skin of your face, crying, salivating, snot running from your nose (I just had to paint that picture), chewing, and the function of your entire digestive system.  So basically: they do a lot.  And each of the 12 nerves has multiple branches that travel through various regions of the skull, half of which (at least, in my mind) are imaginary, so sometimes it's pretty difficult to visualize where these nerves are going after they leave the brain, and attempting to draw them out on paper.  This is the first time all semester that I have truly felt overwhelmed at the amount of stuff that is contained in the body.  8 weeks into Anatomy, and I still have no idea how everything fits into our bodies.