Neurology in TSMU

The introduction

Hello people, now I want to tell you about my university life as of today. Well now I have curations in neurology and there is this new clinic built in Sanzona, Tbilisi which is called the First University Clinic and students go there to study clinical subjects on their fourth and fifth and sixth years of university studies. This is a good building, I can say and it is very  well-equipped with the newest technologies and stuff like that and many good doctors work there and the staff is nice, too.

So, now we are studying neurology. Everyone said it was a difficult subject to learn. Well, I can't say that it is not, but surely out is nothing impossible. Our lecturer is a very professional doctor and she teaches us really well. But it's like a roller-coaster, I mean, you can't really know what to expect next and going in that room for two hours of intensive questioning and explanations and stuff is just a boost of adrenaline _ the heart is pounding like crazy and you are on an edge of dilemma _ whether or not you should go in there.

Going to the clinic

The road is not short, and maybe you can say that it’s pretty long, because I need something like an hour to get there. Well, I usually walk from my home to the metro station and then again I walk to the hospital, so the whole walking takes from 20 to about 30 minutes in all, and the metro only takes about 30 to 40 minutes some would say, but still it’s a long journey, if you ask me. I mean, the metro can be even faster, so that it would not take that much time to get from one station to another. I have calculated and it’s 2 minutes from one station to another on average and the distance is not very long, I must say. Well, I hope that soon everything will be much faster and people won’t have to waste their precious time on roads. And believe me when I say, that we really waste so much time in transportand on move and stuff like that, that it’s a disaster. And I even don’t have to move around the city that much! Imagine, there are so many people, who have to go from one place to another and then to another one and so on and so forth whole day and, I guess, half of their day they spend just on their way to somewhere.

Anyways, I usually go out early in the morning, because I have to be there at 10 a.m. So, I have to go as early as 9 a.m. to get there on time.  The walking is usually nice and sometimes I just have my earphones on and listen to some music. And when there’s a fine weather, that’s even better for walking, of course and everything seems nice and cheerful and stuff. Besides that, walking is great for our health, we know that, and everyone should do that all the time. And I just love walking and that’s a great thing for me. So, it takes up to 15 minutes for me to get to the metro station. Sometimes I take a bus or a microbus, it depends on the weather and whether or not I have time to walk to the metro, because, you know, sometimes you just can’t get out of your home on time, or something happens, or sometimes, when I’m walking and I see a bus coming, I just get on the bus and there are only two stops until I have to get off, because then the bus goes elsewhere and not to the metro station itself, so I still have to walk to the metro station, only it’s a little shorter road, than from my home, of course. Well, I think, I know the whole way from my home to metro and metro itself by heart already. That is the road I use almost everyday and, trust me, when you do something twice a day, that’s not something simple and it eventually gets usual and you just don’t look around anymore and you just walk your way to your destination and don’t really pay much attention to many things. That’s when you can miss something, but the question is _ do you miss something important or is it just an ordinary thing, too?! Well, I don’t really know, because sometimes without looking , you can really miss something important, but still, you just get used to that, too.

So, after I come out of the metro station Ghrmaghele, I have to walk to the hospital for about 10 minutes, until I get to its entrance. There’s a path going through some park full of trees and some people to that street where the hospital is, so it’s pretty nice walking there in the mornings and feel kind of a fresh air because of those trees, and that’s a kind of a shortcut to the hospital, so I just use to take that and walk there on a medium speed, I guess. Then there’s this zebra, where I must cross the road to get to the hospital gate and that’s the place which I don’t  really much like. Because, as I’ve written in my blog about not trusting zebras, no one really stops his/her car to let you cross the road, despite the fact that you are standing near this zebra and waiting for them to stop. Even if there are some people waiting for the traffic to calm down so that they can cross the road, drivers just try to speed up and rush through that zebra. That is how it is! So I hate that crossing place, but what can I do? I just cross it somehow and then I walk into the hospital yard and there’s pretty good nature there, too. There are those tall trees and grass around and it’s just an amazing view there. Especially in autumn, when all the leaves are colourfuland all the leaves are falling down from those tall trees and they are falling on that yellow grass and everything is covered with those leaves.

So, now about the neurology. It’s a pretty heavy subject, you know, and it requires much knowledge and logic and stuff. There are so many things that you need to know in neurology, that it’s really hard and there are many nerves and conditions and all the other stuff that you need to know, if you want to treat your patients correctly and not to make any mistakes, that you need to work really hard.

Well, we had only a few days to study this general neurology and, of course, that is not enough, but we did learn some useful stuff and it was really interesting. In general, neurology is very interesting and if someone wants to be a neurologist, they should know many things, until they become neurologists.

You know, the brain is a mysterious thing even now and scientists can’t really understand it, and, well, there are lots of things, that scientists try to understand, but they can’t understand the whole universe, can they? That’s the human body. No one can really know how it’s going to respond to some triggers and environmental changes and everything around us. When someone gets really sick from something, another one exposed to that something can be totally healthy and not get sick. That’s a rough example of the individuality and uniqueness of our human bodies so that you can have a glimpse of what our organisms can do. Miracles do happen and those miracles are something we can’t understand. Well, maybe that’s for now, but still, they are called miracles, because we can’t understand how they happenand what causes them or something like that, you know.

The end of the curation

So, the other day, we were finishing this general neurology and the last thing was to bring our works about some topics, which were given to us to choose and work on them. There were about 16 different topics, that we had discussed and covered and there were some of them, which we hadn’t covered during our curations and we had to work on them if we chose those topics. Well, I chose the one that we didn’t cover and it was about the meninges and liquor, layers of the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid, in particular and the blood-brain barrier and how pathological process affect them and what we can see on the tests during different pathologies and it was pretty interesting working on this topic. I did a pretty good job, I guess. Well, to be honest, I could have done it better, but considering the time we had left until the presentations, I really did a good job, so the presentation was good, too. Well, at least, that’s what my lecturer thought and told me during the presentation. So, everything went just fine and all we had left was this one day of our midterm in neurology, which we knew was not that hard, if we had studied neurology during those days and, well, nothing is really hard, when you know it, right?! Still, it was not enough to just be depended on  the things we learned  those days to be calm and wait for the next day to come, I mean, we had to revise our knowledge, because there were so many things that we learned in those days, that without revision, everything seemed to be mixed together and you wouldn’t know which one was right for that particular thing and which one was not. So it was a big night before that Friday, when the midterm was scheduled. I revised all the things from the book and then there were these exercise and tests about those subjects, which I did, too, and it was pretty time-consuming, if you want to know the truth, but it was worth the effort and it really helped me a lot.

And the next day, when it was the last day on our general neurology curation, I was pretty ready for my midterm and I was looking forward to finishing it all, as I really wanted to come home and sleep, because I was really sleepy. And, to be honest, I did sleep alright, because I didn’t stay up all night or something like that. I did sleep something like 6 or 7 hours, I guess, but still, I was really sleepy and as it was Friday and then there was this whole weekend coming up and I didn’t have to study anything or do anything, I could just come home and sleep as long as I wanted to.

So, the first group was finishing their midterm, when I got there in the hospital and we were the second one, so we had to wait a little longer, although our scheduled time had already come. Well, you know, some of the students were very nervous, some of them not so much and some of them were not nervous at all, that’s how it happens all the time everywhere, of course. And this waiting thing is always bad, if you ask me and I kind of hate it, but what could there be done. I felt like I knew many things and I would do well in my tests, so I was not really nervous and that made me kind of happy, you know.  And the time came, and the other group came out of the room and, of course, we asked them about the tests and they told us not to worry and that the tests were not very difficult and that’s pretty good, when you know someone’s opinion about the exam until you take the exam yourself. It kind of calms you down and you feel like you know more about the tests and stuff like that. So, we went into the room very calm and determined to do great on our tests. I couldn’t really decide where to sit, so I sat in the middle of the first row and waited for the tests to be handed over. I got the 1-st variant. When I glimpsed at the questions, I knew many of them without even thinking, so it all started great and I finished almost every question pretty fast and then there were just some of them left, that I had two options left and couldn’t really decide which one to choose, but I still knew which one would be correct, so after some thinking, I circled those answers, too, and the test was finished. I walked out of the room pretty confidentand they told us, that the answers would be on Monday, so all I had to do was to go home and get some sleep, as I had planned.

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