"Lots of people go to college for 7 years"

Well, I just took my last exam before finals (I passed :) ). I've been done with lectures for awhile, we had our last one last week. I've studied my little heart out for a year and a half. And now nothing but the "Intro to Clinical Diagnosis" and "Pathology" national "shelf" exams, and the USMLE Step 1 stands between me and starting third year. So, in honor of all of that, I've decided to make a list of the things that I really liked about the first 2 years of medical school (as opposed to most of my posts, which have mostly catalogued the things that I didn't like).

So, in the order that I remember, here we go:

1. In gross anatomy lab, my dissection group coined the term "dissection ladle". Yes, it's what it sounds like. We also referred (and sometimes still do) to ourselves as "the four horsemen".
   
2. For the first semester or so of first year, I convinced my classmates to celebrate "123456" every night at 12:34 and 56 seconds. By the way, get excited for July 8, 2009.
3. When we were in a pharmacology lecture discussing Fomepizole (a drug that inhibits alcohol dehydrogenase, one of the enzymes that breaks down ethanol, methanol, etc., and is used in treating things like methanol poisoning), from the back of the classroom, someone (it wasn't me) asks, "So, could you take that to make your buzz from drinking last longer?"
4. When you go to med school at the South Bend center, you get ND football tickets
5. When I came to look at the apartment I lived in first year (before I moved in), on the way to it, I saw three separate instances of people getting arrested within about a half mile where I lived. I wouldn't necessarily say I lived in the "nice part of town".
6. Apparently we have more fun at medical school here in South Bend. Because I was talking to my friend that goes to medical school in Ohio, and, well, for some reason we were talking about anatomy lab, and I said something about a bonesaw, and "how many times did you make that joke during lab?" (like "Bonesaw" from Spiderman) Well, the answer for me and "the four horsemen" was "too many to count", but all he said was "what joke?" So, I'm guessing we have more fun here.
7. I'm passing medical school, the majority with Honors or High Pass, but I still can't remember the "i-before-e" rule.
8. I may not be able to spell yeild (wait, I think that's wrong...), but I CAN spell "dysdiadochokinesia" and "erythropoietin".
9. Everybody made fun of it, but when the one doctor came to talk to us about something (I'm not sure why he was there, it was mostly just him rambling about things) he said that when someone comes in to see you as the physician, you should aks yourself "Mah nishtanah ha-lahylah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-layloht?" or "Why is this night different from all other nights?" before you start figuring out what's wrong.
10. I've always been told that its not OK to refer to morbidly obese patients as "Jabba the Hutt", but residents do it anyway.
11. "Fellow" is a word that denotes a person is in a fellowship, and is not interchangeable with the word "chap". I made that mistake one time when I wasn't thinking, and I have yet to live it down, over a year later. (What it says about me that I actually used the word "chap", I'll leave up to you to decide)
12. Eponyms are good to use when you want to sound smart. For example; "Babinski's sign" versus "upgoing toes".
13. Mnemonics are fun.
14. I used to hate it when people talked about their "life verse". I always thought, that's a bunch of bologna. Until I found mine. It's Acts 26:24 :)
15. Since we're talking religion, I've dicovered that while God may have created the rest of the world, Satan was undoubtedly responsible for creating the kidney.
16. I really like neuroscience. No jokes involved.
17. I've heard that undergrad is where you learn "nothing about everything", and graduate school is where you learn "everything about nothing". Medical school (a form of professional school, not technically graduate school) is where you memorize everything.

Well, this started out as a list of things that I liked about med school. I think it ended as that. Of course, the end of "preclinical" training is when the real work begins; "out of the frying pan" as they say. But I've got about a month and a half of some real hard-core studying to do before then.