One of the reasons I didn’t pursue the nursing program is because of the fact that I needed to learn medical terminology which I thought would be really hard to learn.
I chose to share this time in my blog about my experiences from the anatomy and transcription classes. It is kind of interesting to share the fact that I didn’t have a clue about these topics prior to starting the course.
With anatomy and physiology class I was very anxious about what to expect because first of all I have no medical experience or background. You know how it feels like when you are so clueless and you don’t really exactly know what to expect. In addition with my anxiety of the course, I’ve been hearing that some students failed and others used their retakes in able to pass the course. I found this kind of scary because we are only allowed 3 retakes for the entire program so this made me want to freak out. I remember the time, the instructor kept reminding us to read ahead of time and study, and she also advised us to have a study technique so it will help us with the exams. Everything for me is like, omg! I don’t know what to expect. I’m a little bit scared because I don’t know if I can make it to the end of this course and hearing about people failing scares me a lot.
This course was very intense. Aside from the project, we have spelling, pronunciation and abbreviation of medical words each day for every chapter of the book. It was a very hard core course and I think this is one of the hardest parts of the program. This course was broken into two parts, the first part was medical terminology and the second part was anatomy. Knowing medical words is just like learning a new language, it is very similar when you learn the English language that they have rules that you need to follow. You will learn how the medical words are put together, it is by learning the roots, prefixes and suffixes just like the English words. We are very lucky to have a teacher that was also a doctor. She taught us really well. She has a very good knowledge of the course. In addition to what we covered in the book she also shared real life examples and stories about the topic that gave us a deeper understanding of it. If we have questions she can answer them very well. I think that is one advantage of having a teacher who has real life experience in what she was teaching. I can’t believe that we tackled everything from top to bottom in the book.
One of the interesting parts of learning anatomy was you will learn about how the cells works in our body and what goes on in our body systems, the planes of the body and how they are divided and human diseases and the signs and symptoms of it. For me the body systems was the best part of the course. I didn’t even realize it will be interesting subject for me. Sometimes when I feel something in my body I feel like I can diagnose it myself ha, ha, ha but that is not allowed because we are not trained to do that. I know my knowledge of this isn’t good enough and for sure it will take lots of years of study but it’s kind of interesting that when I feel some pain in my body I know what it’s cause may be. (Just sometimes.)
So in my opinion after all these feelings of anxiety, I realized that this was a very interesting course and wasn’t bad at all. This became one of my favorite courses we had so far. You know the feeling when you work hard for something and at the end you get a sense of accomplishment when you finally finish. I am very happy that I passed this with a really good mark and it was a relief after so much intense pressure and sleepless nights I had during this program. I feel I can breathe lol, but honestly I miss this course. I miss going to class and learning about the human body but I know things cannot stop here. I need to move on and so does my learning. My only advice for people who are interested in taking the HSS is that you need to take this course seriously, give yourself time to study and you will be okay. I think this applies to any subject.
So after anatomy and physiology the next class we had was transcription for one week. I can tell you that every course that we finished was related to the next one. So with this one, you need to listen and write what you’ve heard and I can say that having knowledge of medical words will be very helpful for passing this course. At the beginning of the course I had difficulty understanding what the doctors were saying on their recorded messages. It’s not that I don’t understand the medical term, it’s just the way they deliver the words and with their different accents. For people who were born here in Canada it will not really be a big problem due to the fact that they are used to different accents but still some of my classmates who were born here had their struggles too. I guess it takes time before we get to use to all the different ways people talk. I never thought transcribing would be a kind of struggle to learn because in theory you are just listening to the doctors dictations and writing it down. In spite of my struggle with certain accents, I still managed to pass with a good mark.
