I actually might have gotten something written and posted, but the end of the quarter ended up being a little crazy for multiple reasons that I won't dive into. Ultimately in the end, I passed all my classes and am officially considered a 2nd year optometry student now. PLUS I had to hop a plane to Iowa literally the day after my last test to see family and help celebrate my grandma's 80th birthday. So all of that = no post from Sherah.
But! Here I am in the end.
So! What all has happened in the last 5 months? Glad you asked.
As far as skills and practice go, we learned a couple more crucial ones this last quarter.
1. Keratometry
This was a pretty quick one and we only spent one class period and lab learning it. The thing above is called a keratometer and we use it to measure how curved a person's cornea is. This gives us pretty important information for things like contact lenses. It was a little tricky to learn at first, but by the end of the one lab, we all had it down pretty well.
It basically just looks like a miniature telescope. This is what we're looking at when we're doing the actual "measuring" in case you were wondering.
2. Retinoscopy
This might have been one of the hardest things to learn, but is ultimately one of the coolest things (I think) once you start to get the hang of it.
Despite it's name, a retinoscope is not a scope that directly looks at the retina - that would be an ophthalmoscope. I bring that up because we had exam questions written by our basic science faculty (non-optometry of course) that would give a scenario where an optometrist was performing "retinoscopy" and noted certain findings of the person's retina that would indicate (insert whatever eye disease we learned here). So wrong. So! Here's what it REALLY does!
This is how we can estimate someone's prescription without the patient telling us anything. This piece of equipment shines a long narrow beam of light across the patient's eye and we move it back and forth and side to side over the person's pupil. Based on the optics of the person's eye and how light travels itself (which is a whole entire optics lecture in itself that I won't go into), the light will either move in the same direction as you move the scope across, or it will move in the exact opposite direction. What we're looking for is no "movement" of light ultimately and that the whole pupil simply lights up when we move the light across.
We do this by adding lenses in front of the person's eye. Once you get the correct powered lens in place, the whole pupil will simply light up and the power of that lens will be roughly what the person's prescription is. AND they didn't have to tell you a thing. Cool, right?
Side note: This is what is used for small children or babies that would be unable to physically tell you what looks clear or not in the event that they need some sort of correction for their eyes.
I pretty much just made it sound really easy. This took a lot of practice to get used to and to be completely honest, I would only consider myself semi-ok at it. Our professor ensured us that this skill would be something we'd be perfecting pretty much all throughout school, so I'm not too worried.
And lastly...
3. Refraction!
This was the skill that the majority of us were sooo anxious to learn because it's what you mostly associate with optometry. I loved learning it because it's so cool getting to be the one on the other side of everything - helping the person in front of you go from seeing nothing on the chart to seeing 20/20 or better.
So! If you've ever been to the eye doctor before, you probably recognize that thing that's in front of my face up above. This is called a phoropter and it's an awesome tool. Within it is a huge set of lenses that we can control by putting them in front of someone's eye to simulate a pair of glasses.
A lot of times, the doctor will first do retinoscopy (what I just talked about above) and get an idea of where the person's prescription is, especially if they're a brand new patient and have no idea what their eyes are like. They'll then put that "ret" prescription into the phoropter and then somewhat "fine tune" it based on what the patient says that they like.
So this is where we get that whole "1 or 2" thing. We give the patient options with certain lenses. We make the changes based on what they say. If we can get them to 20/20 - great! We stop, write out their prescription, and that's it. Little bit more to it than that of course, but ultimately, that's what's going on.
Other Classes
So, all of the above we learned in just our theory and methods class this last quarter.
Adding to our ocular anatomy class that we took winter quarter, we had to take ocular physiology in the spring. Lots of rote memorization. For those that don't know, anatomy refers to the physical structure of something while physiology refers to how it works. I actually did better in this class than ocular anatomy and overall it wasn't too bad. Lots of studying, but what else is new, right?
We had another quarter of geometric and physical optics course this quarter as well. Basically a giant math based/physics class. These are the kind of classes I do best at (fortunately). It's one thing to be able to memorize a whole bunch of things, but I honestly do better when I have to apply information to a problem. So that class went pretty well. We will be moving onto ophthalmic optics this next year and will be getting more information that's a little more applicable :)
And lastly, we are DONE with our basic science courses, or as we called them Basi. I mentioned a little before about how they worked, but this class was literally the epitome of time consuming. Anywhere from 10 to 14 hour lectures a week (all on Tuesday thru Thursday) with a test every week Tuesday morning at 7 AM. This class was the reason why my weekends were gone. I had a huge test to study for every week, so naturally you have no choice but to use that free time on Saturday and Sunday to study because you HAD to, or you failed.
This class accounted for almost 15 credit hours this quarter for us (sectioned into 3 official classes that you got grades for) with the last one being the gross anatomy of the head of neck. This was the messy one because we had to spend at least 6 to 9 hours a week in our anatomy lab. Imagine a huge room with 22 metal tables, every single one containing a human cadaver. And they left all the dissecting to us.
We were assigned groups and one body for the remainder of the quarter. For whatever reason, I was the only girl in my group and was with 7 other guys - 1 of them optometry, the other 6 being dental students, and of course our cadaver was male as well. We used scalpels and other tools to cut through skin, muscle, tissue, you name it. My least favorite day was the day I stood there for an hour and a half straight just scraping and removing fat off of our person's shoulder region so we could get a nice clean look at all the muscles/nerves/arteries. I don't gross out easily, but that was definitely one of those days where I was glad I didn't eat much before hand in fear that it wouldn't have stayed down. I got a stronger stomach further down the road, but I definitely had trouble when we had to decapitate our cadaver. I'll just leave that at that.
This was a really tough course as we had practicals physically based on the cadavers. We would have questions where they might tie a string around one little artery in the cadaver's face and we had to be able to name the specific artery of the specific branch "x". They loved "higher end" questions that required you to know multiple things too where they might put a pin in a muscle, but instead ask what nerve innervates that specific muscle. So...you had to know what muscle it was in order to answer the question and then know the other information on top of that.
Tough. Really tough. Especially muscles and nerves in the face because they're tiny.
Anyways. After all that, I survived. Barely. I don't think I've ever been so excited to be done with a class. Ask me that again though once I am finished with second year, haha.
And that is my (very long) recap of our last quarter. School starts up again on August 25th and I am doing my best not to do anything these next 2 weeks, haha. Well, at least anything that requires a high amount of cognitive activity.
I will be doing a couple more posts here soon before school starts: one talking about the upcoming year and the other briefly talking about my weight loss journey and basically how I managed to lose 40 pounds in under a year, with almost 30 of those being since the last time I posted on here at the end of February (crazy, right?). So watch for those! I will be posting links to them as I finish them.
Until then, hope you have a great day!
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