School wise it has been an interesting week. My classes covered a wide range of topics from inflammation and the immune system to entropic phenomenon (which is in basic terms a visual sensation that is due to inconsistencies in the fluids and structures of the eye) and even the basics of prisms (because it's impossible to go a whole week without learning any math!). Actually on Wednesday this week I had four hours of math all with the same professor starting at 9am (which is unusual since normally we only have two hours of lectures on Wednesdays and only one hour of math), so it was definitely a lot all at once, but I luckily got through it (with a little help from a lot of coffee). This week two of my labs were fairly easy since in one we just did a bunch of stuff on Excel and then in one of the other labs we did some more focimetry (lensometry). It was nice to have these fairly straightforward labs, since in my clinical optometry lab we had an assessment on ophthalmoscopy. Basically we were given 30 minutes to use an ophthalmoscope and look into one of our classmates eyes and draw the fundus (aka the retina). We had to include many of the structures of the retina including many of the blood vessels, which we had to colour in using the correct colours. The instructors are then going to mark our drawing against the retinal photographs that they have of each of us. It actually doesn't sound too hard but basically everyone was nervous about it since we have only had three lab sessions so far on ophthalmoscopy, so we didn't really feel ready and thought we would run out of time, but it seemed to go much smoother than most of us thought (although we don't have our marks yet from that, so we'll have to just wait and see).
Part of my course involves me sitting as a patient for an eye exam at the school's optometry clinic and on Thursday I had my eye exam. The exam is performed by the final year students and the reception staff tell all the patients that it will take about an hour and a half. But some of my classmates had told me there's took almost 4 hours, so I made sure I had tones of time, but luckily my exam only took just over an hour. Now the eye exam was definitely different that what we have in Canada. For starters the pretesting involves the usual automated NCT (puff of air test which checks the eye pressures), but then the only other pretest that was done was about a 5-10 minute visual field test, which had two parts for each eye, the first part was just the white stimulus and the second part was a red stimulus. I then went to the exam room and the student and her supervisor introduced themselves. After dealing with all of the patient history portion of the exam the student then used their ophthalmoscope and looked at the exterior of my eye, the cornea and then all of the structures of my eye and then did a comprehensive examination of my retina. The student then placed a trial frame on my and did retinoscopy to objectively determine my spectacle prescription. They then subjectively confirmed and slightly modified the prescription by having me read out the letters and look at some spots on the eye chart while they added, subtracted and moved the lenses to the trial frame. Once they were happy with the prescription they then did some other little tests (cover/uncover test, amplitude of accommodation, pupil reflex, near point of convergence, near vision and motility tests). Once completed the supervisor then came in and verified the prescription and the health of the eye. I thought it was kind of neat to see how they did the exam, especially since it was the first time that I had an exam where a slit lamp and a phoropter weren't used or even in the room. It sounds so far that this is basically how most optometrists here perform their eye exams, while it is only a very small number who even have access to a phoropter. I am really starting to look forward to learn how to perform all of these tests and to learn the reasoning behind the different techniques used here compared to those typically done in North America.
Now asides from school this week I also went to the German market which is on downtown (which is a five minute walk from campus). The market started last weekend and runs until Christmas. So far I have been to the market twice, and looks like I’ll likely be going several times each week as there is just so much to see in this a massive outdoor market. Here are a bunch of the pictures that I have taken so far while at the market.
The farris wheel was actually much bigger than it looks here!
This was the small crowd on Monday around 4:30
The beautiful lights
Some of many little stalls with handmade gifts
Oh the sweet smells of donuts and chocolates!
...and don't forget about the candy and schnitzel!
Two of the many temporary pubs (note the huge lines...and to think it's only 5pm)
Now that was my week in a nutshell.
Cheers,
Jeff
Well I had to have some German beer with my schnitzel ;-)
*Word of the week: "brown sauce" which sounds gross but it turned out that it is just "HP steak sauce". Apparently Birmingham use to have a big HP sauce plant located here. I have also found that here brown sauce is more common than ketchup and can be found in all pubs and basically all restaurants. When I asked what my British friends what they put it on, they said that it's basically anything, like with eggs in the morning or with a sandwich at lunch. I asked about what they thought about putting it on a steak and well apparently that thought had never crossed there mind!
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