which I'm sure you can find if you google for it, but I think it's uncreatively repetitive (it starts "oh oh oh"). The "on Old Olympus" mnemonic (for the cranial nerves) is so famous it even shows up in an abstract on MEDLINE. The 12 cranial nerves are olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, and hypoglossal.
We did the nervous system last. The nervous system was what brought me into this journey to begin with. I'm filling in prerequisites to enter a PhD program in neurobiology (I'm not doing so as an actual grad student, which is a long story, but has a lot to do with my having obtained a CS degree in undergrad instead of a biology degree). So you'd think I would know a lot about the nervous system.
Which I do, but largely from a functional perspective. I can tell you all sorts of things about the hippocampus, but heaven help me if I need to find it. I can tell you even more about, say, kappa opioid agonists, or the intricacies of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (and you can stop snickering any time now). But cranial nerves? I care about cranial nerves about as far as I can comfortably spit a living rat.
With one week left in the class, my fever still hadn't broken. I was sweating so much at night that I could wring out the sheets in the morning, and they stank of some evil brew of urea and carboxylic acids. By the time the week was through, I lost about ten pounds, a good portion of it muscle mass. Every time I thought the fever had broken, it kept coming back, and I was facing finals in under two weeks.
It finally did break, leaving me with lingering congestion, sleep deprivation, and minor memory problems (probably from the lack of sleep). For about two days, I kept losing words. That went away in time for the lab final (except for not remembering the word "caecum", but that was a run-of-the-mill brain fart), but by then I was down to my very last nerve (probably my vagus). All I could see ahead of me was the exam. I didn't bother with the rest of my classes.
The exam, like its predecessor, was two hours of going from station to station, identifying and describing structures. They didn't have enough cats, so they chopped them all in half (transverse sections). Gizmo's lower half was used for questions on the branches of the internal iliac vessels and the caudal mesenteric artery, her upper half for the accessory lobe of her lung and for her subscapular artery. If I'm remembering right ... a lot of it was a blur.
At the end of the exam, as we went from station to station trying to fill in the gaps of our memories, I said my goodbye. I wasn't the only person do so; I remember seeing at least two other farewell notes written next to people's dissection cats. And then I did what any sane human being would do in this situation -- I went to the bar, bought a vodka tonic, and drank in honor of a patchy grey kitten I'd come to know very well.