A Med School Memoir

remembering med school in real time

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In Which I Am Yelled At For No Apparent Reason

September 24th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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So in the rush to prepare for my test last week, I failed to mention the awesome diversion that I had to suffer through a couple days before the test.  My school has started doing this thing called “Professionalism Clinic” as part of the Introduction to Clinical Medicine class.  Don’t get me wrong, I feel that ICM is a useful class, and a lot of the time it’s the only thing putting the “med” in the first two years of med school.  It’s the class where we learn how to do all the physical exams and stuff that will be the bread and butter of our time on the wards in third and fourth years.  But this class was absolutely ridiculous.

Let me set the scene for you.  After making something like 1200 flashcards, and trying to learn more information than can possibly stay in my brain, I was understandably stressed out.  I spent much of last week walking around so tightly wound that if someone walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder without warning me first, I probably would have shrieked in terror, spun around, and punched them in the face.  I’m not bragging here–just trying to explain how uptight I was from the stress of the looming exam.

So, as if the stress of the test wasn’t bad enough, they added another highly stressful event to the mix.  This so-called “Professionalism Clinic.”  The basic premise behind the professionalism clinic was that we will be expected to retain our composure in even the most stressful situations, and in order to prepare us for such situations, they would test us on them ahead of time.

The scenarios in our professionalism clinic included “Angry Patient,” who was, as the name implied, an angry old man who immediately started yelling at me the second I walked in the door, and “Sad Patient,” whose name was slightly misleading, because she wasn’t really sad until I told her she had cancer.  Now, the patients were not patients at all, but actors, as you might expect, and the scenarios were obviously contrived.  Once I actually got into the room, it was fairly easy to deal with the pressure of being yelled at or comforting the sad lady with breast cancer.

But the real stress of this event wasn’t encountered in the clinic.  No.  It was encountered in the days leading up to the event, just knowing I was going to have to go to this stupid clinic and get yelled at.  By a fake patient.  For NO REAL REASON.  I still get angry just thinking about it.  I understand what the course planner for ICM was thinking.  Something along the lines of: “medical school and the medical profession is a stressful, so we’ll prepare the students for that stress now.”  Well, I don’t think they succeeded in preparing us for anything.  They just allowed us to walk around with added stress before an exam.  Thanks for that.

Here’s why I object to this whole exercise–it is artificial, and unlike the other stressful, artificial clinical scenarios we encounter like the breast exam and genitourinary exam, this one has no objective standards for successful completion.  Basically, we have to go into a room and act with another actor.  No real emotions are being displayed by these people, and thus no real emotions are being conveyed by the students.  Just anger at having to waste our time a day or so before a big test on getting yelled at and having our stress levels go up that much further.

Sometimes I feel like medical school is just a big indoctrination into a culture of masochists who constantly compete with one another to see how much bullshit they can endure.  The thinking seems to be something along the lines of, “well it was shitty when I was in school, so it might as well be shitty for you too.”  As I have no tolerance for enduring bullshit, I’m not incredibly fond of this aspect of medical school.

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There’s Gotta Be a Better Way

September 16th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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Seriously?

Seriously?

You’re looking at my ridiculous flashcard collection. Those aren’t my accumulated flashcards from throughout med school. No. Those are my flashcards FOR THIS TEST.  WTF?

The cards in the box are what I feel relatively confident I know. The stack next to the box is the stuff I need to learn in the next 48 hours. Looks like I have my work cut out for me.

Last year I did well by making flashcards for every little fact or funtoid I could possibly need for the test. (I tend to learn well by flashcards, sue me.)

The problem here, as you might be able to see, is that I’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.  Hell, I reached that point, blew past it at ludicrous speed, and left it spinning behind me like a cartoon road sign.  I slammed on my brakes somewhere around the point of futility, and came skidding to a halt at the point of absurdity.   See, it wasn’t always like this.  Last year, I might have a couple hundred flashcards per test.  That might sound like a lot, but it’s actually very do-able.  I’m estimating my current collection here at somewhere around 1200.  That isn’t gonna work.  I can’t even carry them all around with me.

The main reason for this dramatic increase in flashcards is largely because we’ve started Pharm, and there is a LOT of memorization for that class. But still, I’m obviously gonna have to re-evaluate my study methods for the next test. This is ridiculous. With this many flashcards, I don’t even have time to review them all enough times, let alone actually LEARN them.

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A Day in the Life of a Med Student

September 11th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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While every day in the life of a med student is unique with respect to what is learned, the days still tend to blur together with regards to the overall theme and tone.  For instance, yesterday I learned about B cells, and today I learned about T cells, but aside from this remarkably small difference in the content of my learning, the two days were essentially indistinguishable.  In fact, so far this year, very few days have stood out as being remarkably unique (with the exception of test days).  A day in the life of a med student is essentially the same from one day to the next.  It’s like the movie Groundhog’s Day, except if you kill yourself, you don’t come back. Here’s about what it’s like.

6:45 Awakened by alarm clock.  Hit snooze.

6:48 Awakened by alarm clock.  Hit snooze.

6:51 Awakened by alarm clock.  Find the strength to open eyes, put feet on floor.   Drink coffee.  Shower, shave, brush teeth.  All that boring morning ritual stuff.

7:45 Arrive at school.  Drink more coffee.  Pre-read for morning lectures.  This usually involves highlighting words from the syllabus that appear important.  Remind yourself to figure out what they mean.  But not now.  Later.  Drink more coffee.

8:45 Migrate to the classroom.  Chat with friends.  Be chummy with people you don’t like sheerly because you have to.

9:00 Lecture.  Try to focus on the lecturer instead of the dude in front of you playing flash games on his laptop.  Drink more coffee.

9:20 Nudge your buddy sitting next to you when the dude who’s always 20 minutes late comes in wearing the exact same clothes he’s worn for the last month.  Consider consulting the Guinness Book of World Records to determine the record for “longest time spent wearing an ugly shirt.”

9:50 Break time.  Chat with whoever is sitting next to you.  Watch stupid cat videos on the internet.

10:00 Lecture.  Try to focus on lecturer.  Instead, read failblog over the shoulder of the guy in front of you.  Drink more coffee.

10:50 Break.  Chat, go get more coffee.  Listen to that one whiny dude in class who always complains about how he couldn’t understand the lecturer on account of his/her foreign accent and/or blazing pace with which he/she went through the material.

11:00 Lecture.  Fight urge to check email fifteen times.  Drink more coffee.  Check email fifteen times.

11:50 Lunch time.  Since you now live on student loans, you can’t afford to eat out all the time anymore.  (This lesson may not be learned until after your first semester, when you run out of money in October and have to scrape by until January.)  Instead, you now bring your lunch almost every day.  It’s usually the same.  A boring sandwich, some carrot sticks, maybe some yogurt or an apple.  Your lunch is so healthy for a couple reasons–one, you can’t really afford anything better, and two, you’ve heard a lot about high cholesterol/hypertension/diabetes in the last year.  You want to avoid this, but you still wish you were eating a burrito or something significantly more awesome.

12:30 Check your e-mail, drink more coffee.  Consider pre-reading for the next lecture.  Watch stupid videos on youtube instead.

1:00 Lecture.  Despite your best efforts, you will, almost assuredly, faze out almost immediately and retain next to nothing from the lecture.  Every few minutes you catch yourself falling asleep and look around to make sure no one caught you napping.  Look over to see people pointing and smirking.  Drink more coffee.

1:50 Break.  At this point, after all the coffee you’ve had, you may have to sneak off to a secluded bathroom somewhere on campus to take a dump.  This is quite possibly the most anxiety-provoking event of your day.

2:00 If you’re lucky, you’re done with classes.  If not, you have to go back and try to focus on another lecture. Why is it that the lecturer for the last afternoon class is always the guy trying to be “cool” by cramming his lecture full of stupid puns and filling his powerpoint full of “funny” pictures as old as the internet?  Cue instantrimshot.com and prepare to deny any culpability.

2:50 Freedom!  At this point, there are a couple options.  Either

  • go home and zone out in front of the TV for an hour
  • go to the gym to work on your sweet biceps, if you’re like me and like to keep your immaculately toned body immaculately toned.
  • go home and begin studying.  (aka: go home, open a book, and watch TV for an hour with an open book on your lap.)

3:50 Check e-mail.  Browse reddit.com.  Tell yourself that you’ll begin studying again at 4:00.

4:45 Realize you’ve been surfing the internet way too long.  Tell yourself you’ll begin studying again at 5:00.

5:00 Realize you’re getting hungry.  Tell yourself you’ll eat dinner and then start studying again at 5:30.

5:10 Eat dinner (probably something from a box or the freezer, despite your good intentions.)

5:30 Sit down in front of the TV, tell yourself you “need to digest” for a bit, then you’ll start studying again at 6:00.

6:00 Realize that there is a good House, MD rerun on.  Tell yourself it will be good for your education to watch it, and that you’ll start studying again at 7:00.

7:00 Open up textbook.  Attempt to read.  Get caught up in thinking about how you really need to get good grades in order to get a good residency.  Search google for doctor’s salaries.  Realize that the dude in your class who you really don’t like is probably doing way better than you, and he’s going to make a lot more money than you if you don’t study and get a better residency than him.

7:30 Get frustrated that you’ll never make good enough grades to get into a really high-prestige residency slot.  Search google for med school study tips.

8:00 Actually begin studying.

9:00 Still studying.

10:00 Yup, still studying.

11:00 Notice the time, realize it’s time for bed.  Wonder why your eyes hurt and you’re always so tired.

So, that’s it, to my best approximation from what I can gather from my life and what I hear my classmates tell me.  (Okay, I’m exaggerating somewhat–I actually do spend quite a bit more time in the evening studying than that…)  Still, I’d like to hear from any other med students to see roughly how well this correlates to their daily routine.

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Aww Shucks

September 10th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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When I started this blog, I never really expected to have more than a few readers.  I mean, I don’t actively promote my site, and I’m not incredibly proactive about posting all the time or anything like that.  And while I have put a lot of work into the site, I never expected that anyone would notice or care.  So, with that being said, it’s incredibly humbling and rewarding when someone recognizes my effort.

A blog post entitled “100 Blog Posts You Should Read Before Going to Med School” recently linked to two of my articles–my apparently infamous guide to not being a pre-med douchebag, and my more recent “are you ready for med school” post.  I’m grateful to the blog’s author for including me in the list.  It’s really nice to know I’m not just posting in a vacuum all the time.

I encourage all my premed and med-school readers to check out the article.  There are tons of good articles linked from it.  Someone has taken a lot of time and effort to scrounge together a good collection of articles related to med school, and for that, they should be applauded.

(Cue applause)

Link: 100 Blog Posts You Should Read Before Going to Med School

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Suture Lab

September 9th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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Photo091

This afternoon was suture lab.  I used to be a vegetarian, so I don’t have a ton of experience with mangled dead animal parts, and consequently, I had a slight worry that this might be difficult for me.  But honestly, after gross lab, I’m glad to find that there’s really nothing relating to dead things that can gross me out.

At one point, I was working on my subcuticular suture, when a big jet of blood shot out of one end of the pig’s foot.  I was pretty intently focused on getting my stitches right, and it startled the crap out of me.  Otherwise, it was a pretty uneventful, though enjoyable lab.

I have to say though, it’s little things like this that get me really excited for things to come.  In between studying for pharmacology (not fun) and studying for immunology (really not fun), and studying for all the other classes (equally not fun) we get these little brief respites from the classwork to see what is in store for us next year.  It’s like a little flicker of light glimmering from the end of this long tunnel they call the M2 year.

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Dax Cowart

September 7th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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In our ethics class recently, we discussed the case of Dax Cowart.  His case is well known in the medical community, but I had never heard of him before–for those who aren’t familiar, here’s a quick rundown of his story.  In 1973, Dax and his father were surveying some land in rural Texas that Dax was thinking about buying.  When they went to start the car to leave, they were caught in a freak gas line explosion.  Dax’s father did not survive the accident, and Dax was covered in severe burns on the majority of his body.  At the time of the incident, Dax asked the farmer who came to his rescue for a gun so that he might put himself out of his misery, but the farmer declined.

From that point on, Dax was subjected to over a year of medical treatment against his will.  As he was completely incapacitated, he didn’t have the strength to refuse treatment by walking away–instead, his body was actually physically carried, against his will, back and forth to various modalities of painful treatment such as dips in a solution of bleach, and wound debridement procedures that were, according to Dax, agonizing.  He continuously asked to be left alone to die because he was in such excruciating pain, but his physicians continued on with the treatment despite the fact that Dax continuously refused treatment.  As a result of the accident, Dax was left blind in both eyes and without the use of either of his hands, not to mention disfigured.

One of the reasons the doctors continued to provide him with treatment, despite his refusal, was that they assumed he lacked the adequate capacity to make such decisions, on account of his condition.  During the course of his treatment, two psychiatrists were brought in, and both confirmed that, in fact, he had the full mental capacity to be making these decisions on his own; his decisions to end treatment did not stem from the fact that he was insane–he simply didn’t want to bear the pain anymore.  Regardless, the power to determine his own fate was stripped from him and given to various proxies–namely his mother and his lawyer.

Dax’s case brought the issues of a patient’s right of autonomy, and the patient’s right to refuse treatment into focus.  To this day, Dax maintains that he should have been allowed to die in 1973, even though he is now alive and leading a productive life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this case.  I agree that a patient should have the right to refuse treatment that is being proposed–especially if that treatment is tantamount to torture, as some of Dax’s treatments were.  But at the same time, this case seems so much more complicated than that, because the physicians knew that if they stopped treating Dax, he would die.  And no physician wants to let a patient die if he or she can help it.  Putting myself in the shoes of Dax’s physicians, it’s hard to imagine myself being okay with letting him die, even though he was practically begging for death.  It’s a really tough case–one that I hope I never have to face!

As I mentioned before, Dax is currently alive and well, and he has become an advocate for patient’s rights.  I found a lecture that he gave at the University of Virginia not too long ago.  I highly recommend it, for those who aren’t familiar with his story.  It’s not for the faint of heart, but it really does highlight the essence of his struggle.

Link: Dax’s Story: A Severely Burned Man’s Thirty-Year Odyssey

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Are you ready for med school?

August 16th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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Pencil and Paper

Judging from my blog stats, it would look like a lot of folks who come here are still premeds and interested in going to med school.  My most popular article thus far is a guide on how to not be a premed douchebag, and right below that are all other premed-related articles.  So, in the interests of boosting my traffic here a little bit now that I’m back from a long hiatus, I’d like to pander to my premed readers a little bit.

So, you think you’re ready for med school, huh?  You’ve aced all your pre-reqs, you scored really well on the MCAT.  You got your AMCAS in with a Pulitzer prize-winning essay.  By all standard, objective measures available, it would appear that you’re ready for med school.  But as I recently realized, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re ready for med school.  Just because you can get in doesn’t mean you can stay in–or even should be in in the first place.

What follows is a little quiz for you premeds out there to determine if you’re really ready for med school.  I think it should go without saying that anything written henceforth is coming from the same guy who wrote an article with the word “douchebag” in its title, so this is by no means a scientifically valid assessment.  But it should be fun nonetheless.

So, here we go.

ARE YOU READY FOR MED SCHOOL?

1.  You were up until 3:00a.m. studying for a test, and this morning you woke up at 6:00 in order to cram in a few more hours of studying.  With three hours of sleep, you:

a) don’t wake up.  The alarm is going off, but you can’t hear it because you’re not accustomed to functioning on such little sleep.  When you finally do wake up, the test is over.

b) are a zombie.  There’s no way to you’ll be able to do well on the test unless you get 8 or more hours of sleep nestled snugly in bed cuddled up next to your teddy bear.

c) pound cup after cup of coffee, pop a few vitamin pills, take a cold shower, and review your flashcards one more time.  Sure, it sucks to not get enough sleep, but sometimes you have to sacrifice to get good grades.

d) feel like a million dollars.  Three hours of sleep is more than enough!  You routinely stay up all night memorizing passages of arcane physiology textbooks and reproducing plates from medieval anatomy atlases just because you can.

2.  You studied 60 hours per week for three weeks preparing for yesterday’s exam.  Yet when then exam results come in, it turns out your hard work is all for naught–you FAILED!  Your immediate reaction:

a) “Eh, I failed the last twelve as well.  Might as well make it a baker’s dozen!”

b) You feel the tears well up in your eyes.  You reach for your cellphone and immediately begin dialing your mom.  Maybe she can talk to your professor and convince him to let you retake the exam.

c) You feel like shit.  You can’t tell if you did something wrong in preparing, or if one of your professors just hates med students.  Nevertheless, the test is over, and now it’s time to grab some beers and relax.  You’ll just have to do better next time.

d) You laugh.  There was clearly some mistake.  You’ve never failed before, and it’s impossible that you’ve failed this time.  After all, the professor asked you to write all the questions.

3.  You’ve just completed the last test before the Christmas break of your first year of med school.  What is the first thing you do?

a)  Crack out all the books from the first semester and start reviewing them.  Your classmates peg you as a gunner, but in actuality, you’re 99% sure you’re going to have to repeat the first semester.

b)  Breathe a sigh of relief.  You’re 1/8 of the way through medical school!  This is the most momentous occasion of your life!  Before heading home for the holidays you hold a tea party with your stuffed animals who are all so very proud of you.

c) Get amazingly drunk with a handful of your classmates.  Who needed to remember any of that info from first semester anyway?

d) Polish up your best pair of shoes.  The medical school is throwing a party in your honor tonight for being the most amazing student in the history of the institution ever.

4.  It’s the first day of Gross Anatomy.  Describe your state of mind.

a) Absent.  Not absent-minded.  Literally absent.  You slept in through anatomy lab because you were out late the night before.  The bars don’t close themselves, you know!

b)  Scared.  You’ve never seen a dead body before, and you’re afraid you might puke when it comes time to cut one open.

c) Mixed feelings.  You’re excited for this milestone in your education, but you’re nervous because it comes with a lot of responsibility.

d) Super excited.  Finally, a cadaver you are legally allowed to dissect.  You’ve come a long way from the “good old days” in your basement.

5.  Finals are around the corner.  Describe your study methods.

a) You crack open a textbook the night before the test and read the words in bold.  They’re the most important ones, right?

b) You read, and reread, each assigned chapter from the textbook, review the powerpoint slides from lecture, do 100 study questions from a review book, transcribe your class notes into a word document, highlight pertinent info from a review book, and go over flashcards.  In the meantime, you forget to eat, sleep, or defecate.

c) Find a review book, and memorize as much as you can.  You study in discrete blocks and remember to take breaks as needed in order to stay sane.

d) This shit is so easy, you don’t even need to study.  What is this, kindergarten?

6.  It’s time for the first genital exam clinic in your Clinical Medicine class.  How do you feel?

a) So excited!  This will definitely be the first class you attend–you can’t wait to see some wang/vag!

b) So nervous!  You’ve never seen the genitals of the opposite sex before, let alone palpated them.  You can’t tell if it’s a sin to touch the genitals of someone who isn’t your spouse, even if it’s for school.

c) Completely indifferent.  With all the schoolwork, this is really just another class.  You still giggle when your professor says “testicles” though.

d) Disinterested.  You’ve seen so many genitals in your conquests of the opposite sex, this is all old news.

7.  You have to buy a stethoscope for class.  What do you buy?

a)  Buy?  A stethoscope?  Are you kidding?  If you ever actually need one of those, you’ll borrow it from a classmate.

b)  A Littman Cardiology III, even though you can’t really afford it, because the Clinical Medicine course director recommended it.

c)  Whatever you can buy off an upperclassman for cheap.

d)  A Littman Master Cardiology, mostly because it was the most expensive one you could find, and also, because it has the word “master” in it, which seems fitting.

8.  Your best friend from college visits unexpectedly.  You haven’t seen each other in months, and you’d like to hang out.  The only problem is that you have a test coming up.  What do you do?

a) Hang out!  Studying is for squares, chumps, and losers!  C equals MD, man!

b)  Tell your friend that you’ll have to see them another time.  Even though you realize it might be a year or more before you have the chance to see your friend, you also know that you need to study–and getting good grades is the single most important thing in the world.  Ever.  Period.

c)  Tell your friend that you can hang out for a couple hours.  While you really need to study, you also need to have a life.  You’ll figure out a way to make it work, even if it means getting less sleep, or biting the bullet and getting a lower grade on this test.

d)  This is a completely implausible scenario.  You have no friends.

9.  Spring Break time!  Describe your week off.

a)  You left school a week before the “official” spring break and drove to the beach, where you drank margaritas by the bucketful until your next test, three weeks later.

b)  You go home to stay with your parents.  You know it would be good for your grades to study, but you can’t bring yourself to actually hit the books.  Instead, you spend the entirety of your break stressing out about the fact that you aren’t studying for your next test.

c)  It doesn’t so much matter where you go–what really matters is the fact that your mind is free for a week.  It’s awesome to not have to think about the innervation of the head all the time.

d)  You spend your time in the anatomy lab.  The cadavers are the only people who understand you.

10.  At the end of the first year, you begin to consider your summer plans.  What sorts of things are you thinking about doing for the break between your first and second years?

a) Review Gross Anatomy.  You’ll be taking it again next year.

b) You’ve got a ton of things lined up.  Research, clinical experiences, volunteering on mission trips to Africa.  It all sounds really great–you just wish there was some time in there to relax.

c)  You’re definitely planning on doing something productive–maybe research, maybe a clinical rotation at the hospital–but you want to make sure you have time to decompress before starting second year.

d)  Preparing your Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  It’s only a matter of time before your genius is recognized.

Scoring yourself:

If you answered mostly A’s:  God only knows how you even got into medical school, but here you are.  There’s no doubt that you’re smart; you probably breezed through college without ever having to study.  But medical school is different.  Unless you shape up, there’s a good chance that you will have to repeat a year or two.  You might even get kicked out because you’re simply not ready for the responsibility of medical school.

If you answered mostly B’s:  Academically speaking, you’re probably ready for school.  But emotionally, you need to mature a little bit.  Medical school is a trying time.  Just stick with it.  You’ll be okay.  Just don’t tell any of your classmates that you have tea parties with your stuffed animals.

If you answered mostly C’s: Are you sure you aren’t already in medical school?  You sound like 90% of my classmates.

If you answered mostly D’s:  You have narcissistic personality disorder and no one likes you.  I’m sure you’ll be a great plastic surgeon one day.

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Back to School…

August 11th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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back_to_school

Today was the first day of second year.  One might expect/hope for a little more pomp and circumstance for this momentous occasion, seeing as how more than 10% of the original M1 class either failed outright or had to repeat the first year.  I mean, I didn’t expect a ceremony or anything, but it would have been nice if someone would have thought to congratulate us, either literally or symbolically, on making it this far.  But no.  Not even coffee and donuts before classes started.  The first day was basically just business as normal, with the professors jumping right in with a brief introduction to the curriculum, followed by a few hours of non-consensual sodomy.  Seriously, a little foreplay might have been nice, get us warmed up and ready to take it, but no, Pharm just came on fast and hard and now I’m left wondering if the 10% who didn’t come back were on to something…

But I kid.  It’s actually nice to be back.  While I do feel like I could have used a little more summer (then again, who doesn’t?), it was great to be back with my classmates again.  We’re all demented in the same ways now, following first year, and sad as it may be, they’re some of the only people who understand me anymore.

What I’m looking forward to this year:

  • path–seems to me the most relevant course material with regards to actually being a physician.
  • icm 2–maybe i’ll finally learn what a systolic murmur sounds like.  or something.
  • behavioral science and ethics–while they’re the “touchy-feely” classes, they sound interesting to me.  after all, i’m a blogger… it should come as no surprise that I have a touchy-feely streak.
  • being a year closer to third year, where i actually get to act like a doctor.
  • not having to take gross anatomy ever again.

What I’m not looking forward to this year:

  • Step 1–nuff said.
  • Finding out if second year is really as hard as everyone says.  (I’ve heard it described as standing on your head with your face in a bucket of shit.  I’ve also heard it described as follows: “the first time you get shit on, it stinks.  eventually, you get used to the smell.”  Most negative comparisons tend to involve feces in some way.  Clearly, this is does not bode well.  We’ll see.)

Any doctors or fellow med students out there care to comment on second year?

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Summer Time, and the Living’s (regrettably, not all that) Easy

July 30th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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So, despite all the crap that happened last year, I managed to somehow end the year in the top half of my class, and was invited to participate in the “Honors in Research” program here at my school. Basically it’s a glorified research project that is available to the top half of students. I was pretty excited about it though, because I like research; I’m not sure that I would want to spend my entire career doing research, but I enjoy it now, and so I thought it would be a good opportunity to get some research in, make connections with faculty, and start improving my application for residency. (Yes, I take a long view of things.)

When I signed up to do research, I imagined it being something like my past research experiences—lots of time spent alone in a lab collecting data, mulling over research papers, setting up experiments and chilling out while they run. What I wound up with was something very different. Perhaps it’s because my earliest experience with research was in a Chemistry lab, and my current research is quasi-clinical with human subjects, but let me put it this way: if my research experiences were sports, my old research would be golf and my new research would be no-holds barred cage fighting. It’s just fundamentally different.

For instance, I had this notion that over my summer break, I would be collecting data. That’s kinda the fundamental thing about research, right? That you collect data to interpret so that you might support or disprove your initial hypothesis? Well, suffice it to say that my summer “research” has found me not so much collecting data, as being a free helping hand for my PI. I’ve written letters, made forms, attended lots of meeting, and other such administrative chores. But I haven’t collected much data. And the data I have collected has yet to pertain to my specific project. I think the idea is that I’ll set all the pieces in place so that my PI’s research assistants collect my data for me after I return to classes and I’ll swoop in at some point in the next year and evaluate that data. That’s so weird to me that I still can’t quite determine if that’s “fair” or not.

But mostly, I’m stressed out. I signed up for this project knowing full-well that the summer between M1 and M2 is a brief respite of calm in an otherwise brutally punishing curriculum. The eye of the hurricane, if you will. I had expected that my time would be spent rather casually in the lab. Essentially, I thought it would be a low-stress situation.

Boy, was I wrong.

The reason it sucks so bad here is not because the work is hard, or because it’s really mentally challenging or anything like that. No. Instead, my summer has been so stressful because I’m working with a bunch of drama queens who insist on making a soap opera out of everything. My research has been waylaid by the emotional insecurities of my coworkers as they quibble and bicker about the most inane and trivial things. For instance, instead of being able to focus on my research, I’ve been constantly distracted by gossip and drama and whatnot. It’s getting old.

Thank god, I’ll be done tomorrow. Then I have a week off before starting second year. I hope to sleep a lot and play video games.

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I’m Back!

July 28th, 2009 by The Memoirist
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I'm Back


First, I’d like to apologize to anyone reading this who may have hoped for and/or expected more posts from me over my first year. It was a crazy and hectic time in my life, unfortunately. Aside from being my first year of medical school, which can be dramatic enough in its own right, my personal life went through a lot of other dramatic changes as well. I moved to a new city. My parents got divorced. My mom started drinking again. Then she tried to commit suicide. In the midst of all this drama, my fiancé and I decided a traditional wedding wouldn’t really work, so we opted to elope. So I got married. I adopted two dogs. It would have been a challenging and rewarding year even if it hadn’t been my first year of medical school. Given that I also had to endure the rite of passage of Gross Anatomy and a grueling exam schedule while dealing with a lot of unexpected catastrophes/revelations, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that it was probably the hardest year of my life thus far. At times it really did feel like I was starting to lose my sanity as I sequestered myself in a study carrel and tried to ignore the fact that my family was crumbling around me, and instead just focus on the innervations and blood supply to some anatomical region. Given all this, I hope my few readers can forgive my utter lack of updates. When I started this blog, I really hoped to keep track of my personal life throughout medical school. I never expected my life to change so dramatically and so rapidly. I wasn’t able to keep up with it all.

As I reflect on my first year, I wish I had devoted more time to blogging, I really do. But I had a hard enough time devoting time to eating dinner with my wife. I’m not good at the short post. It usually takes me at least an hour to write a post. Finding that kind of time was very difficult last year.

But I want to do better. Second year starts any day now. From what I’ve heard, it will be more intense, with more studying and more class work. For what it’s worth, my family situation has calmed down quite a bit; I don’t expect to be dealing with the same kind of drama I had last year. I hope to be a bit more diligent in my blogging habits, even if that means more posts that aren’t as well-written.

The fact that I still get comments from people is a testament to the fact that something I’m doing is resonating with people, so I want to do better. I’ll check back in soon with an update about my summer.

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