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.

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.

The endocrinology test is rapidly approaching, and I’m starting to get a little light-headed from the amount of information I’m trying to shovel into my brain.  Or maybe that’s just hypoglycemia from my insulin-secreting tumor.  Or maybe it’s a headache from the hypertension secondary to my Conn’s Disease.  (Or, maybe it’s just my med student syndrome acting up again.)  My brain feels like my backpack has begun to look from lugging around a dozen textbooks for the last few weeks: tattered, frayed, and on the verge of disintegrating.

Seriously though, endocrinology has been a very strange block.  It’s like biochemistry and cell biology had angry/drunk sex one night and nine-months later spawned this overly-convoluted demon subject.  Endocrinology takes the worst aspects of my least favorite classes (hello random enzymes! hello signaling pathways! hello second messenger systems!), and expands on them in mind-numbing detail.

Imagine your least favorite thing.  This varies by person, obviously, but for me, this happens to be the sound of fingernails on bluejeans.  I’m not sure why, but this sound, once I hear it, will get stuck in my head and linger there for several seconds, and all the while, it feels like it’s stripping layer after layer of flesh out from the inside of my head.  Now, instead of just hearing this sound, let’s say you record it, play it louder, play it slower, cut it up into tiny little chunks and examine each individual waveform.  You play it forwards and backwards, and put it on a loop.  You examine not only the sound itself, but what made the sound happen–you videotape the fingernail and the bluejeans.  You study the way the fingernail fits into the tiny little crevices in the threads of the jeans.  You determine the effects of fingernail length and thread count on the sound produced.  Every little detail that goes into making this sound, you examine the hell out of it.

This is endocrinology.

Now, before it sounds like I’m complaining, let me clarify.  Endocrinology may be filled with painful amounts of seemingly superfluous redundancy, but in the end, that’s okay, because you know the old adage: repetition is the key to all learning.  Even though there has been a lot of material presented in this unit, a lot of it is review.  As a result, I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and that’s always a good feeling.  If ever there was any doubt that I hadn’t learned every single little effect of insulin after I finished biochemistry, well, that has been remedied.  In the last couple weeks, I have reviewed the effects of insulin about 1,000 times from a 1,000 different angles.  I have reviewed the effects of insulin so much, in fact, that I probably have diabetes now.

Since we’re in the middle of the endocrine unit at school, my first reaction was that I have pheochromocytoma, a catecholamine-secreting tumor.  There’s no way I was having a bad dream, or am just a little over-anxious about the test coming up on Friday.  No, it’s much more likely that I have a disease that is seen in about five in a million people.

This is how I memorize my clinical correlations for the test, by the way.  I actually get the diseases we’re learning about.  It’s a bitch, but I’ve yet to find a better way.

I have a feeling that this will make pathology a very difficult class next year.

Don't worry, we'll be in and out real quick.

Since the day I got my acceptance to medical school, I had been dreading one thing. Every time I thought about it, I felt my anxiety level bubble up like a two-liter of diet coke with a pack of mentos dropped in it. It wasn’t the thought of cutting up a dead body. No, that didn’t bother me too much. It wasn’t the promise of never-ending studying and a constant onslaught of tests. No, weirdly enough, I was actually excited about the prospect of getting to spend some time studying. (Weird as it may sound.) It wasn’t even the thought of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for my education. No, I actually managed to get over that shock pretty fast.

No, without fail, the one thing that had been stressing me the fuck out since even before the first day of school was the dreaded pelvic exam. As part of the Intro to Clinical Medicine (ICM) curriculum here at my school, all first year students are expected to learn how to perform several different clinical exams, like the routine abdominal exam, lung exam, heart exam, yadda yadda yadda.

Even these normally routine and innocuous exams tend be anxiety-inducing on their own. I’ll never forget how nervous I was before the very first one–the upper limb exam. My palms were all sweaty and I felt incredibly self-conscious as I approached the standardized patient to feel his shoulder. See, it’s all about the anticipation of awkwardness to come; the thought that you’ll have to put your hands on some stranger’s body and pretend to feel something that you either can’t feel, or isn’t even actually there. Even though it’s an educational activity, it’s also an act–a ruse–pretending to be knowledgeable about something you’re not. It can at times seem so entirely disingenuous and outright phony as to induce some serious cognitive dissonance.

In the end, these ICM clinics are never a big deal at all. But going into it, you have to understand, can be just as stressful as going into a test. I mean, I even managed to make it though the breast exam a couple months ago with little lasting psychological damage. But the pelvic exam, that’s a different story.

It should almost go without saying that along with the general nervousness that I always feel before any of these ICM clinics, there was a unique layer of nervousness involved with the pelvic exam. I mean, touching on other people’s junk and stuff? You have to admit that when you’re used to spending most of your day with your head in a book, it’s a pretty jarring change to suddenly find your head quite literally between a strange woman’s knees. But adding to my anxiety was the fact that at my school, the pelvic exam is bundled together in one fun-filled afternoon with the male genitourinary exam, and a heaping helping of digital rectal exam thrown in for good measure. Yippee! It’s like getting to go to Disney World AND Six Flags in the same day. Except, at this Disney Land, there is no Mickey Mouse–instead there is just some old guy who teaches you how to palpate his testicles. And at Six Flags, there’s a roller coaster where you wind up in a cervix at the bottom of the first hill.

So, anyway, eventually the dreaded genitourinary exam day arrives. On clinic days, we are required to wear “professional attire,” which means I wear my nice shoes, I get a dimple in my tie, and I wear my stupid short white coat that makes me look like a hunchback. On the outside, I am the image of a self-confident medical-professional-in-training. My outward appearance is deceptive, however, because under my spiffy collared shirt, I’m sweating buckets.

I go to the ICM clinic where I see several of my classmates milling around in anticipation of our afternoon’s task. Stories are floating around that the male students are going to have to get up in the stirrups–excuse me “heel rests”–to “see how it feels.” My level of anxiety immediately doubles. Now, don’t get me wrong–I’m sympathetic to how vulnerable it must feel to have your feet up in those “heel rests,” but really? Is now really the best time to do this? Don’t they realize that we’re being traumatized enough as it is? Do they really need to add insult to injury? At this point I’m sweating like a fat guy eating a turkey leg in a sauna. I can feel my undershirt sticking to my back, like I’ve run a few miles–and I’m not even in the exam room yet. Eventually we get instructed on what we’ll be doing that afternoon, and soon we’re all separated into small groups to begin the clinic.

A few minutes later, I’ve been lumped into a group of four, and we stand outside the door to the exam room. No one wants to knock. We dare each other with our eyes until eventually I muster up the courage and knock on the door. I hear a voice invite me in from the other side, and I step in and introduce myself to an older gentleman who, for purposes of anonymity, I’ll call Mr. T. (Who didn’t look anything like the real Mr. T, despite how much cooler that would make my story.) He’s sitting on the edge of the exam table in his hospital gown, and to break the ice he asks if we’re nervous. The four of us all chuckle and admit to our collective nervousness, and he tells us to relax, because we’re not the ones who will be getting 10 rectal exams a day for the next week. I laugh. He makes an excellent point.

Mr. T is about 50, has long hair, and he carries himself with the kind of carefree nonchalance and un-selfawareness that makes me think he might be a little bit stoned. I mean, afterall, this guy’s about to get felt up, and poked, and prodded by a bunch of bumbling idiots for the next three hours. His genitals are literally at risk here, but he’s not sweating it. If I were in his shoes (which were Birkenstocks, by the way) I’d be pleading with my examiners to go gently on the balls. Instead, he waxes philosophical about how much more relaxing it is to exhale than inhale. After a short introduction to the exam, he looks around the room and asks who wants to go first.

I don’t volunteer.

Eventually one of my classmates–we’ll call him “Steve”– bravely volunteers. Steve is one of my Gross Anatomy partners, and he’s an easy-going, modest guy who takes medical school very seriously. I’ve been partnered with him a few times during these ICM clinics, and he always impresses me with his professionalism. But even Steve is a little flustered today. He hides it well, but you can tell by the unusual redness in his cheeks that he’s not 100% comfortable. Nonetheless, he makes it through the first half of the exam without any incident. He is calm, courteous, and he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s seems like a natural.

Until the rectal exam, that is. As he inserts his finger in the standardized patient’s rectum, the look on his face suddenly and unexpectedly melts into a look of terror. Somehow he keeps his voice calm and explains what he’s doing to Mr. T, but the whole time, his face is the visage of fright and disgust. (Kinda like this guy.)

I can’t help but kinda laugh at him.

The standardized patients (SPs) at my school have a dual role. They are instructors in the exam, meaning that they teach us how to properly palpate the pertinent anatomy and build a rapport with the patient, etc. At the same time, however, they’re actors who pretend to be patients. This can be confusing at times when you don’t know if you’re talking to your teacher or your patient. Mr. T seems to have some confusion on this point as well. At the end of the exam, my classmate forgets to instruct Mr. T to regown. Even though the exam has ended, Mr. T is still playing the role of a patient, I guess, and his pants are still down around his ankles. At the same time, however, he’s giving helpful pointers about how to properly dispose of soiled latex gloves. It’s more than a little weird.

When it’s my turn to go, I try to mask my nervousness by acting calm and chatting up Mr. T a little bit. We’re normally given a bit of a script to work with, and this time is no different. I introduce myself, tell the patient why I’m here, and what he can expect from the upcoming exam. Trying to keep the tone casual and easygoing to offset the emotionally charged nature of the whole thing, I tell him, “don’t worry–this will only take about four minutes. We’ll be in and out in real quick.”

Whoops.

God, I’m stupid.

“In and out real quick?” Before I’ve even finished my sentence I realize what a stupid thing I’ve just said. My verbal diarrhea immediately elicits a row of laughter from my classmates, and I know I won’t live this one down any time soon. I back up, apologize to the standardized patient, and try to explain what I meant. It’s no use. He reprimands me for using such unprofessional language and warns me to choose my words more carefully in the future.

No duh.

For a minute, I try to shake it off. Maybe instead of beating myself up for my poor choice of words, I should just roll with it. Maybe this can be my trademark. Maybe I’ll open up a chain of clinics called “In And Out Clinics” where you come in for a genitourinary exam, and if it takes longer than four minutes, your exam is on the house.

But it’s no use. I’m flustered. My face is burning. I fumble my way through the remaining formalities before we move on to the meat of the exam. When I ask Mr. T to disrobe, and begin the inspection phase of the exam, he reminds me to explain what I’m doing. I tell him I’m inspecting his genitals for “redness, swelling, or other abnormalities.”

He adds to that, “and parasites. Don’t forget to tell the patient that you’re inspecting for parasites.”

Parasites? Really? I mean, yes, I’m examining for parasites. If you’ve got a leach on your balls, I don’t think I’m going to miss it. But I’m sure as hell not going to tell a patient point-blank: “I’m examining your genitals for parasites.” That just sounds bad. (Not that I’m an expert at sounding good, but I’m trying.)

The next phase of the exam is the palpation, which means I have to stretch the guy’s penis out and feel it for lumps, and then feel his scrotum and testicles for any masses or other abnormalities. This goes without incident until I work my way over to his left testicle. “Did you feel my varicocele?” He then proceeds to maneuver his left testicle into position so that I might feel his enlarged veins.

I palpate his left testicle and the the knotty tangle of veins running around his spermatic cord. Mr. T instructs me to feel for something that has the consistency of a wad of limp noodles. “Yeah, I guess I feel it,” I say, and add, “but I wouldn’t have pegged that as abnormal.” Again, my classmates all snicker at me. I add, “but maybe that says more about me than you care to know.” That makes everyone laugh a little more and somehow I feel like that awkwardness bomb has been momentarily defused.

Up next is the prostate exam. Before I lube up my finger, Mr. T addresses me and my classmates with a helpful tip. “I think it’s worth pointing out that I can feel it when you palpate my prostate. Because the prostate and the penis share some common nerves, stimulation of the prostate makes a tingling sensation in my penis. So I will know if you palpate the prostate or not.”

Oh, okay. Great. Thanks for sharing?

I ask Mr. T to rest his elbows on the table. (We were instructed before the exam to watch out for language like “bend over and spread your legs.”) I inspect his rectum. Hemorrhoids. I tell him that I’m about to insert my finger into his rectum. “Take a deep breath… and exhale.” I slide my finger in. I can’t tell what I’m feeling. It’s a dark slippery mess, and honestly, I could just as easily have my finger in a hot pocket, and I wouldn’t know the difference. I slide my finger in a bit more and eventually I come on something that feels different. That must be it. It seems abnormally large and firm to me. But what do I know?

“That’s it,” he says.

Thank god.

Trying not to seem too overzealous, I swirl my finger up the lateral walls of his anus to feel for masses, and I’m done. I pretend to test his stool for blood on a prop guiac card, and I make a bee-line for the sink so I can deglove and wash my hands.

I tell him that everything’s normal. Keep in mind that I have no idea if this is true or not. But it lets me conclude the exam and begin the long process of recovery.

The point of these clinics is not to teach us about pathology. The point isn’t even really to teach us about what a normal anatomy looks like. Of course, those are bonuses if they occur, but we’ll see enough normal and enough abnormal in the coming years to learn what a normal prostate is and what an abnormal prostate is.

The purpose of today’s exercise, really, was just to get us used to the idea that for the rest of our professional lives, possibly, we will be sticking our fingers up people’s butts. We need to know how to do this, how to be comfortable with it, and how to make the patient comfortable with the exam. After the male genitourinary clinic, I can actually say that whatever fears and anxiety I felt about performing a digital rectal exam are significantly diminished, thanks largely to the excellent instruction of Mr. T. Am I totally comfortable? No. But I’m not sure if you ever get totally comfortable with these things. I suppose only time will tell. The one thing I can say for sure is that I won’t sweat a gallon of nervousness into my clothes the next time I have to do this. And that’s a good thing, because the next time I perform one of these exams, it will probably be on a real patient. And to me, that makes all the anxiety of today worth it in the long run.

So, with one GU exam under my belt, I return to the clinic waiting room until it’s time for my next exam…

The dreaded pelvic exam.

More on that soonish.

Note: The image at the top of this article was found on Flickr. It was taken by the Flickr user “The Doctr” and is titled “275 | Exam.” I have reprinted it here under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works 2.0 generic license.

If it sounds to you like we’re being disrespectful or unprofessional about dissecting a human body, you’re probably right.  But I would also suggest you try taking a hammer and chisel to the spine of someone who resembles your grandmother, and hearing the bones crack, and feeling them give way from your blows, and then get back to me.  I defy you to do that without throwing up about 1,000 primordial defense mechanisms, because I say it can’t be done.  So yeah, we make some jokes about how her back fat looks like coconut creme pie, and we laugh, because really, we’re all traumatized as shit by having to mutilate a dead person every day.

So yeah, I cut open a human heart with a pair of scissors the other day.  Let me tell you, it sounds way more badass than it actually is.

My cadaver (“Dorothy”) was a pretty big lady (let’s just say she liked her McDonald’s).   She died of heart failure, and her heart was enlarged–probably a result of hypertension, which would not be not surprising considering that she was obese.  In addition, her heart was covered in a thick layer of fat that we had to dissect through to find all the intrinsic vessels of the heart.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought of the heart as this solid, firm organ, kinda tough, but ultimately resilient.  I mean think about it–this thing beats millions of times in a normal person’s life–is more active than any other muscle in the body.  How could it be anything other than durable–that’s kind of the definition, right?  Able to withstand a lifetime of use?  Holding a heart–literally–in your hand, you realize just how fragile the thing really is.  I’m finding the same to be true of pretty much everything we dissect in lab–everything in the body.  It’s kind of startling to think how much work goes into building a human body–thermodynamically, chemically, etc.–that is so easily and irreversibly destroyed with one deliberate swipe of the scalpel.  It took this wonderful woman an entire life to make the body we now find splayed out in front of us in lab, and within a few hours, we’ve stripped her of her skin, or we’ve sawed through her chest and removed her lungs, or we’ve chiseled our way into her vertebral column to expose her spinal cord.  The net effect of all the cuts we make in a normal day in lab would most definitely kill a person, if they weren’t already dead.  It was tough to come to terms with this at first.  But you also know that you’ll never learn any of ten thousand things you have to learn if you don’t get in there and dig until you find it.

There is something very zen about picking away through layers of fascia for long stretches of time in order to find a tiny little nerve, no thicker than a spaghetti noodle.  And then, when you finally do find it, you must exercise the utmost caution not to apply too much pressure, or it will snap.  In a living person, severing that nerve might lead to irrevocable muscle atrophy, or paralysis of a limb, or loss of sensation to some portion of skin.  And if the same thing were done in a living person, it would never heal.

We are such intricate, delicate beings.  Life, in and of itself, is an amazing thing, and I think that goes without saying.  What’s also remarkable, and often under appreciated as the miracle that it is, I think, is that we can not only be born alive, but that we can be born healthy, and stay in relatively good health more or less until we die, riding the crest of a lifetime of subtle physiological equilibria that can usually keep things working as they are supposed to.  Knowing that so much can go wrong, sometimes it’s amazing to me that we aren’t always sick, all the time, and I’ve become hyper aware of my own health.  It’s not much fun.

A lot of cadavers in our lab had severe lung problems when they died.  Let me tell you, seeing firsthand the damage that smoking can do to your lungs will make you never want to touch a cigarette again, and regret the fact that you ever smoked at all.  The lungs of these smokers–the lifetime, pack a day habit smokers–they’re just so much worse than you can imagine.  We’ve all seen the pictures of the smoker’s lungs, dark and cruddy looking.  Well, that’s nothing.  The cadaver at the table next to mine died of lung cancer.  He had little meatballs growing in his lungs, but otherwise his lungs looked fine.  What is troubling are the other ones–the ones who were lucky enough to not get cancer, the ones who never had to quit smoking.  Their lungs are tiny little sacks of black tar, shriveled to less than a third of their normal size.  And they smell–even in a lab full of dead bodies, you can make out the smell of a stale ashtray wafting from these lungs.  And when we open up the trachea, we find congealed black mucous.

I used to smoke.  In college, I probably smoked a pack a day for a while, and even in the last couple years, though I have cut back significantly, there have been plenty of times when I smoked a pack over the course of  a weekend at the bars and then vowed to quit again on Monday.  But that’s all over now.  I’m done.

The problem is, my head just isn’t in it.

I wish it was. But when I study, all I think about is the bad news I got on Thursday night. My dad left my mom and they’re probably going to get a divorce. Furthermore, both my parents are recovering alcoholics, and recent events have triggered a relapse in the family. Things in my family haven’t been this stressful since I was a teenager when they first went through treatment for their addictions. (More on that later–I’ve been meaning to talk about that anyway.)

Needless to say, I really wish I could be there for my mom. She’s emotionally devastated, and she needs some support in a bad way. Unfortunately, I’m hundreds of miles away, without much power to help. I wish I could go up to see her, but I can’t–not right now. I’ve got to study and get good grades. It has taken me years of hard work to get to where I am, and I can’t risk it not working. I’ve got to do my best to stick it out. At the same time, I feel incredibly guilty for not being there for my mom. I feel like, by not dropping everything to go up to see her, I’m effectively saying “what I’m doing is more important than you are.” While I can tell her I support her and love her and all that, actions speak louder than words, and I feel like my actions are screaming out something I would never say.

Bottom line is: it really, really sucks that this is happening right now. In hindsight, I suppose I saw it coming, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen now.

Oh well, c’est la vie. Gotta study. I have a date with phosphofructokinase-1.

Monday was the first test.

I studied.  Every day, after class, I reviewed the lectures, made notes.  Then, when I was through making notes, I previewed the next day’s material.  I studied every night, sometimes until well past midnight.  And as the test approached, I kicked it into high gear.  When I say I studied hard, good god, I mean, I studied hard.  I read.  I took notes.  I highlighted my notes.  I drew diagrams.  I made flash cards.  I did practice questions.  I did everything I could think of.  I stayed at the library for 12 hours on Saturday, and 8 or so on Sunday.  I thought I was golden.  I have never studied like that before.

I’m not used to studying that much.  While I did my fair share of studying in college, if I had studied like I have been in the last couple weeks, I would have gotten 100% on every test.  I would have made a 4.0 5.0 GPA.

But apparently, that level of studying, for medical school, is only sufficient to get B’s.

While I can’t say I’m upset with my grades, I’m sure as hell not exactly thrilled either.  But I guess I’m just going to have to get used to it.  I’m going to try as hard as I can to do as well as I can, and from that point, I’ll leave it in the hands of god (or whoever) because if I worry, or stress out, or dwell on my performance, I’ll simply go insane.

There’s simply no time for that kind of thinking.

I’m not sure if the people who plan the medical school curriculum are intentionally sadistic, or if the volume of information presented in medial school simply necessitates a sadistic schedule, even if the people who draw up the curriculum are reluctant about subjecting 160 people to such a grueling pace.  Regardless, the people who planned our curriculm are some sadistic bastards.  I don’t care if they meant to be or not–the pace is just brutal.

No sooner had my classmates and I finished our first test and begun a celebratory catharsis by drinking away the memory of all things related to DNA polymerase than we realized–shit–we have a quiz in two days.

That’s right.  Not content to give us just one massive test in a week, the powers-that-be in our administration decided it prudent to add insult to injury and throw in a quiz.  A mere two days after having our study skills demoralized en masse, we were to face yet another academic humiliation.

I’ve only been in class for about two and a half weeks now, but I think I’m starting to understand how it works.

There’s no time to get comfortable, no time to relax.  Like a little buoy bobbing along in the ocean, even when the water seems calm, you’re still bobbing–up and down, up and down.  In the calm water, you’ll establish a rhythm.  Class, study–up and down–take notes, make flashcards–up and down, up and down.  That’s the easy part.  But you’re at the mercy of larger forces–namely gravity and the rhythm of the tides–your professors and their tests.  These bigger forces dictate your motion–up and down, up and down.  If you’re lucky enough to be in sync with the rhythm when a big wave approaches, you might get splashed, or you might get tossed around and shaken up, but you’ll stay above water.   But if you’re still bobbing to the rhythm of the last wave that shook you when another wave comes along, however, you might just get toppled and sucked under.

I’m looking forward to a three day weekend.  Free student passes to a baseball game!  Sweet!  Gonna drink beer and root for the away team.  (Not to be a dick, but because they’re from my hometown!)

Oh, wait, I have several… The weeks stretching from the last part of July into the early part of August were hectic for me.  “Hectic,” actually, would have been nice.  No, those few weeks were something more–intolerably frustrating, perhaps?  Maybe they would be better described as “maddeningly overwrought with thousands of trivial loose ends that I was ethically and morally bound to tie up.”  Either way, from about July 15th to August 5th, I realized what it must feel like to be a pinball, bouncing around from one bumper to another at the whims of nothing/no one in particular except the force of gravity and whoever/whatever is controlling the flippers.  I was holding down a job and moving to another city, somehow, AT THE SAME TIME.  I wish I was joking, but I’m not–I actually moved to another city (hundreds of miles away) to start med school, then went BACK HOME to finish out my last two weeks of work, before moving AGAIN the weekend before school started.  Not the smartest way to take care of business, I know, but it was the only way I could make it all work.

And if all that business wasn’t enough to keep me from updating, there was also the lack of internet… that’s right, I didn’t get the internet hooked up until today, so it was pretty much impossible to update until now.  So, I apologize for the lack of any posting whatsoever for this last stretch of time, but I promise that you can expect more updates now that I have a reliable and private internet connection.  (I had thought about posting from the school library, but I’m still paranoid that someone might see me posting and put two and two together.  I’m not quite ready for that.)

Well, I have a ton I want to talk about, but it will have to wait until a little later, when I have a bit more time for a really good post.  Suffice it to say that I’ve recently completed my first week of medical school!  There was a quiz on the third day of class, and thankfully I knocked it out.  (Only missed one out of 15…)  There’s a test next week, too.  My, my, my…

During the first week, I went to lecture everyday, then when lecture got out, I went straight to the library for a few hours (until dinner), and then, after an hour or so of dinner, I hit the books again until midnight or so.  It was intense–Like 14 or 15 hours of class-related, ass-in-seat, nose-in-book learning every day.

I already know I can’t keep up that level of commitment, or I will do one of two things.

Either:

a.) go insane from lack of even a quasi-regular social life

or

b.) lose all normal cognitive function from lack of sleep, and wither away into a shriveled mass of lumpy tissues from lack of proper nutrition, exposure to sunlight, and exercise.  (In other words, I’ll turn into a World of Warcraft player.)

I’m hoping I can circumvent either of these two unfortunate outcomes by finding the happy medium between studying and living a healthy existence.  The problem is, I don’t know if such a thing exists.  We’ll see what I come up with.

Okay, so I promise I’ll give a more thorough update this weekend when I have a little more free time.  I just wanted to check in and let everyone know that I haven’t disappeared, and that I fully intend to keep this thing up!

Best of luck to those who, like me, have recently started med school!