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.
Tags: diabeetus · diabetes · endocrinology · zombie wilfred brimley3 Comments
And yet, even having reviewed and learned it so many times, I still feel like I know absolutely nothing at all.
That is the scope of medicine; you will never know anything completely.
where did you go?! i hope the diabeetus didn’t eat you up…
Where did you go? you weren’t the craigslist killer were you?