A Med School Memoir

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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