OP -
The money wouldn't be an issue at all if you were guaranteed to get in. 90K is nothing when it comes to medical school - many people go to private US MD med schools and come out with 250K in loans (me) while many people go to state MD schools and come out with 150K in debt. That's already a differential of more than 90K, yet most people graduating from more expensive private schools can make it work no problem as they then buy a relatively modest house and no luxury cars and don't go into primary care. No big deal.
However, for somebody like you, you are really gambling whether you can get in. You have a huge hole to dig out of with your GPA. I'm sorry, but 2.6 is really bad. Sure, I think DO has grade replacement, but now you're talking more time and more tuition $$. And with a 2.6 GPA, do you really think you're going to be able to get a 4.0 as a post-bac? For many big state schools that have medical schools, they use every single med school pre-req as a "weed-out" class so they don't have 10,000 students from their undergrad applying to their med school with 4.0's. The pre-reqs are no joke.
Say it is 4+ years from now and you've do all the pre-req's and as many grade replacements as possible. What if you don't get in? Now, rather than being 90K in debt with a 40K, you are stuck with >150K in debt with no job and only spotty, minimal work experience over the last 4 years with a lot of volunteering. Your career potential went from decent to really, really bad.
Yeah, SDN is littered with success stories from bad GPA. But how many failure stories do you see? How many SDN IDs are there on this nontrad forum that sort of stop posting over time? Most likely they gave up/failed. Just look at the "read my blog" post - click on all those blogs and see how many of the blogs just sort of stop over a year ago. It'd be interesting if somebody looked for all the SDN posters on the non-trad forum that just stopped posting to get a rough estimate as to how many failures there are.
I don't know, I'm not saying don't try. But I do think you need to realize that you're in a really bad spot and if the cards don't fall right, you'll be guaranteed to be in debt for the rest of your life. Right now, with 40K salary and 90K in debt, you CAN pay off your loans, even if it seems impossible right now. Furthermore, being a doctor is no ticket to happiness. If you were unhappy in life before med school, you'll almost certainly be unhappy after. Happiness comes from within, not from a career.
