Originally posted by srlondon:
•As a 4th year, one of the things that I find most interesting about med school is that it highlights the odd subjectivity of life. In short, your mileage can, and will, vary. You can ask ten people about a class/clerkship/movie/etc and invariable four will hate it, four will love it, and two won't remember the question long enough to answer it. So making decisions in your own lived based on the opinion of any one person (our distinguished visitor Justin included) is pure folly to begin with.
From my perspective (which I encourage you to take with a grain of salt, and perhaps disregard completely if this suits you), med school is a long, winding, rocky road which, unlike many things in life has a guaranteed payout. Even if you slog it through school and decide you never want to touch another patient, you will have an eminently marketable degree which you will never regret having after your name. While med school is tough, it is hardly, hardly insurmountable. There are certainly things in life which are far worse. And for every doctor who bitches and moans about how his life sucks and how if he could go back and change everything he would have become a lawyer/chef/gigolo/fighter pilot there are 20 people stuck in crappy, low-end, minimum wage jobs with no useful responsibility, opportunity for creativity or self-expression, and certainly none of the intangible rewards that physicians get more than most people such as respect, social stature, and the feeling of doing something vaguely worthwhile with one's life. Joe Average never even has a glimpse of the things which make medicine so great, and he's largely miserable. And do you know what he does? He sucks it up and goes to work the next day because he doesn't have any alternatives.
My point in saying this to you is not that I'm accusing you of being a whiner or an ingrate. Much to the contrary, I'm just trying to express the oft-forgotten point that while med school is no panacea, it is a lot better than most of the other things you could be doing with 4 years of your life. Is it always pleasant and enjoyable? No. But there have been days I've had in the hospital which I wouldn't trade for anything. Yes, it can be that rewarding and fun. Nobody's got any guarantees in life, and nobody said that life would be easy. Med school is no exception to this tenet.
So where do you go from here? My suggestion is to stop worrying and first do a little re-evaluation of your life as a 1st yr. If you are busting your ass for your grades and not eating/sleeping/doing fun stuff, then you need to make some major changes in your schedule before you work yourself into the ground. There is no reason that you shouldn't schedule fun time into EVERY day. I don't care if you've got a biochem exam the next day. Watch TV. Read a book. Call a friend. Do you think that one single hour is really going to make this difference between passing and failing. No way in hell. Med school is a marathon, not a race, and you will either a) finish what started the weekend you walked away from school, b) run yourself completely into the ground, or c) destroy yourself as a person and finish up med school a miserable exhausted slob.
Furthermore, do not mistake the basic science years for what the rest of your life will be like. They are like the nasty-tasting metallic wrapper which surrounds your favorite candy: They must be dealt with and disposed of in order to reveal the good stuff which lies beneath. Until you enter your clinical years and get a taste of what being a doctor is really like, then you have no real basis to decide on whether or not your are going to radically alter the course of the rest of your life based on what you're gonig to do for the next few years. Don't forget--medicine is not a single career. There are litterally hundreds of disparate turns your life can take... from researcher, to anesthesiology to urology.
What to do now as a motivator to get through the 1st two years? Find something that you like doing, and do it whenever possible (check local laws in your area before doing anything hasty). Volunteer at a clinic and deal with patients, and let them remind you why you bothered with this nasty process in the first place. This never fails to make me feel better. Even in my darkest day in med school, walking into a patient's room and talking to them has never failed to make me feel better.
I've gone on long enough, but let me just say that I would take this episode to be an indication of the fact that you might not be going about med school the right way rather that you are wrong for it or that it is impossible to make it through. Learn from your mistakes and give it another shot. You can drop out or decelerate at any time. But getting back in after you walk away is a lot tougher. And don't hesitate to drop me an email if there's anything else I can do to help.•
