- Joined
- Feb 9, 2002
- Messages
- 1,903
- Reaction score
- 2
Thought some might find this interesting. Maybe allow us to take a step back from it all and look at the bigger picture.
Last fall, Maria began her four-year journey through med school. These diaries chronicle her experiences.
I have now officially completed five months of medical school. I'm not sure how I should feel about that. Should I be proud? I've done okay, but not spectacularly so. But is "okay" good enough? And is it something to be proud of?
I feel like the only thing I've really been tested on so far is my ability to retain arcane bits of knowledge for a number of days; I promptly forget all of it the minute the test is over. It kind of scares me to think that I'll be expected to recall this knowledge when the time actually comes to save someone's life. It's also a little hard to believe. How is pulling a B on a neurology exam going to help a future stroke patient?
I'm beginning to have major issues with the sheer amount of material our professors have been throwing at us. It seems like so much of it is there just to torture us; that because some Ph.D. decided that since it was the topic of his life's research, we have to learn it, even though it will mean absolutely nothing to our future patients or careers. Why can't they just teach us what we need to know? We often get bogged down in so much detail that I can't even tell what's important to know anymore. How efficient is that? And how is it going to make me a better doctor?
The only thing I've really learned so far is that stress management is key - not just for our success, but for our mental health as well. One would think that med students would already realize that, but I have never seen such a stressed out, unstable bunch of people as my classmates (fine, myself included) were before our first neurology exam. We'd been taught weeks of anatomy, brain pathways, and biochemistry — 90 percent of which was unfamiliar even to the neurobiology majors amongst us — and we were expected to know it cold. It was like memorizing the first three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in Chinese. The second-year students had made it a point to tell us that nearly half their class had failed their first neuro exam. While most of them felt intensely sorry for us, knowing that didn't really help.
I was proud of myself for getting to bed no later than 2 a.m. in the two weeks leading up to the exam, but otherwise I wasn't faring too well. I'd sit in class, hyperventilating at the mere thought of all the work I had to do once I got home. I'd silently curse the professor every time something I'd never heard before came out of her mouth, because that meant I had more to study. I scowled each time a classmate asked a question I couldn't understand, because that meant they'd covered material I had yet to cover. The work I had to do felt like a force pressing down on my chest; I'd often get dizzy and short of breath just thinking about it.
But when I felt I was starting to lose control, all I had to do was look at some of my classmates to get a little perspective. I ran into one of them in the hallway while she was getting a drink at the water fountain a few days before our exam, and asked her how she was doing. It shocked me to see her burst into tears — she was one of the most confident people in our class, rumored to be near the top. Plus, I didn't know her all that well, so I was really surprised when my casual question elicited a very personal response. She confided that she hadn't s lept in a week, and couldn't keep a single morsel of food down — she threw it right back up. She felt weak and lightheaded and hadn't been able to study in days. Just talking to me seemed to stress her out more: Her eyes bulged, and she was speaking so fast while crying at the same time that she was hiccupping.
I had no idea how to comfort her. How was I in any position to give another person advice on how to stay calm? I found myself saying things to her that my mother had said to me on the phone hours earlier, when I too had called her in tears: Was it worth all this angst? One test, how much would it matter in the long run? Who would even care? Certainly not our patients. I told her she just had to do her best, and stick it through till exam day. She'd done fine so far, I said: She would do fine again.
But I knew she was thinking exactly what I thought when my mother said these things to me: You have no idea what this feels like. You don't know how much there is left to be done and how, no matter how much I do, it will never be enough.
My first couple of months here haven't all been nightmarish, though. I've done some things I never imagined I'd have the chance to do. Like hold a human brain. It's weird to think that even though there's so much we already know about how the brain works (at the very least it felt like a lot, based on how much we had to study), we still don't really know where our personalities really come from. I can identify the parts of the brain that help us see, smell, hear, even vomit, but I can't tell what makes me me. It kind of saddened me to realize that one brain doesn't even differ much from another. Our cadavers' brains were no different than the identity tags that came wrapped around the corpses' toes: They gave us absolutely no clue about their personalities.
I was a little grossed out when the time came to saw open our cadaver's ribs, but my queasiness vanished when we lifted them off to reveal his lungs and heart. I cut through all the big vessels connecting the heart to the chest cavity, lifted it out, and suddenly I was holding a human heart. I don't even know what it is about it that fascinates me so; it's just such a vital organ. What are we without our hearts? How many years had this one been beating, and what made it stop? It's such an amazing piece of tissue — so intricate and yet so perfectly formed. For the first time, what I saw in anatomy lab was far more colorful and exciting than what I saw in my text. Every valve was in place, every vessel there to carry blood to or from the heart, to the lungs, to the brain and body, at one time keeping this person alive. There it was, the key to life, lying right in my hands.
When I'm under the stress of an impending exam, these are the moments I forget to remember. They strike me with the kind of feeling that made me want to enter this profession in the first place. I guess I haven't been so proud of myself for surviving the past couple of months because I've lost touch with that feeling. All the studying, all the stupid details, all the stress has been sucking it out of me. I forget to just take a step back and let myself be struck by how awesome the human body really is - and how fragile it can be.
Last fall, Maria began her four-year journey through med school. These diaries chronicle her experiences.
I have now officially completed five months of medical school. I'm not sure how I should feel about that. Should I be proud? I've done okay, but not spectacularly so. But is "okay" good enough? And is it something to be proud of?
I feel like the only thing I've really been tested on so far is my ability to retain arcane bits of knowledge for a number of days; I promptly forget all of it the minute the test is over. It kind of scares me to think that I'll be expected to recall this knowledge when the time actually comes to save someone's life. It's also a little hard to believe. How is pulling a B on a neurology exam going to help a future stroke patient?
I'm beginning to have major issues with the sheer amount of material our professors have been throwing at us. It seems like so much of it is there just to torture us; that because some Ph.D. decided that since it was the topic of his life's research, we have to learn it, even though it will mean absolutely nothing to our future patients or careers. Why can't they just teach us what we need to know? We often get bogged down in so much detail that I can't even tell what's important to know anymore. How efficient is that? And how is it going to make me a better doctor?
The only thing I've really learned so far is that stress management is key - not just for our success, but for our mental health as well. One would think that med students would already realize that, but I have never seen such a stressed out, unstable bunch of people as my classmates (fine, myself included) were before our first neurology exam. We'd been taught weeks of anatomy, brain pathways, and biochemistry — 90 percent of which was unfamiliar even to the neurobiology majors amongst us — and we were expected to know it cold. It was like memorizing the first three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in Chinese. The second-year students had made it a point to tell us that nearly half their class had failed their first neuro exam. While most of them felt intensely sorry for us, knowing that didn't really help.
I was proud of myself for getting to bed no later than 2 a.m. in the two weeks leading up to the exam, but otherwise I wasn't faring too well. I'd sit in class, hyperventilating at the mere thought of all the work I had to do once I got home. I'd silently curse the professor every time something I'd never heard before came out of her mouth, because that meant I had more to study. I scowled each time a classmate asked a question I couldn't understand, because that meant they'd covered material I had yet to cover. The work I had to do felt like a force pressing down on my chest; I'd often get dizzy and short of breath just thinking about it.
But when I felt I was starting to lose control, all I had to do was look at some of my classmates to get a little perspective. I ran into one of them in the hallway while she was getting a drink at the water fountain a few days before our exam, and asked her how she was doing. It shocked me to see her burst into tears — she was one of the most confident people in our class, rumored to be near the top. Plus, I didn't know her all that well, so I was really surprised when my casual question elicited a very personal response. She confided that she hadn't s lept in a week, and couldn't keep a single morsel of food down — she threw it right back up. She felt weak and lightheaded and hadn't been able to study in days. Just talking to me seemed to stress her out more: Her eyes bulged, and she was speaking so fast while crying at the same time that she was hiccupping.
I had no idea how to comfort her. How was I in any position to give another person advice on how to stay calm? I found myself saying things to her that my mother had said to me on the phone hours earlier, when I too had called her in tears: Was it worth all this angst? One test, how much would it matter in the long run? Who would even care? Certainly not our patients. I told her she just had to do her best, and stick it through till exam day. She'd done fine so far, I said: She would do fine again.
But I knew she was thinking exactly what I thought when my mother said these things to me: You have no idea what this feels like. You don't know how much there is left to be done and how, no matter how much I do, it will never be enough.
My first couple of months here haven't all been nightmarish, though. I've done some things I never imagined I'd have the chance to do. Like hold a human brain. It's weird to think that even though there's so much we already know about how the brain works (at the very least it felt like a lot, based on how much we had to study), we still don't really know where our personalities really come from. I can identify the parts of the brain that help us see, smell, hear, even vomit, but I can't tell what makes me me. It kind of saddened me to realize that one brain doesn't even differ much from another. Our cadavers' brains were no different than the identity tags that came wrapped around the corpses' toes: They gave us absolutely no clue about their personalities.
I was a little grossed out when the time came to saw open our cadaver's ribs, but my queasiness vanished when we lifted them off to reveal his lungs and heart. I cut through all the big vessels connecting the heart to the chest cavity, lifted it out, and suddenly I was holding a human heart. I don't even know what it is about it that fascinates me so; it's just such a vital organ. What are we without our hearts? How many years had this one been beating, and what made it stop? It's such an amazing piece of tissue — so intricate and yet so perfectly formed. For the first time, what I saw in anatomy lab was far more colorful and exciting than what I saw in my text. Every valve was in place, every vessel there to carry blood to or from the heart, to the lungs, to the brain and body, at one time keeping this person alive. There it was, the key to life, lying right in my hands.
When I'm under the stress of an impending exam, these are the moments I forget to remember. They strike me with the kind of feeling that made me want to enter this profession in the first place. I guess I haven't been so proud of myself for surviving the past couple of months because I've lost touch with that feeling. All the studying, all the stupid details, all the stress has been sucking it out of me. I forget to just take a step back and let myself be struck by how awesome the human body really is - and how fragile it can be.
