Why all the hostility towards Onco? Believe it or not, there are some default happy people out there that can in fact, suffer and smile at the same time. I won't be surprised if he is singing the same tune in the next 2 years. I have never agreed on anything with him, but he sure does sound like he has enough "happy kool-aid" running through his veins to last him through all of his medical education. We cant all be bitter.
It isn't so much that he's happy that gets under people's skin. It's the fact that I sometimes feel like he's
assuming that he understands what we're complaining about. And it really seems like, reading his post, he doesn't. There IS a distinction between hating medicine and hating med school, but he didn't quite seem to understand that distinction. And I think that's what gets on some people's nerves. I think that, if he were in med school, he's have a better understanding of what it means to hate medicine vs. what it means to hate medical school.
Welcome to the real world. News Flash: Real life isn't much different.
True. There are parts of med school that are like the real world. And yes, those parts of med school are awful and soul-sucking. But, to me, there seems to be one interesting difference - in the real world, you can complain about how much you hate your job and no one says anything. But in med school, if you complain about how much you hate it and how it is slowly sucking your soul, the chorus of "But you should be grateful that you're in med school!" starts up. Usually from the pre-med peanut gallery, although not always.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of people don't hate medicine. They are burned out. Medical school is hard. And when you are physically and emotionally exhausted, and can't possibly study anymore, and still have piles of work to do, and maybe are wondering what specialty you want to go into, or if your grades are good enough, and a million other things, and you come on SDN to vent, having some cheerful premed talking about how your opinions are wrong, and you should love medicine or do something else with your life even though you've spent a ton of money, years of your life, and effort on this process, is unnecessary and annoying.
I agree with this a lot. It isn't even just the workload anymore. There's a lot of self-doubt, which (I've been told by family members who are MDs) never really goes away, you just adjust to having it constantly in the background. There's a lot of fear, mostly because I've heard "If you miss this symptom, then your patient could
DIE!" over and over again. That goes away eventually, I assume.
For me, personally, it's been having friends who are dying, and knowing that, no matter how much I study, I can't save them. There's just nothing that will cure them. For some reason, that hit me hard before the last exam. (Maybe I was just tired and burned out.) Or having a friend who is really, really ill and refuses to go to the hospital because he can't afford it. I can't help him then either - and, in that case, it was WORSE because I knew the clinical course of that disease and, therefore, what might happen if he didn't get help. That was also really, really hard.
Yes, med school really sucks sometimes.