News Flash

I have an announcement.  Med school is hard.  Shocker, I know, please alert local media.  But no, seriously, and the reason isn't what you'd think.  It's not that the material is that difficult.  It's not even that it's an overwhelming amount of material (although it is a lot, lot more than anything you might have had in undergrad).  The reason med school is hard is because you never. get. a break. Last Monday, I had two sets of exams, and on Tuesday, we had class from 9-5.  So I studied like mad all weekend, took exams on Monday, and had to get right back to it on Monday night to read ahead for the material on Tuesday.  It's Thanksgiving break, and instead of just relaxing, I'm going to have to start reviewing for finals.  It just never lets up.  And it's that, the constant need to be doing something 24/7 to keep it, that wears you down.  There are times when your brain just wants to rest, but it can't.  Or there are times when you really need to study, but you can't because your brain just can't take any more that night.  Thank God Christmas break is only 3 weeks away.  

Exams, Again

Monday was our third set of exams, and they went really well.  Honestly, I've not had much to write about because life has pretty much been nothing but studying lately.  We've had some good times up in the gross lab with my group, and everyone is glad head and neck anatomy is over.  Now we're on to the limbs, which are much more appealing--mainly because structures are a lot bigger and simpler, for the most part.  

I can't believe we're only a week away from Thanksgiving.  I feel like I've blinked and this semester has disappeared.  I'm beyond ready for a break, though...Thanksgiving and Christmas will be extremely welcome.  Beyond that, I'm actually kind of excited for next semester, because it will mean no more labs, and, from what I've heard, pretty much no more class.  Apparently most people last year just stopped going to class altogether in the second semester and studied on their own and did fine, so I'm kind of looking forward to that idea.  I mean, if I can just get up and study while D is at work, it will mean a *much* more congenial schedule for both of us, which would be a most welcome change. 

Christmas

Friday night at home

cold rain splashing the windows--

but inside is warm.

Cozy on the couch

as we lie cuddled up close, 

just us and the dog,

the whole house is quiet

no noise but the soft raindrops

to pierce the moment.

I study, he sleeps

dreams of more money, perhaps

or a better job

but I am content

though we do not have much now

just to sit, watch, learn.

Tonight we went out

no dinner and a movie

just Target wand'ring

came home with Christmas

in our bags, ornaments and

advent calendars...

Better than a date

because Christmas is my time,

our time now for joy

and to have a tree

means more than any fancy

dinner ever could. 

GObama

I can't really find the words to express the way it felt to wake up today and know that for the first time in a long, long time, Americans have a reason to wake up and feel hopeful about the future of our country and the world.  

I have never seen people so emotional, so excited, so passionate about the results of an election.  I remember in the first grade, when Bill Clinton got elected, watching TV and thinking it was pretty boring.  I remember being a freshman in high school when the Gore/Bush election turned into a month-long fiasco decided by the courts--even then, when the final verdict was decided, people simply accepted the decision and moved on.  I remember in 2004 being angry about the lines in Ohio, but watching the resolute acceptance and congratulations speeches by Kerry and Bush.  Last night there were more than speeches.  Last night there were more than just parties in hotel rooms where the candidates were watching.  Last night, at 11:00pm, when California's projected votes came across the TV screen and Obama was declared the winner, there were hundreds of thousands of people waiting in Chicago to celebrate.  There were horns honking outside my home in suburbia, fireworks set off across the country in neighborhoods in states traditionally conservative.  This was, clearly and concisely, a different election.  This election mattered in a way no election has in recent memory.  This was the American people's chance to take back what was theirs, to live up to our creed that all men--black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim or atheist--are created equal.  That everyone has a chance.  

I have never been brought to tears by the reactions of political journalists.  Until last night.  Because now I can tell my children that only forty years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed because he believed he should be able to share a bus or a restaurant with a white man, we elected a black man to the highest office our nation has to offer.  But more than that--we elected a man who will (hopefully) bring America back to the standing it once had in the world as a respected power.  One who will show up in palaces and offices the world over and carry with him the message that America is once again an open, thoughtful, peaceful nation with the world's best interest at heart.  One who has brought the fire of hope back to the eyes of the country, even those at the bottommost rungs of society, that America can once again be the land of opportunity for those willing to work together for its improvement. 

I am, for the first time that I can honestly remember, exceedingly proud to be an American.  I am proud of my country, proud of its people, proud of its president, and proud of what we have been given the opportunity to be once again.  I cannot wait to see what the next four years will bring.  I am excited to practice medicine in a country where people are not denied care based on income, excited to raise children in a country that uses diplomacy before unilateral forces of strength, excited to move forward in this new atmosphere.  Here we go, world.   

Halloween

It must be said that there is nothing quite so gruesomely appropriate for Halloween as sawing a human head in half down the midline.  I have to admit, that while I didn't have a huge problem with the idea going in, seeing the violence with which a human body was literally cut into quarters was a bit...unsettling, to say the least.  Once it was done, however, it seemed perfectly acceptable as we sat back to our dissecting.  

Med school is an odd, odd experience. A point made not least by the fact that it is 10:30 on Halloween night, and I am sitting at home reviewing the embryology of the placenta and fetal membranes.  Because I have nothing better to do.**

I'm a horrible procrastinator.  I'll probably just give up and start playing Mario on the Wii here shortly. 

**Actually, I really don't have much better to do tonight...and D is off tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to a day with him with relatively little studying, which is why I commit myself to this seeming torture at present. 

I knew it would happen eventually...

Thursday, I had an experience that I have often heard about from female med students, but never really thought would happen as much as they made it out to.  I was at Starbucks, getting my weekly fix of caramel apple cider spice and a vanilla scone (oh, how my weaknesses show), and I was also working my way through our neuro self-study book.  When I initially walked in, the line was really long, so I sat down and worked until everyone had gotten their drinks.  Then, when I went up to the counter, my book was propped open to a page about the decussation of the corticospinal tract in the lower medulla.  The lady behind the counter (probably middle-age or so, I'd say) saw the page and proclaimed that that looked really difficult and hard.  Then, the question:

"So are you a nursing student?"

I politely informed her that no, I am indeed a medical student, to which she replied that she had had a roommate who was a nursing major and that the roommate had made Starbucks Lady quiz her on stuff that looked a lot like my book.  I informed her that I make my husband do the same, and we laughed.  

Once I had my delicious apple cider, I did muse for a moment over the exchange.  I'd often heard that whenever a female tells someone who is not associated with the medical field (or not often exposed to it) that they are going into medicine, people automatically assume you are a nurse.  To me, that's such a foreign concept.  If someone told me they were going into medicine, I would assume they were going to be a doctor, or physician's assistant, or something like that.  If they said they were going into nursing, I would think they were going to be a nurse.  For me, the two are completely separate in terms of how you describe them as career fields.  Nurses work in the medical field, yes, but I've never heard any of my nursing friends describe themselves as working "in medicine."  They just say, "I'm a nurse."  Same as I say, "I'm a med student."  Or maybe, "I'm crazy."  So where do people get this whole "medicine = nurse" thing?

Ah, the lovely preconceptions of the outside world. 

Honors

I got honors in histo!  I'm a straight-up bad ass.  

In all seriousness, it was quite exciting, though I'm still not sure it makes up for the 5 days of unrelenting brain-mushifying that preceded the exam.  The good news:  I also got really good grades on my gross exams two days later, despite not studying all that much.  Now we're moving on with head and neck, which, while rumored to be about the hardest part of gross all year, seems not to be that bad.  Especially considering that while there are a lot of structures that we're looking at in lab, they are all in relatively well-defined places, as opposed to the pelvis (where stuff could just arise from anywhere it damn well pleased), so that might actually make things even a tad easier.  I don't mind memorizing branchings and pathways of arteries.  It's finding a tiny little structure that should be so easy but takes 3 hours of my day that's frustrating.  

We also started embryo and neuro yesterday, and so far, I thoroughly enjoy embryo.  It's easier to remember things when it's more of a story, rather than a series of random facts like histo was.  Also, being one who hopes to someday have a child, I find it sort of...more personal?  That's probably weird or creepy or something, but it's fascinating to me all of the things that my body will do in only 8 weeks time to come up with a tiny human being.  

In the news of life outside med school...things are going quite well, though I've become consumed with blog reading lately and it's begun to infringe on my study time to a ridiculous degree.  I texted D earlier tonight to ask him if he would please, please, hold me accountable for getting done with head and neck flashcards and reviewing yesterday's embryo lecture by the time he gets home.  He said that I must study or die...so I guess I should probably get working on that. Particularly since I plan to do NO studying this weekend, as Monday is my birthday and I plan on using some well-deserved down time to celebrate. 

Freedom

Exam week went...well, it went.  It was the first time I've really understood the stuff I've read on other med blogs or from other people about the insanity of studying that is med school.  I literally crammed for the histo final for over 5 days straight.  Cramming for my undergrad histo final took about 3 hours.  My brain has never felt so overstuffed.  Luckily, however, gross comes much more easily to me (I think it's a visual thing) and so the fact that I kind of blew it off to study histo didn't bite me in the ass too bad.  It was pretty funny, though, because the night before the gross final, D was quizzing me on some of my flashcards, and after about 40 of them (out of the almost 500 I had prepared), he asked, "How in the world do you do this every day?  This is the most horribly boring thing I've ever done."  Welcome to my life, love.  

I got honors in histo, which is exciting.  It would be more exciting were it not for the fact that, due to a ridiculous extra credit opportunity that the professor meant to be used by people who were failing to bring their grades up (but instead was used to pad grades by almost everybody), 44 out of the 150 people in my class got honors too.  Oh well, an H is an H, at this point.  

The only problem I have now is that I feel like gross should be over, too.  It really does feel like we've been at this for a semester already.  Too bad it's only October.  And tomorrow, we get to replace histo with not one but TWO new classes, which are supposed to be the hardest of the year.  Oh, joy.  If I don't manage to catch up on blogging for a while, forgive me. 

This weekend, however, has been pure bliss.  I almost don't know what to do with myself since I don't have to study at all.  It's a fabulous concept.  This afternoon, I really need to mow the lawn...but I somehow think I'll end up playing on the wii instead. 

Exams, part deux

Next week is our second round of exams, and things are infinitely more spread out this time than they were last time.  Yet somehow, I feel just a bit less prepared or more behind (can't quite figure out which).  We had a practice practical for gross a few days ago, and the tags were (in my not-so-humble opinion) pretty poorly put together.  There were several where they didn't have time to clean things up, make sure you knew where an artery was going, or even that a correlating structure was in view--and those are generally the only way of knowing for sure what a structure is.  Ah well...I passed even then, and it's pretty much a given that the real thing will be infinitely easier.  I just worry because I'm good at it, I think.  

Today, by contrast, we had a practice histology practical and it went far better than expected, given that I have not really had much time to study the slides.  What I was more concerned about coming into the histo exam is that I won't have enough time to really review the written material to the point that I really know it, but I've made it through three "sections" worth of flashcards this afternoon and evening (in addition to making flashcards and doing a first run of yesterday's lecture material, which I didn't get to yesterday) and it feels like things are, for the most part, going pretty well.  I was attempting to do one more section but I just feel like at this point I'm so tired that nothing's really going to be worth it.  It's still more than I thought I would get done today...but I needed to get lots done today because tomorrow I'm going to the Old Crow Medicine Show concert!!!  If you don't know Old Crow...they're a modern bluegrass band with a fiddle player that I would seriously give my right arm to play like.  Although in a massive twist of irony, were I to actually give my right arm, I would then be completely unable to play the violin at all.  That's life for you. 

But no, in all seriousness, I really am very much looking forward to this concert.  A new friend from school was looking for someone to go with her, and I jumped at the chance, and D is actually off from work early enough to go, too, so hopefully a great time will be had by all.  My goal is to get through another 2-3 sections of histo tomorrow and take a gander at the cross-sections we're supposed to know for gross prior to going out...but we'll see how that goes, as I also really need to go birthday shopping with my mom to select things for my list.   For having a test next week, this actually stands to be a pretty good weekend. 

Med School is a Crazy Thing

I feel like I'm not being nearly as productive in studying for the upcoming exams we have next week as I was for the last exams we had.  On the other hand, I'm taking practice exams for gross and doing FINE, so I can't force myself to be too much more concerned.  And so, in lieu of reviewing the pelvic viscera, I have decided to compose a list (one of my all time favorite activities). 

Things no one tells you you get to do in med school...because they're CRAZY. 

1. Saw into a body.  Literally.  We have successfully completed dissecting the abdomen and (almost) the pelvis for our practical exam in gross next week.  However, to really get at the branches of the internal iliac artery, it was necessary to find a..."better"...view of things.  And thus, we hemisected the pelvis.  When professors tell you you're going to "hemisect the pelvis," it sounds relatively benign and medicalized and stuff.  What it really means is that you're going to cut any organs in half with a scalpel and then take a giant hacksaw to the middle of the pubic bone until you hit vertebrae and head out the other side.  Then you take that same hacksaw right above the right hip and hack through until you have, for all intents and purposes, a leg.  A leg that is vaguely reminiscent of a scene from Jurassic Park, just sitting there all by its lonesome.  And then you can turn it all over and review all the arteries and such from various positions.  You can also carry said leg across the room for a professor to look at and help you identify things when you can't get anyone's attention to help you for three hours in the lab...or maybe that's just our frustrated little group. But yeah, the point is, they let you SAW A BODY IN HALF.  So cool. 

2. You get face to face with a whole lot of nastiness.  Like poop, for example.  And not just poop.  Dead poop.  Poop from the rectum of a person who has been dead for a good six months, just chilling out in the rectum until you saw it in half (see above) and all the poop spills out on your hacksaw and lab table and gloves and EVERYWHERE.  One of the girls in my group has a baby and deals with poop daily.  Even she was grossed out.  The entire room essentially just giggled our way through it.  Perhaps this is less appropriate a respect level than you might prefer around cadavers, but really....it's poop. 

3. You will study until your face falls off.  Well...maybe not quite.  But oh my lord.  Back at the beginning of the semester, I studied a good few hours every night and felt pretty good.  I would try to review most of the stuff from the week on the weekend.  In general, I felt pretty up to speed.  Now, for some reason, be it laziness or inefficiency or who knows, I feel like I'm studying all the time and not getting anywhere.  Earlier this week in histology, we had an hour and a half lecture on the eye and ear.  This lecture was based around 17 pages of lecture notes.  That's right...17.  17 pages which I turned into 114 flashcards (and probably could have been more, because by the end I was making some pretty darn loooooong flashcards in an effort to save time and preserve my sanity).  17 pages and 114 flashcards that will account for a grand total of SEVEN exam questions.  *weeps*  But anyway, the point is that you could study 24/7 in this kind of an environment and still not know everything.  And you somehow just have to come to terms with that and do your best. 

I'm sure I'll have more to add to the list later, but for now, this is it.  I'm falling in love with lots of other med blogs, which I should probably link up at some point to this, but I'm not sure how and I don't really have time to figure out right now, because I should really go review some histology.  Man, I will be glad when this course is done in another week. 

Down There, and other thoughts

I dissected a clitoris today.  You truly know how far down into the medical school chasm you have dropped when you are standing around a table with a group of 4 people, all of whom have their faces about 2 inches from a dead woman's crotch, some of whom are holding her legs as far apart as possible, and all of whom in perfect seriousness are attempting to claw away at a clitoris to find the dorsal nerves.  As a friend of mine put the other day, "it's like being a porn star who specializes in sticking things up people's asses, except instead of making bank, we're all paying $50,000 a year for this beautiful experience."  So true, man, so true.  What this really means, though, is that gross lab is starting to take way too long to find very few structures.  On Monday, we spent 3 hours finding about 6 nerves in the ischioanal fossa.  That's right, we spent 3 hours picking fat our of a dead person's ass.  This is what happens to you if you donate your body to science.  I often wonder if our donors or their families really knew what would happen to their bodies when they made this decision.  I mean, personally, I don't think I would care, since you're not really "there" any more, but next week we are going to cut these people into quarters.  It just kind of makes you think. 

Our professor who teaches the pelvis is awesome.  Hilarious, actually.  I love him as a teacher.  Unfortunately, not so much on the material.  There's a lot of little bitty structures that go strange directions with no good pictures to use to visualize them, so rote memorization kicks in and it's kind of boring.  Especially when added to the MASSIVE amount of memorization we're doing for histology right now.  We have our histo final exam two weeks from today, and while we do have the blessing that it's not an actual cumulative final, it's still going to have twice the information on it of the last two tests, and those were brutal enough to study for.  I really don't mind studying--in fact, so far I feel like med school has been much easier than people made it out to be like--but for some reason histo just bores the living daylights out of me if I spend more than an hour or so doing it, probably because it's all just rote memorization of TINY (and I do mean tiny) differences between various things.  And it's hard to really get that you're going to need to know how to differentiate between a primary bronchus and a segmental bronchus on a slide at any point in your career, unless you become a pathologist, which I don't plan on doing.  

I find it interesting that whenever I tell people in school that I'm interested in pediatrics, I often get the response that people could never do that, that they want to do something exciting like surgery, etc.  It's rare to find someone (even among women, even among married women) who are actually currently interested in something like peds, or even ob/gyn.  Everyone, it seems, wants to be a surgeon, and I kind of feel like odd man out.  I have no interest in surgery.  I mean, I'm sure it's cool, and a good rush and all, but I have honest expectations about what I want in my lifestyle.  I want to have children before I am 35.  I'd like to start before I'm 30, although that might push it a bit.  But one reason I'm interested in peds (or possibly med/peds, since I sat in on a really interesting lecture about that the other day...but that's another blog for another time) is because I will graduate medical school at the age of 26.  Three years of peds residency puts me at 29 when I finish.  That means I could possibly have children in the last year of my residency or shortly thereafter and still be on track to not be 60 years old when they graduate high school.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that idea...but apparently there are just so many people who are content to put off the idea of family because it's not something they want *right now*.  Maybe it's because I'm already married, but I know that in six years, I am definitely going to want kids.  And I'm going to want to be around for them.  Really, I'd even like to be able to take some serious time off to spend with them, possibly even work part time if it's feasible.  And so I want to specialize in something that will accommodate that fact.  

On a completely different note...we've been having a lot of labs recently with our standardized patient.  In the past two weeks, we've learned to take vital signs and to do a lung exam (or at least to pretend that we know how to do one, since we really don't have to be able to recognize what we're hearing yet--only to demonstrate that we know how to go through the motions), and on Monday I'll do a cardiac exam.  A lot of people seem to think of these as a pain, but I love them, because I get to actually feel like a doctor and I see them as the "useful" stuff.  The "real doctor" stuff.  You get the idea.  And apparently, I'm good at the "real doctor" stuff...my SP for the lung exam told me I was the only person she'd had all day who percussed lungs the right way the first time.  Woot.  Unfortunately, I embarrassed the daylights out of myself in the vital signs lab when I walked in and the SP asked me to demonstrate how I would normally start an exam when I walked in the room.  I stuck out my hand, shook the "patient's" hand, and said, "Hello, my name is B, and I'm a medical student.  I'll be taking your vital signs today."  At which point the SP stared at me as though waiting for me to do something else.  So I continued... "What brings you in here today?"  At which point she stared more.  ...   "You need to ask for her name."   Oh....and here I thought we already had that on the chart.  Apparently not.  Ah well...it's a learning experience.  

Now, unfortunately, I must get back to memorizing the perineum, because tomorrow is the histo day from hell.  

Hope, and then some

First exams came and went and I did really well.  Continuing to study was almost painful at first but getting easier again as we continue in the swing of things, finding my rhythm.  Finally got to go play trivia again last night, which was a much needed release.  Something about my goofy guys just relaxes me...  I find it odd and even a bit surprising that one of D's best friends (best man at our wedding, no less) has slowly but surely become one of mine.  I say odd because we're definitely not your typical "best friends"...I mean, we don't call each other a lot or talk about much on our own, but we do hang out sometimes when he comes to stay at our house and we wait for Daniel to get off work, and he can always make me laugh.  I hope every day that he finds a great girl and we can all laugh together, because laughter is something we could just all use more of.  

The past couple of weeks (maybe three, even...) have been a complete roller coaster on the personal level.  School has been, well, school, and everything's fine there, but there have just been a lot of personal issues for D and me.  Some of them very long-standing, others new, but it's been very emotional.  I think, now, that we've finally gotten to a point of upswing.  We've made some deals and compromises that I hope we can keep, and I hope they can help him (and me) to climb out of the dark place we've found ourselves in lately.  Today, things went really well, no problems...and for maybe the first time I'm actually allowing myself to hope that we might yet work our way out of this.  He's started running again.  It was kind of a fluke...I read somewhere that lots of people who are in his situation (which I'm sorry, for anyone who might ever read this, but I'll not name here...) benefit a great deal from exercise, especially those who used to be big athletes like he was.  Last night at trivia, I asked one of his good friends who also used to run to make him do it again.  And right now, they're off at the park.  I'm hoping it will help ground him, give him a bigger friend base to lean on, and work off some of the energy he can build up sometimes.  Meanwhile, it gives me time to reflect and study and mow the lawn.  It's one day at a time....but hope is like air around here right now.  

Black Monday

Should be a Led Zeppelin song.  Instead, it's the day when our med school initiates us into its ranks with a barrage of 4 exams, including histo written and practical and gross anatomy written and practical.  It was yesterday.  I spent all weekend studying, hampered by the lovely arrival of hurrican Ike on Sunday (which, yes, was *actually* classified as a tropical storm as it trampled on us here in the midwest).  The power went out at about noon on Sunday and my dearly beloved laptop decided to bite the dust about 2 hours later (along with all of my study material), and so I headed out to the local hospital where my sister is currently residing thanks to her dastardly appendix.  At least I knew they'd have power.  The tests went fine--I got well above the average on both of the gross exams, and I feel pretty good about the histo written.  The histo practical was my weakest showing and I don't think it was a very fair test compared to the first one, but ah well.  I'm at least reasonably sure I landed around the average of slightly above.  Hopefully those scores will be posted tomorrow morning so we can at least know the damage.  

We had a clinical lecture today about skin cancer.  Newly added to the list of disease I would never want to have: malignant melanoma.  Those were some NASTY pictures.  Yuck.  Also, you'd think that the day after we were just tormented with 4 exams they might give us a slight break from life, but no, we had class from 9:30-5 today.  It's really hard to make your brain focus on histology and the integument when you're completely mentally exhausted.  Actually, I'm not that tired...I actually seem to have fared better and been much better prepared than a lot of people for the tests yesterday, but still.  It's cruel.  I need a holiday or something.  

There was also a meeting about med/peds residency today at lunch, which I found reasonably interesting.  Right now I'm most interested in going into pediatrics, but this did seem to have some good points about the relative merits of being board certified in both internal medicine and peds.  If you see patients, for instance, you have the advantage of seeing them their whole lives in continuity, you have a distinct advantage in the niche of adolescent medicine (wherein most pediatricians don't necessarily know as much about the issues of a 16 year old and most internists really don't deal with anyone under 18), and you get a nice variety rather than getting burned out on stuffy noses or hypertension as you might if you did one or the other.  Something to think about, at least.  

Another one bites the dust

Had our first exam today in histology, and I think it went ok.  There were maybe 4-5 questions that I was iffy about, one of which I'm almost positive I missed (but that's because it was a poorly-asked question, in my opinion).  Still, even if I missed all the ones I wasn't sure about, I'll still end up with like an 85% or more, which is fine by me.  I'm desperately trying to kick the old pre-med competitive attitude out the window--not that I'm competitive with other people, but with myself I am ruthless.  I hate not doing as well as I think I should've, which, considering my record in undergrad, is basically perfect.  I don't know if I'm quite satisfied with an 85%, but considering I don't feel like I could've done much more to help myself do better, I'll have to just take it and run.  I think the next test will be better, and I'm actually kind of looking forward to the first gross exam just because I enjoy the concepts of gross more, so studying is more enjoyable than the rote memorization of tiny minutiae required of histology.  

Unfortunately, my pre-test "ritual" of sorts was interrupted this morning by the fact that my poor littlest sister was in the ER having to have her appendix removed.  She's been sick since Monday, went to urgent care yesterday, and finally returned to the ER at about one this morning, where a cat scan showed her appendix had perforated.  By the time they operated, it had ruptured, but she's done with surgery and doing much better now.  The saddest thing about the whole situation was the medical student in me, upon hearing the news that she would need surgery at about 5:30am, could only think "dear God please let the on-call surgeon have gotten some sleep."  So sad, but so true. 

Last Friday was a great day in anatomy lab.  Our course director actually complimented how well my side of the body was dissected in the mediastinum, and we got out extremely early.  Good times.  

Playing Dress Up...

Today was our first session with the SPs, or standardized patients.  Basically, these are people are who paid and trained (well) to act as though they have a given condition so that med students can practice taking histories, performing exams, diagnosing stuff, etc.  Since we've only been in med school for about a week and a half, our first SP experience was mainly just to teach us to get used to taking a patient history (asking about present illness, past medical history, family history, etc.).  So this morning, first thing, I got to get all dressed up in my suitpants and nice shirt and white coat, and I found myself suddenly standing in front of a clinic door, about to knock.  

It was the coolest thing I have ever done.  

When I walked in the building, I felt a little bit like a kid playing dress up...pretending to be a doctor, wearing my short little white coat that signifies that I'm not really anything yet, with my rudimentary knowledge of the heart and connective tissue all I had going for me.  But knocking on that door *just like my doctor does* and walking in and greeting the "patient" *just like my doctor does* and sitting down and chatting with them and asking about what's been going on to make them come to see me *just like my doctor does* really hit home that THIS IS WHAT I'M HERE FOR.  I came to medical school not to study away for hours and hours, not to memorize random minutiae about the brachial plexus, but because eventually, I will be the doctor knocking on doors and hearing about people's problems and secrets and troubles and joys.  I will be the one who for whatever fateful reason will be privy to many people's most intimate moments of pain or happiness when they find out that they're going to die, or going to live, or going to suffer, or going to heal.  So before I knocked on that door this morning, I felt like a kid just going to school day in day out.  For some reason, when I knocked and walked in and there was a girl sitting there saying she had back pain and diabetes...it just sunk in that this is what it's all about, this is what we're training for.  And it was the coolest feeling ever.  

It also felt good that my SP told me I did a really good job with her history, that I had pared down the ridiculously long list of questions used to review the body systems' functions into a manageable list of relevant questions to her problem.  Her only critique was to try not to ask two questions at once, as people may sometimes get confused or only answer one of them.  Overall, she said I was very calm and talkative and easy to work with.  And it made me happy.  It made me feel like no matter how I do on my upcoming histo test, I might just make a good doctor.  

All of a sudden I think I've found my groove.  I think I'm gonna like this med school thing after all.  

One week in...

and a whole lot left to go.  First week actually wasn't so bad...spent the vast majority of my time attempting to learn about a semester's worth of cell bio in four days, which was relatively time consuming since I never had it in undergrad.  Once we hit epithelium on Friday, I was set.  For anatomy, honestly my only "concern" is that it's seemed far easier than I had imagined thus far, at least as far as the academic material goes.  Granted, there hasn't been that much of it, but I feel like I've done well getting a handle on it pretty quickly.  Lab....well, lab is another monster.  It's not that I don't like lab.  I think it's pretty cool to be able to see all this stuff on a real human, especially when you find weird little abnormalities and differences.   It's just....well, for one thing it's insanely tedious.  Spending three hours in a lab where only about half an hour is spent actually identifying structures is insanely frustrating to me--the rest of the time is generally spent cleaning (i.e., picking fat off of stuff) or watching.  Doesn't really help that I'm not terribly fond of the people I'm at the table with.  Not that they're bad people, they're just...not my type, for lack of a better phrase.  

The biggest thing, though, is that while I'm pretty much 100% sure I'll be 100% fine academically, my biggest fear about med school thus far is that I'm never going to make any good friends.  It seems like everybody else in the class either knows people from UofL, or from prematric, or from somewhere, and so there are already these little groups of people who seem to be good friends, who study together and hang out after class or go to the gym together or something.  I keep trying to meet people, get to know some people to study with or hang out with or something, but it just never seems to work well.  Saturday night a bunch of people went to a local bar, but it was the same deal...everyone else seemed to already know everyone there except me.  It's very isolating...I just want to be able to have a small group that I can go out with for dinner or coffee or whatever after studying, but I can't seem to work my way in anywhere.  I've met a couple of people that I like who are very nice, but I can never find them in lecture to sit with and they're almost always gone before me in lab, so I don't get to see them much.  I probably shouldn't worry about this so much, but it just gets tremendously frustrating when all I want to do is get to know people.  I think I just suck at making friends.  

On a more positive note, the olympics were cool minus the crappy judging in gymnastics.  Sigh...four more years til London.  

Orientation, or, How I Learned to Sit Still and Make 100 Friends in One Week

Since the white coat ceremony on Sunday, my class and I have been subjected to a week's worth of orientation.  This has consisted of some interesting and useful information, but really seems to be more of an excuse for us to get used to sitting in a large classroom and introducing ourselves to 100 different people per day.  It also seems to be a good excuse to go out every night without feeling guilty.  Overall, it's been a generally fun week, and I've met a good few of my classmates, almost all of whom seem mostly pretty cool.  I've purchased my books, picked up my scrubs, and ordered my stethoscope, as well as laid claim to one of the very few remaining anatomy lab lockers.  I've gotten free food every day, and today I signed up for clubs.  Other than that, really, there is nothing whatsoever to report.  Getting used to getting up again has been relatively unpleasant, but I think I've adjusted relatively well.  

One thing I have noticed this week is that I've been surprised by just how many people in my class are married--I sort of had a feeling coming in that I would be just about the only one and I would probably be looked down upon for it, a la "Oh, you're *married*." (read: Why in God's name would you give up being able to study 100% of the time and do something crazy like get married?  You're not supposed to have a relationship in med school.  Hard core, hard core!!!)  In reality, on the other hand, most of the people I've met have been *extremely* accepting of it and almost 1/2 of the people I've met (some older, but many my age) are also married themselves.  I even signed D up for the spouse club so that he can get integrated into this new lifestyle of mine and not feel completely out of the loop all the time.  Hopefully good things will result.  

Orientation week ends up tonight and tomorrow with a barbecue tonight (followed by a late-night haircut for yours truly--thank God, because while it's starting to grow on me the cut I got last week is just not really all that fabulous), and then BLS training tomorrow morning and a house party that I may or may not go to tomorrow night.  Saturday, I'm hoping, I'll convince my mom to take me out shopping and snag a couple of new shirts for fall.  At this point, though, I'm really just ready to get down to things, even if I'll probably hate it by two weeks in.  

A Short White Coat

Today was the white coat ceremony at school, and now I have a short white coat with my nametag on it hanging in my closet.  It's a kind of crazy feeling...but at the same time it doesn't feel real at all.  Met my lab group, who seem decent enough.  The nicest thing about them (so far, of course) is the fact that there are 3 girls and 1 guy (including me) and all of the girls are married.  I see that as an advantage because all of us are committed to our families and, while we want to do well in school, refuse to get honors at the expense of our relationships.  So hopefully while we'll all be studying hard, it will also be easier to stay balanced and have a chance to get home at night without feeling guilty.  Not much else to report, other than orientation starts tomorrow morning, so I'm sure there will be much more to tell in the coming days. 

House Stuff

Spent most of today cleaning out our garage (which was previously full of moving boxes and random crap) so that I could store a bunch of D's random stuff (which was previously in boxes all over our study and bedroom) so that I could actually clear space in the bedroom and office for us to live and rearrange the furniture as necessary.  As this sort of task would have probably killed me to perform by myself, my mother was kind enough to come over and help, especially with the de-spidering of the garage.  The office and bedroom are beginning to look like they belong in a real house of a real adult person, which is a huge relief to me.  I was beginning to think that this house would forever be just an extension of the proverbial college apartment.  Also, I think I've picked a paint color for the bedroom, so hopefully by the end of this week that might get painted and pictures can go up on the wall and such.  If that all happens...by God, I think it'll be pretty much set with what we can do for now.  Eventually, obviously, there will be many more updates...but that's for when we actually have cash.  Right now I'm just hoping that we don't max out the credit card before the loans come in on the 15th.  

In other news, I finally finished all of the requirements for immunizations prior to school starting today...that only took about three weeks.  Finally, after two blood draws for chickenpox and hep B titers, I can call it a rest.  Still hard to believe that orientation is less than two week away.  And the olympics are coming!!  For a brief side note:  I LOVE the olympics.  I get warm fuzzy feelings when I see all the heartwarming stories of athletes against the odds and people breaking world records and thinking about my first major olympic memory of Kerri Strug vaulting on one foot.  It seriously gives me goosebumps, so the ability to DVR all of the coverage and use it as a carrot to keep myself going in the first few weeks of school will be absolutely fabulous.  

Back Home Again...

Just got back last night from a few days vacation with the family down in Florida.  D was upset because he couldn't go (couldn't get more than a week off from work, and the whole honeymoon thing kind of ate that up...)--he worries a lot that my family will always take precedence over us as a family unit.  Problem is...my family is everything to me.  My mom is practically my best friend, and I just relax when I'm with them so much more than I often can at home what with all of the worries about school or things that need to be done around the house or finances.  I feel bad that he thinks the way he does, but sometimes I feel worse that I want to spend so much time with my family.  

On a lighter note, the beach was fun.  Got my orientation packet in the mail along with my marriage license, so now I can spend the next week trying to get my name changed, ordering books and scrubs, finishing thank you notes, and hauling ass to get the house put back into respectable shape.  The back yard looks like a jungle currently, and the inside isn't a whole lot better.  Stands to be a busy week.  

Can we fix it?

Apparently, yes we can.  Almost two months to the day since we closed on the house, we finally went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of paint and supplies to actually start fixing up the house.  We also ordered a new stove with the gift card D's (that would be Awesome Husband) parents got us for the wedding--thank God, the stove that came in this house is so old I'm constantly afraid it's going to explode.  Seriously, you can't even see the difference on the knobs between 350 and 400.  I'm not much of a cook, so this definitely doesn't help the effort not to burn things.  

But the paint!  So exciting because now we can finally paint the study room and set it up with our myriad bookshelves, which in turn means that I can start looking for a desk and setting up my study space prior to the start of school.  Once that's done, hopefully we'll move on to the bedroom and get that done before August as well so everything will be mostly put together.  

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3...

So...of all the advice I've heard about going into medical school, probably one of the first and most oft-repeated was the admonition to write.  Didn't matter what, didn't matter how, but almost everyone suggested keeping some kind of journal, if for no other reason than to give myself a way to look back over what are about to be some of the craziest years of my life.  And so, without further ado, I began this blog.  The name, the balancing act, should be relatively self-explanatory to most...mainly because the second-most spouted advice I've gotten about medical school is to try to keep a balance (as difficult as that seems to be...) between school and life and everything else you're interested in.  I have a feeling this will probably be relatively difficult for me, even as compared to others...right now I live in a small town with my entire extended family within about a ten minute drive, I just got married and bought a house, which we're in the process of renovating, I coach kids' gymnastics classes at the same gym where I trained growing up, and oh...I'll be starting med school in a month.  A decent amount of things to keep balanced, to say the least.  As far as the whole "stay on the beam" thing...well, that goes back to the balancing.  I was always a balance beam gymnast--for whatever reason, I found it the most fun and easiest of all the events, although this is generally not how most people feel.  At one particular competition--one of my last, as well--I remember my coach coming up to me right before beam, waving frantically to give me one final piece of advice before the routine.  "Becs," he whispered, "You have to remember one thing...stay on the beam."  So that's what it's all about I guess...staying balanced, staying on the beam, getting through, winning, conquering the world...oh wait, scratch that last.  (My husband is probably coming out in me there, what with his penchant for playing games like Risk and Age of Empires.)  But anyway, now at least you know where the ideas for the blog came from.  Now, for a brief introduction of the players involved:

Becs--that's me.  For the sake of anonymity, not my real name, but you probably could've guessed that.  As mentioned above, I'll be starting MS1 in August at a large academic medical center in the midwest, only a few miles from where I grew up.  Went to college not too far away, majored in biology and religious studies, very interested in medical ethics.  Right now, I kind of want to be a pediatrician, but only time will tell what will actually happen.  Also as mentioned previously, I used to be a gymnast, still coach little kids' classes on occasion for extra cash.  Just got married, bought a house, now working on trying to get it all set up and painted and put together before school starts and my life is consumed.  (With that in mind, a desk should probably be a high priority...) Awesome Husband and I have the World's Most Awesome Dog, who also happens to be the world's furriest dog and who is cause for a great deal of time spent vacuuming.  I love Italian food, traveling, photography, white wines, shopping, video games, and wandering aimlessly through bookstores.  

Awesome Husband--the guy I married about two weeks ago.  He's pretty cool.  He works a lot, trying to pay the bills while I'm in school and leeching off of society with all my student loans, and even though it's definitely not easy I have to admit that one of the reasons he has been dubbed Awesome is because he rarely complains about the fact that he's putting off *his* schooling until I'm out so that at least one of us has a means of financial stability.  He enjoys soccer, traveling, video games (more so than I--he's pretty much a twelve year old when it comes to computer nerdiness), history, archaeology, and reading almost anything to do with ancient Rome.  He still opens doors and buys flowers on occasion.  We've been together for almost 6 years, engaged for a year, married for two weeks.  

There you have it.  Much more excitement to come in the ensuing weeks as preparation for the ultimate timesuck begins.