Blogging. Apparently I am not very good at it. Goal for the next year is to be better!
Well, I did it! I finished my first year of medical school. I must say that last August, as I was going into it I was cocky and completely underestimated the impact that it would have on my life. The past 9 months or so have been harder than anything I had experienced before. For example at one point mid-march during our Neuro (neuro-anatomy and physiology combined with A/P of the head and neck) I found myself dreaming of being on fire. Not the kind that generally requires transport to the hospital, but the kind where you work with 20 of your best (or not) friends for 16 hour shifts for weeks in a row with no break. That sounded like a vacation compared to my repeated 14 hour study days. Studying for 14 hours in a row is an amazing feat of pain and torture that I didn’t even realize existed before medical school, especially for someone who has reached the age of 25 without learning how to sit still. I try to minimize the amount of time I spend staring off into space, maximize the number of study locations available to me, and do pushups when I start to fall asleep sitting up.
The mantra of the academic advisors and professors at our school is to keep up and not to get behind. This is a great theory, but I have not yet figured out how to do this. There were days where we would have lecture and lab for 8 hours, then I would go home feeling like the organ inside my cranium was made out of blue cheese dressing instead of gray matter. At home I would try in vain to review and comprehend the previous 8 hours of my life, generally by trying to make my notes legible and reviewing power point presentations. Then, here is my favorite part, the professors would like us to prepare for the next day i.e. do the reading and preview the power points. I still don’t know how to pack review of 8 hours plus preview for the next set of lectures into one evening. There must be a way.
The course of the semester was pretty rigorous. We started out with Renal A/P (anatomy and physiology) then move onto the Endocrine and Reproductive systems, followed by Neuro (as explained above). After Neuro was over we were rewarded with a much needed spring break. After break it was into Immunology and we ended the year with Pathology. I had hoped that it would ease up after the immunology course because we were also done with our Osteopathic Principles and our Principles of Clinical Medicine class. Alas, Pathological Basis of Disease was harder yet.
The good news is that I now have six weeks of nothing to do...well let me re-phrase…six weeks of cutting trees, going to weddings and hiking. My goal is to read for fun, not for school and maybe do a couple of art projects. We will see how it goes!
