how doctors get weird

Every couple of weeks, I lose a little bit of my everyday brain. I keep myself very occupied with splanchnoderm, endoderm, hemothoraxes, pneumothoraxes, desmosomes, hemidesmosomes, streptococcus, pneumococcus, and thousands of other minute details that we are required to know. (As a side note, 85% of our professors have insisted that we "don't sweat the minutiae!" more than once...yet the minutiae is almost explicitly what we are tested on.) Yet in the last month, I've forgotten to brush my teeth twice, zip up my pants once, routinely misplaced my keys/wallet/chapstick/mind, and apparently got one day ahead on my birth control pills...something I noticed yesterday, but it definitely happened at some point before this weekend. Probably. Whatever, at least I didn't forget to take it...I just remembered so well that I took it twice.

My point is, by the time we finish med school, we're going to be a complete mess. Sure, we'll be doctors in every right, but doctors who forget to brush their teeth and spend longer than they should looking for the phone that they're holding in their right hand. We're going to come out of this experience weirder than we were when we started, and be responsible for saving lives. Yikes.

Hidden peril

Some time ago, I resolved to not be like so many families who live off of take out and microwave-prepared foods. Not because we didn't do family dinners when I was growing up (which we didn't, but I couldn't have cared less. I was a teenager), but when I was learning how to be a grownup, it was so much fun to go grocery shopping and make delicious meals in My Apartment. Salmon, walnuts, cranberries, brie, asparagus, herbs...the fancy recipes were endless.

Then, when you serve your time in the restaurant business, you don't get evenings for lovely dinners anymore. No, your Saturday night dinner is the staff meal of restaurant leftovers, eaten standing up. If there ever was an evening that T and I both had off of work (a true rarity), it was certainly not wasted on a Papa Murphy's pizza, Lean Cuisine, or any other aberration. That was for people who didn't value their glorious evenings.

Enter test week.

I haven't had time to shop for groceries in a month, we've eaten out at a Mexican restaurant twice, Papa Murphy's once, and, dare I say it, bought, cooked (in the oven, not the microwave...I'm not a complete heathen), and ate a frozen lasagna from Costco. Oh yeah, we have a microwave now. It came with the house. And I've used it. A lot.

The hidden peril of medical school: you will compromise most of your standards of living.

Human

The idea of cadaver lab never intimidated me. I'd seen cadavers before, been tested on them, and studied them without any problem. Even here, I was the one that made the first cut on our cadaver, no big deal. But there are horror stories of medical students who were so conflicted with their role in dismantling a human body that they couldn't be in their own home with the lights off. These bodies were once people, and some med students can't justify what, in a way, seems like morbid desecration.

We start with what might be the least-human body part (if that makes any sense): the back. You don't look in the mirror and see your back every day, and it's really just a flat edge of a body that usually has clothes covering it. The back is full of muscles that are large, small. and somewhere in between. It's interesting, but not particularly human.

Meanwhile, the rest of the body is covered. The head, hands, and feet are wrapped in an extra layer of cloth and plastic to prevent them from drying out before we've had a chance to dissect them. Occasionally, I catch a glance of our cadaver's ear, and it's a little startling. The ear, so distinctly curved and shaped, and unmistakably human, is an odd reminder that I've just been skinning a human body. It's not uncomfortable, just a gentle reminder that this is my first patient, and she was brave enough to volunteer.

For every unit, we switch lab groups and we switch cadavers. Strangely enough, I felt a little sad not to go to my same dissection table, and continue to get to know "my cadaver." I knew her when she was an intact body, and saw her make the remarkable transition from dead person to skinned teacher of anatomy. However grotesque a bond that is, it's a bond all the same. Throughout the next unit, I even "checked in" with her periodically. It's a good idea to get to know other bodies anyway, but I was mostly curious about what the rest of her anatomy looked like.

This is probably one of the stranger relationships I've had.

So...I've got this pain...

It's pretty remarkable how much people think you know as a first year medical student. When I was getting my daily coffee from the drive-through espresso/tanning joint we lovingly refer to as "el cheap-o," I was greeted by the owner with an "oh, good!"

"My daughter has this pain that was in her back last night, and now it's in the front! What is that?!"

A little speechless that someone was actually asking my advice for an innocuous pain in her grown daughter, I stammered a little, so she took the opportunity to continue:

"Is that where the gallbladder is??" She asked urgently, jabbing at her hip.

Encouraged by getting a question that I could actually answer, I explained where the gallbladder actually was, and gave her the harmless suggestion of staying hydrated and going to the medi center if she was really concerned. 1st real-world patient, 1st referral.

I guess this means I'm well on my way to physician-hood. Even though I really don't know anything yet. It's all about confidence?

let's try this again.

One of my fond aspirations was to chronicle my life in medical school via blog. I believe my last entry was precisely the weekend after orientation, and today is in fact the half-way point of the semester: week 10. Honestly, it doesn't seem like that many weeks or even days have transpired. This is now Life as We Know It and it's so full of learning and experiencing that I'm afraid it's going to be over all too soon.

Sure, it's really hard, and some days I feel like crying, and some days I do cry a few tears of frustration/agony/stress/despair...but those are brief moments of haze in a world otherwise naked in clarity. I love medical school, I love learning, and I wouldn't trade it for a thousand hours of peaceful rest.

The hardest part is the occasional mental block I throw up for myself. I can get lost in anxiety as I stare up from the rock bottom at an insurmountable mountain of information that demands I learn it all, but taunts me that I never will. Occasionally the mountain lifts up and crushes me with every ounce of cruelty it has. Those are the dark hours that make time move interminably, but inexorably. Usually though, I can ignore the mountain, and trudge resolutely onward. I'm OK, I promise.

There is so very much to catch up on, but it will have to be done one blurb at a time. Histology is beckoning.

4 out of 5

Today is a hard day. I don't know if it's my stress, T's stress, or a deadly combination of the two, but we had the first fight we've had in a very long time. I don't even know that it was so much a fight as an impasse. Or just a loud vocalization of quiet feelings.

T's reaction to stress is negativity and abrasiveness. My reaction to that is pervasive and consistent optimism. Only I can't be happy for the both of us for very long, and he has been stressed for the past few weeks. Right on cue, my stress creeps in at the midnight hour, and my survival plan cannot include optimism for two. It's standing room only. Usually I can just shrug my shoulders and let him tizzy himself out, but it's different this time. Because this one statistic just keeps flashing across my mind: 4 out of 5 medical students get divorced while going through school. Now we are a little bit of a special case since we're both in school...but does that make it half as likely? Twice?

Things are about to get overwhelming fast, and if things are this hard in the first days of orientation, how is it going to be when we reach our first test block?

I'm more upset with anxiety than anything. It's fear of the unknown. Although that unknown has been fortified with dismal testimonials from students who have come before me.

Before

Today is my last day of being a relatively normal human. Tomorrow, I am an officially abnormal med student. Not that I think much is going to change between today and tomorrow, but it's the start of a definitive new chapter book of my life.

For instance, in what other realm of the world is it socially acceptable and even expected to cut up and dismantle a human body? Or to ask a perfect stranger how often they have sex and with whom and other sordidly private particulars? I'm on the threshold of a changing role. What's OK for me to do, ask, or say and what isn't, is about to change.

Really, I'm just excited to get started, get my books and my stethoscope. I'm not afraid of my changing role, I can't wait for it! But as I think about all the things I'm just barely beginning to step into, I suppose this day counts as a momentous occasion. It doesn't really feel momentous; just another day. But it's really the last day of me, before med school. My uncertainty will soon give way to more uncertainty, and maybe someday, secure confidence. Tomorrow is the first certain step toward that, where I will begin to look back at the naive before med school me of today...I wonder what's in store...