Ah yes. We couldn't have a blog without a little Buffy, right? I never could quite figure out what Faith was referencing exactly when she said she was five by five. I guess it was her way of saying everything's OK. Or maybe not. She wasn't exactly OK, was she? I kinda get her though. I find myself saying I'm OK a lot of time when I'm not exactly sure that I am. I'll think I'm OK, and then I'll have a mini panic attack while I'm trying to nail down a pathway or cascade in cell bio. Yeah, we have our cell bio final tomorrow, and this is not my best subject. So my brain will start cramping and then I panic because I don't want to remediate cell bio. We always jump to the worst conclusions don't we?
We are trucking along here in block 7 now. We only have one more block left in our pre-clinical education. Then it's time for boards and clinical rotations. This block includes hematology, dermatology, and lymphatics. People will come up to me sometimes and ask if I'm almost done with medical school. Haha, no. But it has gone very quickly, especially second year. First year seemed to drag out indefinitely. Then this year started, and ZOOM! I feel like I've learned a ton, but then someone will ask me a question about a condition, and suddenly I'm like, oh. We haven't really learned that yet. Or worse, we will have learned about it, but maybe not the particular aspect they are wanting to know about. For most illnesses, we get clinical presentation, a little info on any kind of genetic goof-up if applicable, and drugs that treat it and their mechanism of action. If it's a bacterial infection, I should be able to tell you if the bug is gram negative or positive (in theory), which really doesn't tell you much about the disease course or what you can expect. It does help with the kind of medication that might wipe it out though. I'm hoping that kind of info will be more clear in clinical rotations.
Sometimes it seems like medical school is asking a little more out of me than I want to give up. Especially when something fun is going on, and I have to once again bow out and go study. Like right at this moment, my family is at my house eating nachos and chicken wings and watching the Super Bowl. Now, I'd rather eat crickets than watch a football game on TV, but I love a good excuse to get family together and eat junk food and hang out. But here I am studying for my exam tomorrow and feeling a little meh about it. I try to comfort myself with the fact that it will be over and I will be a real doctor, but that seems really far off from here.
Yeah I will deal with it, thanks. A really awesome lady told me one time that a lot of medical school involves holding my nose and getting through stuff I don't like. I think that was her reasoning for enduring organic chemistry in undergrad. So here I am holding my nose. But it's not all bad. We get to do some really cool stuff. Every Friday, we have early clinical experiences, and a lot of those have turned out to be really cool. Last week, I was assigned to shadow at a local EMS station. So I went to a firehouse and waited for them to get a call. Unfortunately, they didn't get any calls while I was scheduled. Or probably fortunately for the community. I never quite know how to feel about when I don't get to observe something because I know it means that nothing bad happened on my shift. Does that make me a bad person? I'm just sitting there on their couch like, I'm ready!
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