Anatomy

Okay, not all medical students like anatomy. Many consider it the first hurdle in medical school. But hurdle aside, every medical student remembers what it was like to be in anatomy lab. Stepping into anatomy lab for the first time is a roller coaster for the senses. Every sensory neuron in your body becomes overwhelmed by the smell of formaldehyde, the beaming fluorescent light, the cool still air, and the sight of students surrounding a cadaver, a human cadaver. From the first day, you won’t know if you love it or loath it, but the stink of anatomy lab won’t let you go, at least for a couple of months.

Some students will dive right in and create masterpiece recreations of Netter, while others would rather read anatomy than dissect it. Some students may become attached to their cadavers and squirm when their anatomy professor tears up their work of art to find one little artery or nerve, or was that a ligament? It’s hard to tell sometimes, but at least it’ll be clear during the exams! Or not.

Who could forget the memorization involved. This was when our color coordination, mneumonic making, and story telling skills evolved to a higher level of desperation. With anatomy, we had our bodies in front of us to help us visualize where everything was supposed to be. Need an anatomy lesson? Take off your clothes. At least, the pick up lines were endless.

Anatomy was a memorable time in our lives. We’ll always cherish the gift that our cadavers gave us. We’ll alway wonder what our anatomy professors did in their spare time. And we’ll never ever ever forget the time when we accidently cut the cadaver’s bowels (Humbling Moment #6). Thank you anatomy.

Naps

There’s nothing like chronic sleeplessness that really makes a medical student appreciate the concept of naps, especially power naps. When that coffee, tea, or energy drink isn’t working, and there’s no other way to fight the powerful force that is sleepiness, why even fight the inevitable? Resistance is futile! Take a nap!

If you walk through a medical school, don’t be surprised by the occasional student completely knocked out at the cafeteria, the student lounge couch, the ’study room’, or in class. For some unexplained reason, lecture is the best place to take a nap. It may be the warmth from neighboring bodies, the drone of the professor’s voice, or the dimness of the room, but within ten minutes of lecture, heads drop and there’s no stopping it. And if you do start napping, make sure you have a nap-wingman to poke you awake when you start to snore or drool or mutter in your sleep.

Be warned that when you sleep in school you may fall victim to “sleep shooters”, peers who will take unappealing photos of you and post them on social websites such as Twitter or Facebook for their own entertainment (Humbling Moment #5)

Oh naps, I wish I could have more of you! Even if you give me funny book imprints on my face.

Professionalism

Being in medical school, the term ‘professionalism’ is emphasized, underlined, and capitalized on the very first day. When I first started medical school, that term was so daunting. Professional. Cue in montage of men and women in business suits looking sternly at you with judging professional eyes. Yikes!

No one ever taught me how to be professional in college or in life. Yet somehow I passed their bar for professionalism during the interview process. A true whodathunkit. When used as a noun, to be a ‘professional’ is to simply be an expert at something whether it be medicine, law, baseball, or paper airplanes. But as an adjective, I’ve realized that being ‘professional’ is the grown ups word for the ‘golden rule’ but in a totally serious manner.  To be honest, I still don’t get it but have caught on to this dance. For example, I make sure to say my ‘thank you’s and ‘your welcome’s because being nice is apparently part of being professional. I resist releasing gas in front of my peers because that’ll get you in serious trouble! And don’t even think of murmuring the dean’s full name in the hall ways.

Seriously though, just be  nice, courteous, and don’t touch your patients ‘that way’ and that should get you through at least third year!

First Aid

When mentioning the words ‘first aid’, a lay person would think a box or bag full of bandages, gauze, alcoholic in emergency situations. Well the ‘first aid’ to medical students is for an emergency situation per se, but it’s not boo boo related; it’s the national boards! Help! Whether you’re an MD or DO to be, the ‘First Aid for the USMLE Step 1’ is a must once second year comes around because at the end of it, our basic knowledge of EVERYTHING we’ve learned during our second year is tested. It’s a lot. That’s why there are hundreds of resources out there that willingly take our money…I mean…offer us help in battling this beast called boards.

Let’s talk money for a moment. Below is the amount of money I’ve spent on board related expenses:

2009 First Aid: $31.46

USMLE Step 1: $495

COMLEX Part 1: $465

USMLE World Qbank 60 days: $135

Used BRS Physiology: $10

Rapid Review Pathology: $35.05

Used Kaplan COMLEX review books: $85

Losing your social life for more than a month of so:  %&#(@#*#!!!!!!

So, we’ve accepted it reluctantly. We’ll just take out another loan to pay for this and the large amount of coffee and caffeine to sustain ourselves.  No big deal. Now comes the time to actually go through First Aid and we realize that all this sounds familiar but do we really have to know this detail? The answer is yes and more! Unfortunately, the First Aid doesn’t have it all. So we write on the margins, highlight the whole thing, and tag it to death. By the end, if your First Aid doesn’t look beat up and broken then you’re doing something wrong or you’re very neat and if that’s the case than good for you.

Break

Whether it be Spring, Winter, or Summer Break, after finishing that last final, a medical student is left to wonder of what to do now. See, usually after an exam some medical students would go out, have a drink [See previous post], but still have the next day’s busy schedule buried deep in their subconscious. However, that nagging feeling of responsibility is replaced by this sudden exhilaration and happiness for two whole weeks of freedom that is, ironically, mixed with feelings of confusion as well. Why the confusion? Well, what do we do now that our time is not occupied with studying?!

Medical students refer to life before medical school as our ‘previous life’. During break, we’re forced to remember what we did in our spare time in our previous life. It can be a slow process and require baby steps for some cautious medical stuents that are still under the whiplash of break. But in no time, we readjust our minds towards general relaxation mode.

We enjoy sitting, eating, sleeping, you know the normal things mortals do. We also like to go out to get our daily dose of Vitamin D, but hurry back in as to prevent skin cancer. We’re really paranoid now thanks to our knowledge of diseases. Of course, some medical students are more adventurous than others and actually stay out longer than one hour.

Here’s to break and…hey Judge Judy is still on TV…

Post-Exam Revelry

Have you ever wondered while passing a full bar, why the hell are there people drinking in the middle of the day on a Monday? Wonder no more! It’s 1) alcoholics or 2) students, particularly of the medical variety. There is nothing more beautiful than just taking an exam and having the rest of the day to veg, to catch up on Tivo-ed shows, to wash clothes, to heal relationships, and of course, to party. Who said medical students don’t know how to party? You’d be surprised. After being cooped up in a room for days (you don’t want to know what happens behind those doors), our fried brains seek comfort. Be it ice cream, the gym, video games, or ethanol containing beverages, we want nothing more than to relax our muscles into full brain-dumping mode.

More importantly, what post-exams mean to many of us is catch up on sleep. If possible, we stay up long enough to drive ourselves home, work very hard to not break any traffic laws or hit inanimate objects (Humbling Moment #4), and roll ourselves in sweet sweet bliss. It’s so spectacular! A thing many take for granted! Truly heaven on earth!

Good night America! I just had an exam and I need me a martini with an fluffy pillow on the side.

Laptops

So you’ve been accepted to medical school? Congratulations! Getting accepted to medical school is like getting a huge tax return. You’re excited for all that money you’re getting and you’re ready to buy that nice waffle maker as a treat for yourself! However, you realize that you’ve been paying too much to begin with and feel kind of ripped off. Guess what? That feeling doesn’t go away, and the bad part? You don’t get a tax return. (But of course, you’re getting a medical education which is priceless)

The excessive spending begins with your first purchase of a laptop. The following statement may seem like an exaggeration, but it really isn’t: Without a laptop, you are nothing. A laptop becomes your detached organ of knowledge. There’s no symbiosis here. You just plain need it. You need it to check your email ten times a day. You need it to study powerpoints. You need it to watch recorded lectures. You need it to read online books and review for exams.

A new laptop evokes much excitement from your peers, much like a new baby. We start to crowd around it, take pictures, hold it at night. We are very attached to our laptops. And a broken laptop or a lost laptop is a tragedy. People will offer their condolences and ask if there’s anything they could do. It will hurt every time as every heart break cuts deep. But nothing can replace that knowledge, those memories. Until you get a new one, of course.

(By the way, I wrote this with a laptop. See?!!)

“Diagnosing” Ourselves and the People We Know

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, according to the DSM-IV (The big book of psychiatric disorders), defines obsessive as “recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate [ie persistent dread of failing] and that cause marked anxiety or distress [yes and yes]” and compulsive as “the behaviors or mental acts [ie excessive studying and consumption of coffee] are aimed at reducing distress or preventing some dreaded event [dropping out of medical school! Ahh!] or situation.”

The above definition pretty much sums up the average medical student. But that’s aside the point. Really, above is an example of the one in many scenarios in which I’ve found myself diagnosing–myself and the people around me. Learning about psychiatry is really interesting because (1) Psych is kinda interesting, (2) Psych is mysterious, and (3) Psych makes you realize that you and the people you know are really borderline in some psychiatric disorder. Number 3 can be both eye-opening and/or shocking, yet may allow you to understand why a person acts the way he or she does (and that may be more than you’d like to know).

However, it doesn’t stop in psych, through every system that we learn, we find ourselves realizing that one of our family members or friends may have this. “Oh! Uncle Jim totally has urinary incontinence…and now I know why.” Sometimes knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Even our family members and friends start to approach us with medical questions that would usually be socially unacceptable to ask, and it always seems to be related to cancer. “Is this mole cancer?” “My poo has been green, is that cancer?” “I think I have a lump on my breast, can you check if it’s cancer?” What people don’t realize is that–we’re medical students! We’re just walking textbooks that have yet to be molded into competent doctor figurines!

Even so it’s still fun trying to diagnose that mole, poop, and breast lump because we’re all a little narcissistic.

Studying While Working Out

Learning about diseases that could be prevented by lifestyle choices highly motivates some medical students to stay fit while other students resort to the Wii, which by the way hasn’t been found to lower cholesterol, diabetes, or risk of heart attack…yet. However, there’s the issue of not having time since doing absolutely anything else really cuts into studying time. How do we solve this dilemma of working out versus studying? Well, we study while exercising of course!

You’ve probably seen it before at the gym. A person attempting to jog on the treadmill with a gigantic textbook in front of them. I say “attempt” because all the vertical movement makes it quite difficult to focus on the words. To resolve this, one might stabilize oneself by leaning forward onto the treadmill, thus allowing movement in the lower extremities while completely locking one’s back and upper extremities. The problem with this is that we look ridiculous, but we do it anyways because it’s oddly effective. We get our 30 minutes of cardio in while reading roughly two paragraphs, albeit over and over again. But by the end of that 30 minutes, we know those two paragraphs by heart and that’s two paragraphs less to read! Hey anything counts.

So the next time you see someone studying while working out, just hope they don’t trip, fall, and rip their pants right off (Humbling Moment #3). Because I’ve seen it happen before and it’s just sad.

Color-coordinated Notes

Have you ever sat in on a lecture with medical students? If you have, then you must have heard clicking sounds that bothered you for the whole hour. The constant clicking noise that you witnessed was simply an innocent multi-colored pen being switched from one color to the next. Do not be shocked by this unusual act, it is only the medical student’s way of feigning organization as he/she scribbles “know this” and “important” on the side margins of printed powerpoint lectures.

To look at a medical student’s notes is to look into an organized chaos of thoughts. Like our creative mnemonics, we find color-coordinated ways to visually remember the endless capsules of knowledge that float in our mind. Looking at written notes is like looking into insanity and looking at highlighted books is to see the color spectrum sprinkled over the pages in a very specific manner that only the highlighter could understand (ie blue = noun, pink= verb, etc). It’s almost like an art form really, a very nerdy and modern art form if you can appreciate it.

And like the mnemonic there is a dilemma in the coordination as well. Once we take the test, there’s a common mishap of remembering the color of the thing we’re supposed to know, but not remembering that very important slice of knowledge. “I know it’s within the shade of pink that I highlighted in Chapter 4, but what is it!?” It’s amazing how we are able to pinpoint the exact location in the book but fail to remember the contents of that sentence.

So if you ever happen to see a person highlighting almost every word in a book in different colors, just understand that it somehow makes sense and don’t ever ask to borrow a highlighter from this individual.