Medical School

10172001

Humph!!! it’s about 5am and i have been studying surgery for hours. for those of you who are ambitious premeds this is one of those marathon study sessions where all you do is eat, sleep and study (yes, yes pottie breaks are okay- diapers are better). but for the last couple of nights i’ve been studying from around midnight to 7AM. now comes the serious part. between now and friday at 1PM i will study around the clock 50 minutes of studying 15-20 minute break. rinse and repeat. i’ll probably get about 6 hours of sleep because i want to keep sharp. essentially this is me facing the test that handed me my a$$ on a platter last we met.

The last time i studied like this was for the medical boards. for six weeks my study partner and i studied fourteen hours a day. we locked ourselves in at the sixth floor of the main campus library in a room where we could overlook the courtyard, bought 12$ binoculars so that we could watch the girls go by that we wouldn’t be meeting, brought a bag lunch and went ten AM to midnight- rinse repeat. on weekends we took 6 hour practice tests to show us how far we had/ or had not(half empty/half full) come. in that time we essentially relearned as much as we could from the first two years of medical school- it had all mysteriously vanished. it’s the shelf system- u know- the one where you add stuff to one side and stuff slides off the other.

At the end of the summer- pardon my francais but we knew our SH*T. or at least we thought we did until we got to the wards and they made it clear that our “fund of knowledge” (that’s their little catchphrase) was diminutive. on some rotations they worked us hard but they made us feel good. in surgery they worked us like dogs, were for the most part condescending and not willing to help and made us feel like we were always in the way by always trying to walk through us. we would stand for 4-8 hour stretches in the same uncomfortable position with outstretched-flexed hands holding instruments with as little trembling as we could manage.

I remember one day it was about 5:15PM and i had been on call the previous night (read- not a drop of sleep for you third-year peon) and had been in the hospital since 5AM on the dot the day before. I was smelly, my feet hurt such that i felt the tingle travelling un the back of my legs to my lumbar region where it was pinching me and up to my neck. we had been in the procedure since 11AM and it was supposed to be a simple prodcedure but due to complications we were still standing there picking away at this woman’s gastrointestinal system through a laproscope and some longarm instruments(a laproscope is a tiny camera they put up in the patient to do procedures without the major incisions).
Anyway we ended up having to open her because with the complications they were worried about the fact that there were occasional seven second pauses in her sinus rhythm(um… not a good thang!) anyway tic toc tic…forever and a day..finally toc time slowly passed. we made slow progress and when it looks like i might get to go home or at least go lick a bar of soap so i won’t have a hypoglycemic seizure she coded!!SHE CODED!!!! freakin’ flatline. now we gotta wait for the code team. they get there- we back away- they rescucitate(whew butcher that word MJ!) her and there we are back at it except a few hours set back because as you can well guess all the commotion did wonders for the sterile field, the stitches, the tools etc.

i know i always stop my stories in the middle but i ususally provide u with the part that had emotional relevance and move on from there. that way it may actually keep you coming back to our page. N’est ce pas

i’m going back to studying now- 2 more study nights after this gotta make em count!
Disclaimer- WAS NOT SPELLCHECKED!! SORRY

© 2001 diamondTearz.