Some surprises I've been spared . . .

There are some surprises I've been spared in medical school.  And I'm grateful for that.

For example, one of my classmates spent this last Saturday morning at a clinic for the underserved population of our local downtown area.  Thing big city, little money.  Anyhow, her comment was how surprised she was about how many little kids were there, who obviously had no money, poor nutrition, and poor care in general.  I wasn't surprised at all.  I wasn't horrified.  This didn't phase me a bit.  And that's a bad thing.  When did I become so used to the scores of children transported from hell holes into a busy ER that I stopped understanding what it really meant?

But I know why I'm like this.  What if you walked into a trailer home on a freezing cold winter night and saw pizza boxes stacked 3 feet high by the front door?  The (very well fed) mother is taking care of twins, who are both about 2.  One has a seizure disorder.  Neither twin is clean, and the trailer is filthy.  The huge (I mean HUGE) television is hooked up to a Nintendo Wii (the mother states the state bought it for her as part of the seizure therapy for her daughter) and both kids seem sick.  Fever, flu, you name it -- and definitely nothing good for the one with the seizure disorder.  We recommended taking both kids to the ER -- mom was fine with that.  As a matter of fact, she was hoping we would, because she didn't have a car to take them herself, and didn't feel like calling a friend, so she just dialed 911 even though she knew it wasn't immediately life-threatening. Today, I'm okay with that.  As we try to load the kids into car seats (thank God she at least had those), we realize she has no socks for the kids.  It's about ten degrees outside and snowing, and no socks.  Then, we realize she has no blankets we can tuck around them either.  Then we start getting angry.  We run to the ambulance, grab a couple of our own blankets, and I make my partner ride in the back with them.  He's a good guy who watches his nephew as a son.  I know he'll be good with them.  And frankly, I can't look this lady in the face anymore.  You can buy pizza and televisions and gaming systems but no socks for your toddlers.

I guess that's when I stopped letting myself get really angry about the way kids are taken care of around here.  Hopefully one day I'll find a happy medium where I can feel the anger and not let it affect my professionalism.  It's just hard with kids.

Misconceptions and Surprises

There are some drawbacks to being a "nontraditional" medical student.  It's a different perspective, and it's still surprising how different it is from expectations.

I knew medical school would be hard.  Really, I believed them when they told me. 

(Okay, if we're being completely honest, I did think all of my years as a medic would make it alittle easier.  A smidgen.  At least.)

I knew I'd have to sacrifice stuff and I figured it was good I was single.

What I didn't realize is how much I'd be sacrificing.  As I sit in a quiet study room and fall peeks its gorgeous head into the world, I'm yearning to be outside in nature, hiking, biking . . . doing anything, really.  But I have a test tomorrow.  So I won't be making money and bringing home a paycheck (I miss those).  Or hiking or biking today (Sigh).  Or doing anything else I got used to doing.  Manymost of my classmates have been in school non-stop since they were 5.  They don't really know anything else other than a life that revolves around school and studying.  They don't know what they're missing.  Or maybe they're not missing it because their lives haven't grown yet to be non-academically focused.  

But I know.  And I miss it.

The other misconception I had was how much drive I would have to learn the non-clinical material.  The first two terms of class work are strictly basic sciences.  My particular college has opted for an integrative approach, where classes feed off each other and clinical correlates are presented as often as possible, but at the end of the day, biochemistry is still biochemistry, and microbiology is still microbiology.  And I still have to engage in rote memorization of concepts I'll not be asked to recall past the next exam.  The futility of that leaches me of my drive to study.  Put anything clinical into the picture, and my interest is piqued. 

I suppose that's another drawback to the been-there-done-that life of a critical care paramedic.  The hands-on skills and the basic clinical knowledge is old hat to me.  And outside of surgery and some smaller procedures (arterial line placement, chest tube placement, etc.), there aren't that many physical skills I haven't done yet.

One last thing that I wasn't expecting:  how much of a workout my brain is getting.  I literally feel physically exhausted at the end of a long day studying.  We're all smart people -- we couldn't have made it this far otherwise -- but for many of us, this is the first time in our lives serious studying has been required.

Serious studying.

I still love medical school.  And I still hate rote memorization