Tag Archive for 'third year'

med school sucks

Published on 6 months ago in medical school. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

And that is why I’ve been gone for I-can’t-even-remember-how-long. I’m always thinking to myself throughout pretty much everyday of my third year so far: “Wow! I should really blog about this!” But by the time I get home and eat dinner, it’s time to go to sleep to start the whole crappy routine all over again.

Oh the stories I have to tell!

Third year is sucking the life out of me. My brain works so hard everyday that when I finally get to stop, all I want to do is sit around and not think. I was at the airport one day waiting to board a plane and was staring at my brightly-printed Tokidoki bag when my husband asked me, “Uh, what are you doing?” “Staring at my bag,” I replied. He thought I was crazy. But I just need to turn my brain off sometimes! It’s perpetually on and running, running, running everyday all day long. “Today sucks. I can’t believe I’m here. Oh wait. Don’t look bored. Look interested. You love this! Oh crap. Where should I stand? Did I say that right? Well, that was a stupid thing to say! Am I being empathetic enough? But I don’t know how to do what you’re telling me to do! Gotta pretend like I do anyway! Nod yes. Crap I hope they don’t figure out I don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about. Please don’t yell at me. Please don’t yell at me. Fuck my life.” Even when I get home, it doesn’t stop. “What do I have to do tonight so I don’t look like an idiot tomorrow? Crap, I really gotta study. Crap rounds are at 6?!” You’re lucky I’m even writing a post!

So I’ve done surgery. I’m on pediatrics now. I know I’m not going to be a surgeon. I actually like kids a lot more than I ever thought I would. But it’s early. We’ll see. And now I must shut down my brain. Stories from surgery hell next time I post.

it’s just a job

Published on 10 months, 2 weeks ago in medical school. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

That’s what I’m trying to tell myself so that I’ll stop having anxiety attacks about it. It’s just third year. Everyone else goes through it and survives. And yet I can’t help but be unreasonably nervous about it. I guess too many years of being told I’m an unempathetic robot can do that to a person.

But it’s not just that. I kind of liked being a bum for the past six months or so. Staying up till 2am and waking up at noon was nice. Too nice. I think I’m addicted. I feel like my life is going to end. I’ve been sulking about it for awhile.

But I finally realized that it’s just like having a job (a really crappy one, but still…). Truthfully, I’ve never had a real 8-5 kind of job before. Sure, there was lab, but that doesn’t count at all. I’ve never had to actually do work for eight hours a day. I’ve never not been free to eat lunch whenever I want or take vacations whenever I feel like it. I never had to accept that the weekend is my only respite.  But now here I am having to do that. And more. After having been spoiled for so long. Not only do I have to accept that weekends will be my only time off, I have to accept that most of the time, I won’t even have weekends. That I won’t be home some nights.

Here I am boohooing about it when my peers (those who did not go to med school) have been living like this since they graduated from college. How silly of me! And yet I can’t help it. My life will likely never be the same again. But at least I managed to delay real life for this long. That’s what I’m telling myself. How long until I listen?

better late than never?

Published on 10 months, 4 weeks ago in married life and medical school. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Tada! She’s alive! Ugh. I’m so bad. If I can’t blog when I have all the time in the world, what’s going to happen when I’m back on the wards and have no time at all? Well, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll have more to write about since everyday will be a new adventure. Yay.

What have I been up to? Absolutely nothing. Seriously. Nothing at all. Which sucks because when I decided to lengthen my break from school, it was so that I could do some clinical review work to make myself feel more confident when I return. Well, the powers-that-be made it sound so awesome…like they were going to totally hook it up…but when the time came, all I got was nothing. Don’t they know how hard it was for me even to ask for help in the first place? Why must they make me fight for it every step of the way? Well, I didn’t fight hard enough because *gasp* I thought they were actually going to keep the lofty promises they made me, so I ended up doing shit during my time off. What a waste of my time! I’m not getting any younger here!

Well, I’m not that dumb. I didn’t sit on my ass and twiddle my thumbs while I waited. I got cracking on studying. Big time. I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve read, but I’ve read at least one book for each rotation, plus Bates, plus Step 2 Secrets, plus others in the time I had off. I don’t know if I retained much. I probably still can’t tell you the difference between croup, bronchiolitis, and epiglottitis, but at least I can make some wrong guesses that don’t sound completely stupid. I got ambitious and tried to set up Step 2 at the last minute, but without having done third year first, I wasn’t going to be able to study enough to do well enough for my standards in less than 60 days, so I gave up on that. If only I’d come up with that idea say 6 months ago? That would definitely have been enough time. But silly me, I was still waiting on my miracle from the administration. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Me.

I’m not whining. I don’t care anymore. I’m just trying to finish it all up now. No more breaks. No matter how scared or overwhelmed I feel. It’s time to just plow through. I’ve got more Chanels to buy, dammit and I can’t afford them with my stipend money! Just a word of caution to other MD/PhDs out there: don’t expect any help returning to your clinical years. Actually, you should expect sabotage. They will do everything in their power to make it harder for you than for everyone else. I guess it’s punishment for being such overachievers. So if you want anything from them, demand it and don’t stop until you get it. There is no being meek or being afraid of seeming too demanding. If you don’t get in their faces, you just get totally and utterly screwed. Like me. Don’t be like me. You deserve better.

one step forward, three steps back…

Published on 1 year, 5 months ago in lab/graduate school and medical school. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The good news (I think): I’m finally almost done with my dissertation revision. I could have it done by the end of this week if my thoughts didn’t keep fluctuating and then focusing on how ephemeral life is. That and the fact that all I have left to finish is the discussion. One section doesn’t sound tough, but it is the section that needs the most work and the one that is the most difficult for me to write.

The bad news (or maybe not so bad if you really think about it): I’ve been asked to consider stopping my clinical work (read: my third year) and starting up again with next year’s class so that I would have my dissertation completely behind me and be able to start completely fresh instead of jumping back in with now super-experienced third years with only psychiatry under my belt. I have mixed feelings about this particular strategy. On the one hand, I do need that extra time to “prepare” myself as best I can by reviewing things like the physical exam and clinical reasoning, which I never was very good at in the first place. Also, since I’ve already done one rotation, I can take my last block off and study for Step 2, which I need to do well on since I’m going after Radiology. Oh yeah, and if I were to really return on rotation 5 as planned, I would be so far behind that I would not have any time to do any away rotations during my fourth year before having to apply to programs. I really believe that this extra year will be advantageous to me in helping me become the best possible Radiology applicant I can be. And, of course, I’ll have no more dissertation hanging over my head. On the other hand, now I’m going to be yet another year behind. One more year of not being done. Of not moving on with my life. Of not earning enough money to afford as many Chanel handbags as I want (though, really, in the grand scheme of things, I realize that life is far too short to spend coveting overpriced designer handbags). Oh yeah, as if it wasn’t hard enough to join the current class I’m in, I’ll have to do it all over again with a new batch of people. Not to mention that I’ll have to start the warm-and-fuzzy doctoring class all over again. I suppose I’ll just make sure to take on an early case since I’ll know what they’re all about.

Hmm…now that I’ve listed out all the pros and cons, it’s perfectly clear that taking the rest of this year off and starting again next year really is the best thing for me to do. Now, it’s not set in stone yet. There’s going to be some headbutting between bigwigs over this plan, but we’ll see where it goes. Until it’s decided, I’m sure as hell going to enjoy my carefree days. There’s nothing like tasting just a tiny bit of the third year of medical school to make me appreciate the finer points of doing nothing 10,000% more than I ever did before.

like a prisoner being given his last meal

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago in married life and medical school. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

That’s what I’ve felt like these past couple of weeks. Everyone keeps telling me to enjoy everything while I still can as if I’m some prisoner enjoying my last meal before my execution. Sad how that statement is pretty much true. It is so unbelievably hard for me to accept that I’m going to have to give up everything that I enjoy indefinitely. Simple things like lounging around the house with my dog, playing Rock Band, cooking, blogging, sewing, tennis…all the things that make me me. All those things will no longer have any place in my life as I enter the abyss that is the third year of med school. Having these things then having to give them up again makes me almost wish I’d never done a PhD so that I would never have tasted such freedom because it is now so hard to let it all go. Well, I think you get my point. Enough whining.

I’ve been MIA for quite awhile now because I’ve been enjoying my last meal to the fullest extent possible and was on a last-minute vacation. It was fun, but the spectre of third year was never far behind so it wasn’t quite as fun as it could have been. But at least I won’t regret not taking a vacation later. I don’t do much on vacations besides eat and shop and this one was no exception. And for some reason, I was obsessed with finding a perfectly functional handbag because I was finally tired of my small yet not-so-functional collection. Not one to cheap out on such things, my husband insisted that I only look at designer bags. I had a Marc by Marc Jacobs in mind, but it ended up looking way better online than in person. I guess handbags just can’t be functional and fashionable at the same time. I then found a Burberry one that I could live with and had settled on it (and was planning to buy it once I got back home) when my husband insisted we check out the Louis Vuitton store on the way out. Now I don’t like LV stuff because I don’t like the monogram and how it’s everywhere, but I decided to humor him since he had already humored me way more than he had to with my great handbag search of 2008 and I figured he deserved it. I really hate going to these high-end stores because the people are just so snobby and act like I don’t even deserve to be in their store. One day, I swear, I’ll stroll in in my scrubs and white coat just to see if I get treated differently. Suffice it to say, I was trying to get in and out of there as quickly as possible, but my husband made me look at their bags, theorizing that maybe so many people have them because they’re functional. Well, he was wrong. But he also found the perfect bag for me while he was at it. And even though I don’t like LV stuff, I caved in and bought it.

There was no way I was going to be able to resist my special shade of purple. And besides, it’s a really nice bag. And it doesn’t have that ostentatious LV monogram all over it. And I’m now $900 poorer. I figure I won’t be shopping much once I start rotations again, so it’ll be okay.

So I start tomorrow bright and early. I still wish I could freeze time and be a slacker forever…or at least until I master every instrument on Rock Band on expert, but I have no choice but to forge ahead. I might disappear for extended periods of time, but not forever. You’re just going to have to be patient and you’ll be rewarded with stories aplenty, I’m sure.

And to those who responded to my Dear Reader post awhile ago, I haven’t forgotten you and will be getting responses up as soon as I stop admiring my new LV bag find the time.

on second thought, i suppose it could be worse…

Published on 2 years, 1 month ago in medical school. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

So last week, I whined a bit about my third year clerkship schedule. This week, I’m trying to tell myself that it’s not so bad. It could have been worse. I could have ended up with Surgery or Internal Medicine first. Then I’d really have cause to complain. But I don’t have either of those clerkships first. I have Psychiatry first. Not ideal because I wanted Family Practice first to ease myself into the whole thing and semi-prepare me for Pediatrics second. But I’ll live. I think. I hear Peds isn’t exactly a walk in the park. And now I’m going into it after Psych, which in no way whatsoever prepares me for it. The other thing that didn’t quite fall into place with my schedule is the fact that I ended up not being able to get OB/Gyn before Surgery, which I really wanted so that I could gain some experience with being in the OR/tying surgical knots/etc so that I wouldn’t look like a complete idiot come Surgery since I have a more than passing interest in Surgery after all. Of course, the lottery gods decided to spite me and force me to do OB/Gyn last. Yep, that’s it. The order is jumbled up and looks almost nothing like what I wanted. But it’s not so bad, is it? Well, actually, it is. To me. I want it my way, dammit.

my fate has been determined…

Published on 2 years, 1 month ago in medical school. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Oops…disappeared there again…let’s just say that setting up a home theater system sucks and takes way more time and energy than you would think. Plus I’ve been busy with trying to figure out what order I want to do my clerkships in. Turns out I might as well have not bothered because I didn’t get them in the order I wanted anyway.For the uninitiated, the third year of med school is when students rotate through different required clerkships, gaining clinical experience and hopefully some insight into what specialty they want to pursue. Much fanfare is made about the order of such clerkships and countless strategies abound. Because of the limited number of spots per clerkship per rotation, most schools resort to some sort of lottery system to determine students’ third year schedules. Ours is a long-winded process that apparently doesn’t work too well. Because my schedule sucks. I’m going to go sulk now.