Like a Duck to Water

Crazy as it may sound, that's the way I feel that I've taken to medical school. To be perfectly honest, I wondered for a long time whether medical school was the right path for me, even as I was interviewing and deciding where to go to school. Once I got here, though. I quickly [very quickly] learned that it was exactly where I wanted to be, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps it's just the excited flush of new experiences and new friends, or the joy of learning, or the even greater joy of finally starting on the path toward my chosen career, but medical school, though challenging no doubt, is proving to be much, much better than I had anticipated.

I've been taking classes for five weeks now (our orientation was six weeks ago), and it feels like forever. I barely have a memory of the summer that was before school began. We've covered in five weeks what a college course would have covered in at least 2/3 of a semester, encompassing two tests or more. And we still have one more week of classes before we finally have an exam over our first "block" of material.

When I was still in college [now that's a weird clause; I graduated from college almost a year ago. Imagine that!], I heard from a lot of friends in med school that trying to study all the information thrown at you is "like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose." It's hard to actualize that kind of workload until you're experiencing it for yourself, but I'll have to say that the simile is quite apropos. I would like to add one of my own, though: each week, I feel as if I'm stuffing more and more compressible cotton balls (information) into a container with a snap-shut lid (my brain). As the weeks go by, the volume of the container gets more and more filled, and each week I'm having to push the cotton balls down, compress them as much as possible, then pull my pressing hand away as rapidly as possible as I rush to snap the lid shut on those overflowing cotton balls. It's a set of expectations the sort to which I've never had to rise before, and it's not easy.

But.

I'm finding that I actually like learning about feedback regulation in glycolysis, the muscle that makes my knee jerk in that famous reflex, the tendons visible beneath the skin of my hands. I like my classmates. Their intelligence, while a bit intimidating, is inspirational. Medical genetics and embryology, basically classes about every way a human being's development can go wrong, make me grateful that my genes contain no deleterious mutations, that the oddly-named Sonic Hedgehog signaling protein was present in all the right places and in all the right amounts so that my neural tube developed properly less than three weeks after my conception. There is so. much. to learn about our bodies, but how amazing to know how our muscles contract, that there are tiny little fibers that "walk" across each other every time our motor neurons fire and excite a skeletal muscle? Every time I get to thinking that this is just too much, that no one person can do this, I try to remind myself that so many others have gone before me, so it's possible. More importantly, one day I could be taking care of someone's motherfathersisterbrotherfriendhusbandwifechild, and I want to know everything I can so that I can take the best possible care of that person.

And it doesn't hurt that I still have time and energy to go out with friends on the weekends, talk to my roommate about our respective days daily, see friends from college, visit my family back home, and, yes, waste time every once in a while. More often than I probably should, in fact.

I've been watching Saved by the Bell in the mornings while I'm eating breakfast before school, and I can't help thinking that the theme for "The College Years" episodes is rather relevant to my current situation: "I'm standing at the edge of tomorrow...the future looks bright to me." I am so excited to be starting this next stage of my life, and I can't wait to be a real MD, with all the knowledge--and responsibility--that entails. Not to mention, it'll be nice to finally be getting paid.

"We're young enough to say, 'Oh, this is gonna be the good life.'" Good Life-OneRepublic