Archive | September 5, 2009

Reflection on 1st Week of Medical School

1stweekofmed

I woke up at 7:50am on this beautiful Saturday morning after sleeping at 2am. I was exhausted from the entire first week of medical school, and I was looking forward to finally sleeping in. Of course, my biological clock is apparently broken now, and I woke up around the same time I normally would to get to class. Damn. I actually turned on my laptop to write a blog entry complaining about this, but then the internet wasn’t working, and I realized I should probably at least try to “sleep in” or else I’d be grumpy the rest of the day.

So what to say about the first week of medical school. I think I said this last time, but the days are long. I’m not used to being in school for 9am to 5pm with only a one hour break. But more than that, it’s the fact that I’ve been in lecture most of the time that’s getting to me. I’m going to be frank and say that I don’t think I’m a school person. I think I used to be when I was younger, but something changed, and now I find it hard to sit still in class. It’s one thing if I was extremely fascinated with what we were being taught (for instance, I guess I could watch TED lectures for seven hours a day if I have to), but I’m going to be honest and say that I’m not interested in, for example, human anatomy. I guess that’s okay though – I mean, even one of our professors came in and said he hated anatomy when he took it here.

But it didn’t make me feel better during our anatomy labs, where we are dissecting cadavers. Some of my peers are more into it, excited about learning some of the different veins or arteries, and walking around to check out the other cadavers. Me, I’m not as excited – I’m just not all that passionate about the human body. I’m just trying to get through the lab if I’m being completely honest.

And so for a short while, I started to feel a bit bad and it made me start to question why I’m even here in medical school. I am clearly not at all interested in the basic sciences they are teaching me so far, and some of my peers clearly have an enthusiasm for the human body that I do not.

But the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized it was okay. I remember that I didn’t come to medical school to learn histology or anatomy. While I knew I would have to do those things in my journey to be a physician, that’s not what I was looking forward to. Maybe I’m looking too forward, but I’m excited about being a physician some day. That’s what excites me more than anything else in this whole process.

I mean, we all have different reasons for wanting to be a physician, and along with those, we will have different interests. I want to be a physician for the intellectual challenge, for the dynamic team environments, and for the privilege to impact people’s lives in a positive way, among other things – but needless to say, a genuine interest in the human body is not at the top of the list.

What does this mean? Honestly I don’t think it means anything, and I don’t think it should. Do I think I will be a good doctor? I believe I will, or else I wouldn’t be in medical school right now. I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t genuinely think I would be happy being a physician and that I would be good at it.

I think sometimes we forget that there isn’t just one way to look at something or go about doing something. We get too caught up in trying to figure out the right or wrong way to frame something that we ignore the reality that sometimes there is no right and wrong and there is just different.

So I don’t like sitting through lecture learning human anatomy and I don’t get excited about identifying the location of the lateral thoracic artery – that’s okay. I still believe I will make a darn good doctor and a few months of anatomy isn’t going to discourage me from trying to live up to those expectations.