I'm back!

Wow, I can’t believe that it has been 7 months since my last entry.  Perhaps I should consider a New Year’s resolution to blog more.  Term 1 got the best of me... nearly everything I planned to do- workout every day, blog, take one afternoon a week for myself on the beach, swear off of take-out, did not happen.  What did happen?  I survived it... and I am facing a sad reality that medical school is not quite what I expected it to be.  I expected to work hard, to be challenged by the material, to be pushed to the absolute limit of the amount of material I could possibly digest... but my God!  This was insane!  Quitting my job, leaving my family and friends behind, and moving to another country, all made sense to me.  This was my life long dream, and I was finally living it.  In foundations, I felt like my life was finally coming together, and I knew I was making the right choice.  Throughout term 1, I questioned my sanity weekly, because a sane person does not voluntarily put themselves through this hell.  Considered dropping out every other day- not because I didn’t want to be a physician, because I didn’t want to feel the way I felt anymore.  

Medical school has been described as trying to sip water out of a fire hose, or equated to stacks of pancakes- you have to eat 5 pancakes every morning until the end of term, and if you don’t want pancakes one day, you tell yourself you’ll eat ten tomorrow and take today off from pancakes... next thing you know you have a plate of 50 pancakes you have to eat before tomorrow.  I describe term 1 as hell.  Your own personal, living hell.  For some it may be the amount of work, the challenge of organizing immense amounts of material and making it your own, for others it may be the difficulty of the material.  Some may fall victim to the isolation, and the monotony of a life centered around going to class for 4-6 hours a day, labs, and then studying for another 8+ hours a day... every day.  No weekends, no holidays... those are just days without class, where you find yourself trying to catch up on some of those pancakes you didn’t finnish.  Or those irritating classmates that seem so on top of their shit, with meticulously typed, highlighted notes, with their concept maps sitting in the front row answering every question, and somehow manage to get to the library earlier than everyone, and leave later than everyone... they cause you to question your own intelligence and consider yourself lazy, until you realize they’re popping Adderal like candy, and witness their manic meltdowns (true story).  

I guess what I am trying to get at is that medical school is tough... thank you Captain Obvious.  But not for the obvious reasons, or at least they weren’t obvious to me.  One of my biggest struggles was learning to listen to myself, and trust in what I know works for me, when surrounded by hundreds of “experts”- they’ve read the blogs, or value md, or has a family member in another term, or are doing the term over themselves... People love to give you advice in medical school... take all of it with a grain of salt.  Being able to stay in my own space, and not be affected by how other people are doing in classes.  (One of the things I dislike the most about SGU is that it isn’t pass/fail... that combined with the chips some people carry on their shoulders about being in a Caribbean medical school leads to a less than favorable environment at times).  And to just keep it all in perspective... and as for the pancakes?  I guess I shouldn’t complain, because there are people out there that want a bite more than anything in the world.  And while most days, they make me sick to my stomach, I know I wont have to eat them forever.