The Trusty Sony CFD-540

I think a solid 4 days of doing nothing and allowing medical knowledge to seep freely from my brain has finally enabled me to embrace being on break. The flip side of this is that I do actually have to start contacting people about getting together or yet another break is going to go by where I do nothing to counter the claims that med school has actually swallowed me whole.

Periodically, I wonder what exactly we did before the internet (despite the fact that I managed about 18 years without really using the internet). I have a rather ancient Sony minisystem (AM/FM, TWO tape decks and a CD player) that I bought in grade 9, which make it about 14 years old. Surprisingly, it still works but the CD player is incredibly finicky and only reads about 1% of my CD collection (for the other 99%, I would get a "No DISC" message). It got to the point where it couldn't read a lens cleaner disc so I googled possible solutions. That's when I discovered that a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol on the lens would make my CD player less snobby about what it would play. To be honest, it's a little strange now being able to put in a CD and not have to try 3 times to get it to play.

Just don't look down...

So exams have come and gone and are hopefully a thing of the past* and what is a little unusual for my post-exam state of mind is that instead of having my stress levels drop to nil, there's still a bit of stress going on, wondering about how properly incompetent I will be in clerkship** and whether I'll be able to sort out electives***. I realized that I have call on my 29th birthday so I will be in the hospital from about 7:45am on my birthday until 8am the following day. The lone plus side is that I wind up with a 3 day weekend so if I theoretically wished to escape to Montreal, I could. However, I have a feeling my glaring lack of knowledge will convince me to spend the weekend reading and be semi-responsible.

We had a prep week for clerkship this week which wound up being pretty exhausting (I still haven't managed more than 6 hours of sleep in a night yet). Between finishing exams, this week and a class trip to Tremblant where people couldn't help but go over exam questions (which I can't, for the life of me, understand - people, we're in a veritable winter wonderland, could we not discuss diarrhea?), I think I was feeling a little maxed out on medicine. I decided to opt out of a med social on Tuesday to go rock climbing with a few friends. I hadn't climbed since I was 16 or 17 and it was funny because on my first climb, I made it up about 4/5 up the wall, looked over my shoulder, realized how high off the ground I was and decided I needed to come down post haste. I don't think I'm scared of heights so much as I'm afraid of plummeting from said heights. It took a bit of time to get over that fear and to not freak out when I couldn't figure out where to go next. However, I think I will definitely be doing more climbing in the new year, to fill the void of no longer playing soccer/volleyball/ultimate frisbee.

*Contingent on passing exams
**Clerkship is when we move into the hospital and see patients (and possibly get yelled at by various members of the medical team)
***Electives are clinical rotations that you get to choose and usually do at other schools

10 Reasons Not To Quit Med School

Exams are such a rollercoaster of emotions - I can go from feeling confident to clueless to hysterical to angry in a matter of minutes. I'm currently in a mood downswing and decided to look up a list of reasons why I shouldn't quit med school. This was originally written back in September 2007 when I started med school and found I didn't like it...at all. Fortunately, I had a fateful conversation on a park bench with someone that is now one of my closest friends here, and we mutually resolved to stay in school and fight the good fight.

10 Reasons Not To Quit Med School

1. One acronym: OMSAS.* We survived it.
2. If we quit here and get into another school elsewhere, it could be worse than this.
3. We would have to get a job at a fast food joint to start re-paying our numerous loans.
4. We would have to move all our crap again.
5. We're here to become doctors, not to be med students.
6. We did manage to survive high school.**
7. We would wonder "what if I never dropped out of medical school?" for the rest of our lives.
8. What else would we do with our lives?
9. Writing the MCAT would not have been in vain.***
10. It may get better from here on it...and if not, it might be fun to be the Daria of our class and make sarcastic remarks and witty observations.****
    

*OMSAS is the website through which you apply to Ontario med schools
**Med school often bears a striking resemblance to high school
***The MCAT is a horrific standardized test, designed to weed out pre-med keeners
****In my humble opinion, one of the only decent things to come out of MTV was the hilarious cartoon Daria.

The Past 2.5 Years

After I went to India a few years ago, I found myself periodically checking The Times of India website (an English language newspaper which, according to Wikipedia, has the highest circulation of any English language paper in the world - who knew?). However, I stopped after getting annoyed by all the pop-ups that managed to evade my pop-up blocker. After my Australia trip last Christmas, I found myself very nostalgic for all that is Oz and started to read the Sydney Morning Herald online to get a little taste of that Aussie wit and cheekiness. It has since morphed into a daily habit, which a few of my friends find rather amusing. I was reading one of the blogs by Sam deBrito where he talks about how people seem to waste so much time doing nothing. He comments on one of his former flatmates who decided to go to China for 2.5 years to learn to speak Chinese and how incredible an accomplishment that was. Usually when I read stories like this, it makes me feel somewhat inferior and I think of all the amazing things I could be doing with my life. I started to ponder what I had been doing for the past 2.5 years and then I realized, "Oh wait, you've been in med school, trying to learn how to be a doctor...surely that's as epic as a blond dude going to China to learn Chinese...right?" However, I must say that this whole becoming a doctor business feels like a bust on the brink of exams - I am convinced I must have spent the better part of the term daydreaming for all the knowledge I can currently recall at the drop of a hat.

The Exam Time Grind

Each exam period, I feel as though I hit the point of loathing studying sooner and sooner. Things have only been moderately intense for about 2 weeks (a slew of clinical skills in November hasn't helped me find a studying groove) and already I am frustrated and daydreaming of the things I would rather do than spend quality time with my notes. I spent around 7 hours at school studying, though the last 2 hours were rather weak because I was hungry and had neglected to pack enough food (I finished my food about 4 hours in). I also realized that I didn't see a single person that I know today and am almost looking forward to class tomorrow, if only to have physical contact with people. It's a fine balance between being able to follow your own schedule without getting lonely and studying with friends without letting your respective anxiety levels negatively affect each other. I'm still not entirely sure I have the balance right (which is a little funny, given the number of years I've spent in school where I have had the opportunity to perfect this) but I think playing it by ear is as good a strategy as any.

Go Away Dr. Oz

Initially, I didn't think too much when Dr. Oz decided to pull a Dr. Phil and have a spin-off show of his own after paying his dues on the Oprah Winfrey show. I never really objected to his presence on Oprah's show - he seemed to be giving medically sound advice and actually wasn't annoying (unlikely Dr. Phil).

However, after catching snippets of his show, I find myself really irked by it. Instead of continuing to provide medically sound advice, he seems to be engaging in a lot of fear mongering. For instance, today he's talking about bed bugs. He was narrating a bed bug attack and it was like he missed his calling by going to med school instead of theatre school. His message: NOONE IS SAFE FROM THE THREAT OF BED BUGS. In fact, noone is safe from anything anymore. I understand that the risk of getting bitten by bed bugs increases when you travel and stay in hotels and decided to pick up couches from curbsides, but it feels like instead of making people more savvy, this information overload is making people feel more paranoid. And this paranoia-inducing approach is not reserved to bed bugs - he tends to tackle a lot of issues like this. Then there's the touchy-feely empowering stories of plastic surgery (where the idiotic audience applauds like this woman cured cancer instead of getting a tummy tuck). I seriously hope this show doesn't last more than a few episodes. Unfortunately the equally unpalatable show, The Doctors, is still on the air so that's not exacting promising news for my future.

In other news...Oprah decided to lay the facts out today about her show coming to a close in 2011. What was particularly eery about it was that it felt like she was giving a presidential address. She looked straight into the camera and spoke about the support she received from people over the years and I swear you could have dubbed over with a presidential speech (okay, maybe nothing from the Bush era) and the facial expression and body language would not have been inappropriate at all.

Sad and beautiful and adorable all at the same time

I read this article in The Star and found it incredibly sweet:

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/newsfeatures/article/721390--dying-6-year-old-girl-leaves-love-notes-behind