Popping the Bubble

My fellow med student and friend Yossie told me the other day that when he was in clinic last week, one of the patients was remarking about the tornadoes that we recently had here in Oregon. Yossie was dismayed to realize he had absolutely no idea what the patient was talking about. My student friend Sara told me last week that because she spends all day by herself studying, she has a hard time finding the right words to have a "normal" conversation, one that doesn't include disulfide isomerases, or Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization, or Chaperonopathies, or aminogycloside treatments.

They are in what I would call the medical school bubble, and more specifically in this particular week, the molecular biochemistry genetic bubble. Yes I'm in there too. We're all in there, banging up against the sides with loud screams, wishing that we could get all these words out of our heads, if even to sleep peacefully for just one night.

I finally understand why so many doctors were not jumping up and down for joy when I told them I was going to apply to med school. At the time I thought they were being grumpy old curmudgeons, but now I understand. They remember the pain, the stress, and the relentless pace of medical school and all the demands coming at you from all directions.

I have to be careful when I host interviewing students at my home to not let them see the negative side of medical school. After all, as a student ambassador for OHSU, my job is to "sell" OHSU to them. To give them the ins and outs, and hope that they will choose OHSU to go to med school. Don't get me wrong I love OHSU. I love the way the classes are taught in blocks, I love my classmates (we are the emo class for sure - that's the high school terminology for "emotional" - for example, we are absolutely non-competitive towards one another, and we are often hugging in the hallways). So of course there is no question in my mind that OHSU is the right place for me.

I think the main issue is that as a perfectionist (which we are all), and as Type A, or A- personalities, it is VERY hard to not do it all, and to not do it perfectly. We had a great meeting last week with the Dean of Students to talk about our potential career plans. She laid out what it would take to get into certain specialities - whether you had to have top grades, stellar board scores, or research, or publications, in order to get into a good residency. I am happy to say that the speciality that I am leaning towards, PM & R - Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, is NOT super competitive (in fact, many students do not have any idea what it is, something I wish to remedy by having a lunch time meeting to introduce the speciality to my colleagues. Come on, if a speciality was also know as Plenty of Money and Relaxation (P M & R) wouldn't you try to get your best buds into it? Who wants a lifetime of continued stress and no down time by choosing a competitive speciality like orthopedics, or surgery, or dermatology. NOT ME!

So with the information in hand that it will be just fine to not kill myself trying to get straight Honors in all my classes at OHSU, I now have to figure out a way to be OK, inside myself, with less than perfection. That's hard to do when you're used to always getting As. I joke to my husband that I used to think I was smart before starting med school. Now, as compared to the smarties, I'm just average.

But you know what? Average is great, especially since it means I can do many more things to break that bubble I've been living in. Like watching Lost (season 3 is so frustrating), like cooking yummy food (I made an incredible spice rubbed pork chop with homemade BBQ sauce this weekend), like walking on the wooded trails around my condo (gotta do something since I'm not biking to school anymore), like doing 15 minutes of yoga (any more and I start thinking biochemistry....), like eating warm brownies that just came out of the oven. You see I am trying, really trying, to not let medical school turn me into someone that I am not, to turn me into a complainer, to destroy my idealism about wanting to help others heal. So far, so good. :)

What Works

As I sit here waiting for my coffee to finish brewing (I quit for three weeks in December, but I've fallen off the wagon...), I am thinking about how I have discovered what works for me and what doesn't. Medical school reminds me of marriage and of parenting - there is no real way to prepare for it, and hopefully you learn as you go through it how to make the experience more enjoyable.

I remember when I was younger and how worried I was about what everyone else thought, how I wanted everyone to like me, how I needed to please everyone else in order to feel good about myself. I've always wanted to do the "right" thing, and as I get older (and hopefully wiser), what the "right" thing to do is much clearer, and easier to carry out.

You see, I have discovered that it is not in my best interest to go to lecture or class any longer, now that we no longer have lab. Now, before you make any loud exclamations of shock or disapprovement, let me explain what works for me.

I have always learned primarily through reading and looking at pictures, and I don't have a "photographic" memory unless I have looked at a picture over and over and over again. I do not learn from listening to someone talk about a new concept. I need to read about it, and look at pictures that describe the concept, or even better, to touch with my hands what we are learning about. Since our current class, Cell Structure and Function, has no "hands on" aspect, I have found that the most efficient way for me to learn what I am expected to learn is to stay home and study all day long. If time was not an issue, and we weren't covering a whole semester of biochemistry in two weeks, then I would do it all. Read, take notes, go to lecture, and then restudy my notes. But alas, I am not Hiro, I cannot freeze time in order to do it all.

The best thing about my new studying plan is that it works! For the second exam I increased my test score by 14 points! And I am able to keep up with the work load, because I use the four hours of lecture time to learn the material, rather than listen to someone talk about the concepts for four hours, not learn a thing, and then try to catch up by staying up all night. I have no idea how doctors used to be able to go to lecture 8 hours day, and then learn everything before coming back to lecture the next morning.

In addition to keeping up with the workload, studying st home has the added bonus of being able to spend time with my family. I now eat all my meals with my husband, and I am home when Erinna gets off the bus. I can study for a few hours, take a small break, play with the cats, and then keep studying some more. I save time by not biking to school, and I save money by not buying food at school.

The downfalls of my strategy is that I no longer have planned exercise in my schedule, and I sure do miss my classmates. I do go to class one day a week, for our clinical skills class (that hands on stuff that I love, like learning how to listen to heart rates, and learning how to take histories - I can't learn that just in books...). So in order to get some more exercise, I just forced myself to walk to the store to get some more coffee beans (hey I have to have some carrot at the end of the stick), and now I just need to find a way to reach out to the others in my class who are also struggling (I imagine) with the heroic effort of understanding all the complex biochemistry of the human body. For now, believe me when I say, I have found what works.