Fireteams

In military parlance, a “fireteam” is the smallest infantry unit consisting of as few as two and as many as six individual soldiers. I do not have any military experience or any military background in my family, but I bring up this term for the ethos of it. Simply put: when you’ve spent a lot of time in harrowing situations with the same few people, as I’m sure anyone with a service record will attest, a particular bond forms. You’ll cover for the other members of your team just as they will cover for you and everyone does this without expecting anything in return.

I’ve lacked such a fireteam until now.

A bit of personal history: despite now clocking in at nigh 200 pounds, was the playground runt. I couldn’t run to save my life and I had zero coordination in sports. As a result, I was bullied in grade school. I withdrew because of it. Withdrawing made it difficult to make friends and this antisocial tendency persisted more or less throughout my entire career, until now. In professional school everyone has the same goal and so I now have at least one thing in common with everyone here. Commonality develops relationships. Not to sound like a sap or anything but I now know those few people who I can count on when the “shit hits the fan”, as they say. I suggest to others, who are struggling with the course load here, to find one or two other people that will buoy you up.

Success cannot be achieved alone. As the faculty at this institution is fond of saying: “No one is an island”.

Link to sappy image

Victory!

Dragon = slain.

Anatomy midterm = passed!

Image courtesy of: http://www.webweaver.nu/clipart/img/fantasy/dragons/dragon-dead.gif

Hunting a dragon

(less than) 48 hours to go before I redeem myself.

Anatomy mid-term, I’m winning this time!

Image courtesy of www.metal-archives.com

Slaying the dragon...

 

Wet Lab Shenanigans

NOTE: I would NEVER condone disrespecting the cadavers. We should be forever mindful that these people gave their last worldly possession, their body, for us to study.

… The above being said, what I’m about to tell you relates to a couple of professors ranking on each other, specifically about their own bodies.

Normally, Dr. S and Dr. Y are two of the most straightforward no-bullshit people you’ll meet. The other day, however, I think there was a little bit more formalin in the air than usual. A few buddies and I, under the guidance of Dr. Y., were reviewing the heart for our upcoming midterm exam. Dr. S was doing the same with another group of people. Lacking a proper heart for his demonstration, as the one he’d selected was torn to shreds (as unfortunately happens when too many students handle the specimens too roughly), Dr. Y asked Dr. S if he could “borrow his heart,” at which point Dr. S. launches into this hilarious tirade about how his “heart’s too small”. I think there was another corny crack about getting at the “heart of the matter”… ha, ha. Dr. S. told Dr. Y. that Dr. Y’s heart was “plenty big” and sufficient for demonstration to which Dr. Y. replies “What are you suggesting? Autocardiothoracodectomy?” (AKA: “Self-directed removal of heart from thorax”).

Mind you, we’re all cracking up the whole time as Dr. S. and Dr. Y. are trading barbs.
And then the visiting professors arrive and we all get back to work.

“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

A quote from the book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Chris Hedges). A quote that can be changed a little to apply to medical school: “The rush of battle is a potent addiction,  for the desire to succeed is a drug.”

We are at war. With ourselves, with the AAMC. With those who told us that we can’t, those who deemed us not “good enough” to be granted admission into an American medical school. Midterms start next week for the first termers, and I have my Anatomy midterm in two weeks. I feel like a soldier on D-Day, in the moments before those landing crafts hit the beach… the anxiety of knowing and not knowing what will confront me once that door drops. I’m training as best I can – reviewing my notes as often as I can, going into the wet lab as much as I can, doing as many practice problems as I can, but the anxiety of anticipation is ever-present. The idea of preparing as much as humanly possible and yet getting taken by that one fact I neglected to look at.

I want to succeed, no, I have to succeed. I failed this damn thing once and I can’t let this happen again…. I will not fail. I will not fail. I will. not. fail.

Posted to a friend’s Facebook…

Dear Med School,

There are a lot of things I’ve sacrificed for you. I’ve given up sleep in favor of seven-thirty ward rounds and the excitement of having fifteen doctors ignore me every morning. I’ve said goodbye to normal relationships, finally acknowledging that not only do these need time, but most intelligent people recoil at tales of surgery gone wrong and how you scored your first PR exam. I’ve learned to eat irregularly and infrequently, scheduling sugary snacks between studies and surgeons. I’ve discovered that caffeine is a food group and that one can survive for days on nothing but black coffee.

But I’ve also watched myself and my colleagues fall into your trap and be consumed by you. Sucked into your vortex so strongly that help seeking becomes an impossibility. Found my reason to wake up and take notes on ward rounds slipping from me, a descent matched only by my grades. I’ve been alone at night, numb and exhausted. Meetings with the faculty in failed attempts to make everything okay.

Dear Med School, remember this: I will not give up. I will become a doctor and I will become a good doctor. I will change this world,despite the obstacles you challenge me with. I will grow up and grow strong and dedicate my life to make sure that no one has to feel this low.
Once upon a time, Med School was thought to sort the weak from the strong—I don’t believe this for a minute. Med School isn’t designed to set us up for failure, and nor should it. Call me naive for thinking I can change the system, but I will never stop believing.

– Reproduced with permission of CB

Iterations…

A bit of a laugh: In the last week, apparently, one of the top search terms for this blog has been “what course director do I have to meet with if I failed the Histo Unified quiz”. Wearing your heart on your sleeve, much?

Fear not, young grasshopper. The Histology Course Director is one of the nicest people on this campus and is genuinely interested in helping his students. A very father-like demeanor, that one has.

In terms of my own Unified…. I did OK. Not great, considering I know of a few people who aced the entire thing (wow!), but not super lousy either. Middling. I missed two questions because I couldn’t remember the details, and a few more just from not having really sat and visualized where things were in relation to one another. Oh well. Onward.

On a scarier note, midterms are but two weeks away. That’s not just scary, that’s downright frightening. Especially for someone in my position. I have been given a second chance and I’m not going to waste it.

This last weekend, for the record, was quite good socially. And I was in need of a good social weekend. Did no work Friday night, went out with some friends, generally enjoyed myself, and returned to my desk at 10AM Saturday morning after only three hours of sleep. Hilariously, I was surprisingly productive even at half speed.

Once removed….

The irony of repeating Anatomy is that I’m now looking at Term 1 from a “once removed” perspective. I know what’s coming around the bend, unlike most of the current Term 1 students, so I’m sitting here cool as a cucumber watching the stress pour out of everyone’s eyeballs. The Unified Quiz causes people to freak out because the thought process at the time is “OhMyGod it’s my first ever exam in medical school! whatamigoingtodowhatamigoingtodowhatamigoingtodo??????????????????????????” It’s right about now that those who’ve been taking things lightly, as a Caribbean island is wont to do, hustle in a half-assed attempt to compensate for their slacking. The Unified lowers the hammer. Those who fail the Unified are written one of the nicest “what the hell do you think you’re doing here?” letters you’ll ever read. The letter, in essence, urges them to either quit the study of medicine outright or repeat the term. And the scary thing is that, even though I believe its still too early in the term to make the call, we do indeed lose people post-Unified. On the other hand, those who do badly on one or two sections of the Unified are granted meetings with the course directors in which they discuss ways they can improve their performance. Depending on the course director… such a meeting can either be quite helpful or extremely demoralizing. Those who pass the Unified, and I consider this particularly insidious, are given no feedback whatsoever. A “pass” is defined as 64% or better which at 25 questions per section means getting at least 16 right. 15 is acceptable, though starting to creep into the red zone, and anything less than 15 correct means there’s a larger problem afoot. So what that means is that you could get 16 questions right out of sheer luck and consequently get ZERO feedback on how to improve!

Ladies & Gentlemen, pardon the interruption…

I know it’s been nearly a month since my last post. In truth, I kind of forgot about this blog (sorry!) I got caught up in school
and life developments and writing fell by the wayside. So… now to fill you all in on nearly a month’s worth of stuff in as succinct a form as I can…

For starters, I’m repeating Anatomy this term. Last term I got taken on the midterm exam, had a veritable panic attack and subsequent cerebral shut down. In my state of reduced functioning, I missed the pass mark on the midterm by a few points and consequently was advised (in truth, more “forced”) to decel. It will take me an extra term to graduate, but that’s certainly preferable to failing Anatomy and getting dismissed from the school.

I’ve been keeping myself busy with involvement in several clubs and tutoring Biochemistry… This of course, is all secondary to spending much more time with Anatomy.

One of the advantages to taking only Anatomy this term is that I now have enough time to do what I didn’t do last term, namely go into the wet lab more often and spend more time doing the Gray’s Anatomy Review questions. All first termers at SGU are advised to do these questions at least twice through before both the midterm and final, not least because the head of our Anatomy department wrote the book! Last term, I had difficulty juggling Anatomy/Histology/Biochemistry and so doing these questions several times over fell by the wayside. Wet lab, too. Given that my last name starts with a “B”, my group activities like Histology lab and Biochem small group were first thing in the morning. Those would finish up by 10 AM and if I went to the wet lab after that it would usually be so crowded I would waste my time and not see a damn thing. This term, without the commitment to those small groups, I can go into the wet lab early in the morning when there’s no one there and really take my time and look things over carefully.

On that point… it’s a very humbling experience to be alone in the wet lab with a bunch of cadavers. It’s the realization that a member of the formerly living made the altruistic choice to donate his or her body to us medical students. I’m not sure how I’d feel about a bunch of bumbling first term medical students rooting around my viscera, but all the same given that others have so kindly donated their bodies for us to use I feel compelled to do the same when it’s my time to go.

On the point of death….
…
…
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Two weeks ago, my ex-girlfriend passed away from acute promyelocytic leukemia. It came out of nowhere, ravaged her body, shut down her major organs, and caused cerebral hemorrhaging. Her parents ultimately decided to take her off the respirator because she wouldn’t have wanted to survive, not live mind you, SURVIVE, as an empty shell of herself. I’d dated her for almost three years prior to this point, and we’d broken up last August. She told me that she didn’t see our relationship “going anywhere” and that she didn’t want to “wait for me to finish medical school”. I understand her reasoning, and for the record, I’m not angry or spiteful or anything about it… I came to terms with our breakup. It’s the fact that someone can be wrenched from this earth with such fury and violence and tradecraft fails to stop this process… and I’m not one to betray emotionality or powerlessness. Too often medicine professes to “have all the answers” and when it fails, you start wondering about the path you’ve chosen. Doctors are cited as being too coldly rational when the family of the suffering is an emotional wreck but I’ll tell you the only way to function in such a situation is to be emotionally distant. Emotions mess with rational decision making. It takes real skill to be coldly rational and personally tactful simultaneously, and that’s a skill very few physicians possess.

Of course I was a wreck when I found out this news. Thank God, though, for the SGU community – several close friends helped me through this difficult period and I’ve managed to make my peace. Her funeral was last Saturday and although I couldn’t physically be there a condolence letter I had written her parents was displayed…. so at the very least I was there in spirit.

Return

So I made it to Grenada somehow in one piece after a 36-hour grind. Long story short: I don’t travel well… AKA I can’t sleep when I travel.

Friday morning went about routine things, went lifting, then started packing. I Spent some time with my grandmother as she is visiting my family for the week and hopped a shuttle to the airport at around 6:45 PM. I arrived at the airport around 8 PM then killed four hours people watching, mostly. My flight took off at 12:45 AM.

And because I can’t sleep when I travel… well… I didn’t sleep. In truth, I took a series of short naps but that’s nowhere near as restful as an uninterrupted sleep.

7AM Saturday I was back in my dorm room at SGU and told myself I couldn’t sleep until I got my stuff unpacked and set up… I finally collapsed into bed around 10PM and woke up today feeling great! Most of today was spent getting the last few things in order, saying hello to friends, and flipping through my Anatomy textbook. Classes start tomorrow. Time to get this done so I can move on.

<Odd segue>

The funny thing about traveling is that you could meet some interesting people along the way.  The cabbie I took to the airport, for instance, was a 20-year expat from Turkey. He moved to the US, he told me, because opportunities in Turkey were scarce. His two principal businesses are an ice cream truck during the summer and driving airport shuttles during the winter. Conversing with him helped the two hour shuttle ride to the airport fly by (pun intended). At the airport bar met this one barmaid, and this stuck in my mind, who told me that her life’s dream was to be a veterinarian. She told me that she couldn’t get into vet school at the time she graduated college because the “climate for acceptance” (her words) was bad. So now she works at the bar nights and does personal fitness training during the day. Told me that she used to be a competitive powerlifter… and she was wearing a chain with a barbell medallion on it (go figure!) She gave me a few pointers on how to up my bench press, which was nice, and also told me that when she retired from her jobs would probably get involved with the ASPCA. The hilarious thing is that my flight was full of vet students and correspondingly, animals.

</Odd segue>… Just needed to put it down somewhere.