I just want to figure out how my day managed to end like this… it’s 12:10 and I haven’t really had a break. I gotta wake up at 7 to make it to class in the morning.

8AM wake up for class
9:00-10:30 Histology (classifications of neurons and their glial cells)
10:30-12:00 Study histo in library (because its more effective than looking through microscopes)
12:00-1:00 Dean’s meeting to discuss med school issues
1:00-4:00 Anatomy lab (neck)
4:15-5:30 Neuro review (spinal cord injuries & associated symptoms)
5:30-6:30 Gym… phew. Took the stationary bike to town.
6:30-9:30 Studied in the library about bones of the head (10 minute break for dinner)
9:30-12:10 Prepped for Neuro small group tomorrow morning. 3 patient cases, roughly 3 hours.

12:15-7:00 –> 6:45 of sleep if I’m lucky. Rinse, lather, repeat. Bring it.

By the way, it’s not so much that I’m looking for sympathy as trying to come to terms with the way my life is now. I remember a Zac from college who used to love nothing more than to sit around on the couch and do absolutely nothing for weeks at a time… ah, those were the days.

So I interviewed my first “official” patient today.

The guy was in the hospital for multiple myeloma (bone cancer, though he said he refuses to call it that. When friends ask, he says he has a “bone disease”), and had never before in his life been sick. No chicken pox, no broken bones… none of the normal stuff that people living life do. Now he’s all of a sudden been brought to his heels by this disease that’s probably terminal, and he just has no idea how to deal with it. He’s been through chemo, might have to stop working for the rest of his life- I mean, really difficult stuff.

The worst part? My partner and I only had 40 minutes to interview him, and he was totally doped up on Morphine and Dilaudid so it took forever… and I started to feel the time pressure that everyone is always talking about. We had a specific job to do- to get his current and past medical history. Unfortunately, we kept having to steer him back towards the stuff that we were interested in hearing, because he meandered constantly.

I mean, he had all these crazy cool stories, like how he got dragged by a mule towards an outcropping of rocks and almost died, and how he works at the local desert museum… but we weren’t there to hear that. It really killed me to nod politely and then say “that’s very interesting, sir, but if you wouldn’t mind telling me more about your myeloma…”

I don’t think I’m a bad person, you know, but I can tell that its going to take a lot of effort on my part to not simply shunt someone through the system. When it’s 4:30 in the morning and all I want to do is go home, it’s going to be really difficult to stay human and treat patients like the people they are. Hopefully recognizing that it’s a potential problem is the first step towards overcoming it.

I’m a bit scared to be saying that.

I saw a hand surgeon present yesterday, about all the different stuff that hand surgeons do. Funny thing is, I thought I would have really enjoyed hand surgery- it’s really super detailed, and its functional enough (attaching tendon to tendon and muscle to muscle… not just boob jobs and “reconstructive burn surgery”. Reconstructive burn surgery, by the way, is kind of a cop out in plastic surgery… gives the guy a dose of morality that lets him sleep at night on his mattress made of hundred dollar bills. Hand surgery is usually a subset of plastics, though you can get to it through other residencies, like general surgery or orthopedics).

Anyhow, I just wasn’t totally impressed. This guy, who apparently is one of the best in the state, is going on and on about how good his outcomes look. Meanwhile, I’m looking at these people who have 3 fingers, and huge ugly welts and scars and such where their skin used to be. He’s pulling out muscles from the rest of their body to try to give them some small amount of function back and totally ripping them apart… it just seemed so messy.

Anyhow, I don’t think plastics is for me. Maybe it’s a bit early to say that, but since basically everything else has gotten me hooked, I suppose I can (maybe?) say that with a degree of certainty. Plus, the other day the ER doc said that when they have complicated wounds to stitch up, especially to the eyebrow or eyelid, they send them off to a plastic surgeon. Why? Because “their life is cosmetic stitching”. Sounds a bit boring to me, when I could be playing with endoscopes instead Endoscopes, by the way, being something like a hundred-thousand dollar game of chopper. I’m quite good at chopper *buffs nails on shirt*.

Off to school! Ochem day… we’re getting neurotransmitters, and then we start moving up into head and neck in anatomy. We’ve finished with the upper extremity.

phew… test wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Med school is shaping up to be a solid 4 years!

So I’m sitting here, on a Sunday afternoon, studying for my first test of medical school. We’ll see how well I do- honestly our material this semester isn’t particularly “hard” (anatomy, for as complicated and convoluted as it is, is essentially rote memorization. This muscle goes here, that muscle goes there, yadda yadda yadda. There are no difficult equations, no difficult concepts, no philosophical arguments to go through), but there is a phenomenal amount of it. At this point I can name every single artery, nerve, muscle, and bone of the back, chest, arm, forearm, and hand. Check it out… and this is only part of it!

And… what’s cool about it is that I really feel like I’ve accomplished something. I mean… I know how carpal tunnel syndrome works, and how you can numb an entire arm with only two injections (cool! You’d only need one except that there is a single pesky nerve that doesn’t get numbed by the initial shot). Probably the coolest thing that I’ve learned is how my AC tear works (for those of you who don’t remember, I got a grade 3 AC tear when a friend dropped me from a body slam in high school and I landed on my shoulder), and why they gave me the specific physical rehab excercises that they did.

‘Course that’s just anatomy that I’m going on about. I’ve got 4 other courses that I’m getting tested in…

I’ll let you know how I did. I’m feeling pretty confident (except maybe for SBS… I’ve never had ANY social sciences so I have no idea what I’m doing in it)- I mean, we’ve been studying for 4-5 hours a night every day since school started, and have been putting in marathon 10 hour sessions for the past couple days to review everything.

If it weren’t 1:22 AM, and I didn’t have to wake up for an 8 AM class tomorrow, I’d tell you about how I did my first intubation and threw my first stitch today. However, it is, in fact, 1:22 AM, I do, in fact, have to wake up at 7, and I am, in fact, exhausted.

Learned how to do a spinal tap today. We’re practicing it tomorrow in anatomy lab.

So I’m not really sure if anybody will ever read this, but hey… I figure the life of a medical student might be kind of interesting. Plus, it’ll be nice to kind of keep track of my life and have something to read back through.

The long and short of it is, up until this point, medical school has been everything I’ve wanted and much much more. The classes are tremendously interesting (I mean, that we knew; I loved undergrad bio so much, I would have been really surprised if I wasn’t totally into medicine), and the way that they are taught is fantastic. All the teachers really seem to have a genuine interest in getting us to know the information. Hard to explain, I guess… but there is a distinctive feeling that the teachers are now there (in their role as experts) to impart as much knowledge as they possibly can.

I mean, undergrad teachers were amazing teachers as well, but somehow the attitude has changed. For example, our hand anatomy lecture is going to be given by a local hand surgeon- obviously his goal will be to explain it as well as he can.

Enough of that.

But, to be honest, the best part about medical school is the people. I came to U of A specifically to try to avoid people who got into this whole gig for the wrong reason. And, to be frank, there are a lot of opportunities to go astray. There are very few other professions out there where you can bark out a command and have it followed (drill sergeant, maybe?), or pass judgement on someone and have them listen (“Stop drinking or you’ll die within the month”). That’s pretty scary…. and so I wanted to make sure that I went somewhere where people would be as genuinely good-natured and kind as possible.

I think I struck paydirt… honestly, almost all the people in my class just seem to be great people. We’ve got a 33 year old acupuncturist who spent the last few years of his life traveling around India and studying Yoga with one of the few remaining yoga masters. We have a woman who is married to an Italian guy, speaks fluent German, and holds cooking parties. My roommate is an extremely friendly, easygoing guy who wants to do pediatrics. Honestly I’m in heaven… I feel like I’m surrounded by people who have decided to spend their lives caring for other people… its such a positive, supporting environment. I love feeling this happy.

Anyhow, I should probably keep this somewhat short. I’ll try to keep this updated with stuff as often as possible though… I’m ridiculously busy so I don’t know how often that will happen. There sure are going to be a lot of new, lifechanging things happening.