Breaking from the trend of the last few posts, I bring you into my present. Fresh off Thanksgiving break my class is already deep into school; this week I had my OSCE (graded encounter with a mock-patient), a quiz, and still a quiz and a 108-question exam yet to go. It never slows down.
On my way to the OSCE I was enjoying a nice day. It's cooling down to winter temperatures here in the south, pleasant breezes and sunny afternoons. I stopped at subway to buy a sandwich with the money the government loaned me, dressed in my nice "clinical clothes" and played Barenaked Ladies on my stereo as I drove down the highway. The album I was listening to still takes me back to the cross-country trip I made when I was 17, and for a few minutes, I got to enjoy the fact that I'm halfway through my last year in the classroom. Ever.
It's kind of surreal, really. You start medical school feeling like college took an eternity, then you blink twice and about a million clinical vignettes later you're on your way to practice an abdominal exam in your final year of classroom work. Unlike the play exams we did in first year, when I listen to the heart and lungs now I actually know what the hell is going on. It still feels like I have barely scratched the surface of medical knowledge (which is true), but I can look back and see how far I've come.
The OSCE itself went fine, of course. Most people do very well on these exams. My mock patients were men I had seen before in our interviewing class, both of them very kind gentlemen who seem to genuinely like working with students. This time next year it won't be a fake patient that I'm examining, though. Next year it's going to be the real deal. How much will I change between then and now? Probably even more than I changed in the last year.
I'm always one more quiz, one more test, one more practical from being one step closer to real medicine. Some of the steps are more painful than others. It's kind of funny; I never imagined that I would look at a kidney and think to myself "Oh god, not the renal system" and look at a uterus thinking "YES, repro!" Everyone has the classes they love and the classes they can barely manage to get themselves to look at, and for me, most of my worst classes were this semester. Our school does a "systems" curriculum in which we cover one system with all the pathology/anatomy/pharmacology every month or so, so you might go for weeks studying something you loathe. It has its pros and cons, but overall I think I like it. At least it gets everything out of the way at once.
Even though I do have my favorite organ classes, I'm most looking forward to psychiatry. Aspiring psychiatrists don't get a whole lot of time to indulge their interests until 4th year since, understandably, most of the focus is on the broader fields of medicine (internal med, peds, surgery, etc.). I just hope that I love psychiatry as much as I think I do, and I hope that once all this is over medical school will seem worth it.
Well, enough indulging in my stream of consciousness post. I need to look at some alarming pictures of the gastrointestinal system (did I mention GI was on the list of classes I could do without?).
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