The First Month of Med School

I realize that it has been an obscenely long time since I last posted on this blog (has it really been four years since I went to France?!?), but having recently embarked on a new (and potentially completely insane) journey in my life, I felt that it might be time to write down my thoughts about the medical school process from time to time. So, here I am, writing in this blog that will probably be read by, well, no one. Luckily, a large and devoted readership is not my goal here.

It has now been exactly four weeks since I moved onto campus here at New York Medical College, and three since classes started. While what we are doing so far has little relation to the noteworthy medical careers we all dream of having, there are still glimpses of people's personalities. Person X will be the loud, brash surgeon who takes pride in belittling his residents; person Y, on the other hand, will be the demure pediatrician who always has a pocketful of lollipops. Then, of course, there are the people like me who are simply hoping to make it through and miraculously match into a specialty that we at least think we want to do for the rest of our careers. Match Day, though, seems a far cry from the soporific histology lectures that cause half the class to retreat to their beds in submission to the fact that they will be better off napping now and reading a transcript of the lecture later. I am still gamely slogging through those lectures at this point in hopes that some of the professor's words will miraculously osmose directly into my brain.

In what may perhaps prove to be a fit of optimism, I have started thinking of my classmates and myself as "baby doctors". Not in the sense that we are neonatologists (although I'm sure some among us will be), but in the sense that we are in the earliest stages of our training as doctors (bad joke, I know). After reading Michelle Au's This Won't Hurt A Bit, however, I'm beginning to think that I'm horribly wrong in that thought. It will be years before we can do anything competent or useful to the medical profession. A baby may be rather helpless, but it at least has the benefit of being able to exist on its own as a human being. We, on the other hand, cannot even begin to stand on our own two feet. If we were fetuses, we probably wouldn't even have feet yet. Most of the class probably couldn't differentiate between a beta blocker and an ACE inhibitor. Or even recite what they do. No, we are not baby doctors, we are doctor embryos. Not even fetuses (I at least now know the difference between the two, thanks to Dr. Pravetz, our esteemed embryology professor). The second and third years are the fetuses, the fourth years in their sub-internships are the babies, the interns are the toddlers and so forth. Or so Dr. Au tells me, at least.

What I keep stopping to consider is when that embryological doctor development starts. Is it something that we are literally born to do? Or is it simply one of many possibilities floating around, like the many sperm that swim to and are rebuffed by the egg, until one finally breaks through and achieves fertilization? The fertilization, of course, would be that "a-ha" moment when we realized, once and for all, that being a doctor was what we needed to do for the rest of our lives. My sense is that it's always something that's there. We all may have toyed with other ideas, and indeed we could have been entirely happy doing other things. That type A scientist in all of us relishes the role of doctor, though, particularly when combined with a nurturing side. I, for one, was always fascinated by childbirth when I was younger, thus making it completely natural that I should be drawn to maternal-fetal medicine as a discipline.

At any rate, maybe these musings are too deep and to idealistic for this early point in my medical education, but I will be curious to see how everything plays itself out over the course of the next four years, and what I will learn about my classmates in the process.