The thing I don’t really appreciate, though, is the effect that studying right before bed has. It’s just annoying. Even right now, when exams are weeks away and I’m not particularly concerned about the amount of material I’m learning, I will half-wake up in the middle of the night finding myself going over the branches of the external carotid artery as it ascends the neck. I will wake up in the morning and immediately think, “Drugs did I went over last night — rifampicin, binds bacterial RNA polymerase; tamoxifen, breast cancer drug, antagonist of estrogen hormone receptors for RNAPII.”

Probably most disturbing example: I opened the Glamour magazine Guy bought for me last month to calm me down right before exams, and the first thing I see is an Elizabeth Arden ad with Catherine Zeta-Jones, and my eye zooms to the claims of their Ceramide Face Cream or whatever, and my mind goes, “Ceramide, we learned that. Sphingosine and serine and a fatty acid, backbone of glycolipids.” And then I think for about a minute on whether, based on its biochemical properties, ceramide really could help your face or not. (And I decided it’s quite possible that it does.)

I’m not throwing out all this (arguably useless) M1 knowledge to prove that I’m an awesome student. Okay, perhaps part of me is, but mostly, these are real examples of thoughts I’ve had over the last nine hours. This is particularly disturbing to me when I consider for about eight of those hours I was sleeping.

So I have come to believe, even when you are me, the possibly most calm, least stressed, least currently worried medical student in your group of friends: you may just find yourself dreaming about the twelve cranial nerves.

Gross lab (Gross and Developmental Anatomy lab, so “gross” as in “comprehensive,” though I’m sure professors everywhere giggled when they came up with the name) is the class which newly minted medical students seem to either be super excited about or absolutely dreading, because you either “get to” or “have to” cut up dead people. I was neutral of course (see: title of blog), and mostly curious as to how it would go. I’d seen the labs and the cadavers (though they were all covered with plastic sheaths), and the smell was mostly formaldehyde, reminiscent of fetal pigs but multipled about a thousand times for both weight and sheer number. At our school, the large room has maybe thirty cadavers in it, and the small room has about fifteen. It really is an overwhelming number of dead people for two rooms.

Anyway, back to the first day of lecture. Beforehand we all avidly discussed whether or not we were supposed to change into our scrubs for lecture. We knew we were supposed to wear our scrubs into lab — you know, so that dead person residue didn’t get on our street clothes. Just the ones we’d bought especially for that purpose. Eventually it was a mass, 150-person decision to change. After crowding the four bathrooms we knew about, we all filed in on time, wearing the green or blue scrubs we’d bought at orientation and having not an idea of what to expect. Well, I didn’t, at least. Other people had, of course, pre-studied. Whether by chance or by subconscious design, I don’t really associate with those people.

Our professor looked at us and grinned, “You all look very powerful in your blue and green.”

The first lecture was extremely basic, on the names of the different planes of the body and anatomical jargon. I tried to capture the information in my mind at the moment and I failed. Little did I know that after merely being in the lab for three hours a day, three days a week, I’d have no problem figuring out the lingo. (It would be the names of the muscles, nerves, and blood vessels that would cause trouble.)

After the lecture, our professor informed us we’d be seeing a video on the dissection we would be doing for the day. He dimmed the lights and started the movie.

The room in the video was dark, and the camera focused on our professor’s hands as he casually announced, “Today, we will be skinning the upper back.” Just like opening a can of soup or something. He cut into the flesh without flinching, finding the appropriate level of skin and then pulling it back and gently applying his scalpel to the mesh-like web that was attaching it to the muscle beneath. It looked … simple. Detached, from the close-up view the camera was affording us. It was easy to forget it was a human under his blade.

When my three lab partners and I assembled in front of the body, however, it was a different story.

We introduced ourselves, met each other’s eyes nervously, donned gloves and took our time figuring out how to put on scalpel blades. Then we pulled off the sheet.

The man was face-down, thankfully, but his back felt disturbingly real, far more real than the movie we’d just watched. For whatever reason, a human body with its skin off is far more easy to handle than a human body with its skin on. With no skin, the owner of the body is clearly not alive. With skin, the man could be sleeping. Gray, and clearly cold to the touch, but still. He’s still a whole person, or at least a whole body.

I glanced at the enthusaistic table next to us, who throughout the semester would be happily carving into their cadaver at a far faster pace than us. The first day was no different — it looked like they were sawing into the skin with no problem.

“Well,” I managed aloud, “I guess we should begin.”

And thus the first day of anatomy lab, too, shall pass.

So yes, during orientation, one very kind student affairs dean told us that medical school would probably be like a roller coaster. Before exams would be our very lowest lows, and afterwards we would be flying high — only to drop down again in like six weeks. To be honest it was not a very inspiring speech, and I remember thinking to myself, “That won’t happen to me.”

Lo and behold, alas, alack, etc., for here I am, feeling woefully pitiful for myself, when just seven hours ago today I felt fine. About seven hours ago I felt like I really knew my shit. I presented in my anatomy lab and I knew every answer, not only to my question but to the other ones that were asked too. I took a practice exam and I did well. I looked at my notes and felt like I had all the material pretty much down, and, foolishly, didn’t even know what to study.

Then I took another practice exam and got like 80% of it wrong. I looked up the answers and they were things I knew at one point, or things I should’ve known, or even things I knew but just plain screwed up on. I experienced emotional stress as well, and handled it even more poorly than I probably would’ve at another time, because studying and forcing myself to study is wearing me out. And I’m resorting to drugs (okay, Tylenol PM) to get me to sleep.

I never thought of myself as an emotionally unstable person, but maybe I’ve been fooling myself for years. I hate drama, yet here I am being dramatic. I could be (and was, for the past year) at an easy job making a perfectly decent living, instead of putting myself through this stress. Most of the time I think it’s not so bad, but right now, in the eleventh hour, I find myself wondering, is it really worth it?

Hm, writing it just now was a lot more intimidating than the actual lead-up to it has been so far. Isn’t it ridiculous, though? In undergraduate I would have basically just started classes, but as a medical student I already feel like I’ve been a medical student forever.

Anyway, I should probably disappear into a hole (a studying hole), but instead I will share a story.

Yesterday one of my classes, a small group, let out early. Like the good little first-year I am, I decided to use the extra time to study. Like the social creature who hates studying I am, I decided to sit in a very common area, where a lot of people would walk by, so that when other people’s groups started letting out, they would walk by me and distract me.

After about fifteen minutes, someone I knew walked by, and stopped. “Studying?”

“Of course,” I replied.

“Are you going to be here for a little?” he asked. At my nod, he put his (very full) backpack down next to me and stretched out on the cushioned bench I was sitting on.

“I am so exhausted,” he half-moaned.

“You look it,” I said. “Were you here last night?”

“Yeah,” he said. A heck of a lot of students at my school study at the physical school. I have been unable, so far, to bring myself to do such a thing. I much prefer studying at home, with all of my books at easy access, without having to lug everything somewhere else — but that’s just me.

“How late were you here?” I asked.

He picked up his head a little to look at me. “You really want to know?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“I was here until 5AM or something,” he said.

“That’s crazy,” I replied. Then I grinned and, a little impishly I suppose, said, “I’m pretty much in bed by 11 every night.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What specialty did you want to go into, again?” Implying, of course, that it must not be a very good one.

That last sentence right there exemplifies an attitude that some med students have that I really, really dislike. A lot. It is this feeling that if you are not punishing yourself, if you are not studying until ungodly hours of the night and depriving yourself of everything you enjoy, you must not be a good student. Conversely, if you are haggard-looking and haven’t seen home in a few days, you must be an awesome student who knows everything.

Okay, so it’s quite possible that this friend of mine was joking. But it still points at this underlying idea that I have definitely seen in a lot of my classmates, and I think it’s just plain wrong. Not only because I think/know I am a pretty good student, but because I don’t think that anyone should be pushing themselves in that way and then crowing about it. If I had to study until 4:30AM in order to know the material, I probably would, but I wouldn’t be happy about it. And it seems to me like these people, in a mild, backwards way, are.

Anyway, with that being said, I’m going to go study.

I’ve now been in medical school for about four weeks. Five? I don’t know … orientation managed to sneak its way in there, too.

I am at Relatively Okay, which I’m often starting to consider as more than just “relatively okay.” I’ve only wondered a handful of times what would’ve happened if I’d gotten into Top Tier, though I probably will continue to wonder that throughout the next four years (and hey, maybe even throughout my career. I hope not. I guess we’ll see). I have to say one of those times was this feeling of overwhelming jealousy for the people currently at that school, but, so it is.

I have no regrets about not getting into Medium Prestige though . I was ready to move.

Guy is down here with me and so far things are fine. Occasionally it’s a little stressful, but I mostly study at home and he just reads or phones the friends he left behind for me!, so it’s not that bad.

Now that I’m in school, I have no shame about posting some of my interview stories, which is something I’ve been waiting a while to do. I think it’ll be fun. And maybe useful to some of the aspiring students out there. And eventually I’m going to post my thoughts on the jumble that’s been my first month, but I haven’t had time to organize those so it might take a while.

Me: So, I know neither of us really has a cemented place to live yet and you don’t have a job or anything, but I’m still really worried about medical school.

Guy: What do you mean? You don’t mean the work, right?

Me: No, I mean clearly the classes will be hard, and I might not be in the right mindset about it so it might be difficult to study at first and I’ll probably do horribly on the first set of exams or something like that — but whatever, I can always pull that back up if that’s the case.

Guy: So you’re still worried that this isn’t the right choice.

Me: Well, yeah. And what with making you move down here and everything, and getting my parents’ hopes up …

Guy: Don’t worry about me. I mean, yeah, you made me quit my job a little earlier than I’d planned, but I’m going to get a better one, so that’s fine. And your parents would rather you be happy than be a doctor, unless those two coincide.

Me: I know. It’s just that it’s really coming down to it now. I really am going, and it really might not be right for me.

Guy: Well, you’re lucky enough that it doesn’t matter that much. You want to explore your options, so you’re doing so, and that’s good. And if you hate it and we get to move from Home State after only a year, so much the better. … Kidding.

Me: Ha. Ha. But if I figure out this isn’t right for me … if I realize that I don’t really want to be a doctor …

Guy: You’ll have no idea what else to do.

Me: Yes, that would be an accurate assessment of the situation.

Guy: Well, don’t worry about that until you get there.

My parents are very interesting to me. Okay, that was probably the most general statement ever, but let me explain. I think most people have a hard time thinking of their parents as ever having been romantic, and I’m definitely one of the crowd there. But, and I guess most children probably say this, I honestly do think my parents were never that romantic to each other. They went on dates, and still go on walks, but nowadays they sit at opposite ends of the couch for comfort’s sake.

Take tonight, for instance. We had turkey burgers for dinner.

As I was finishing my burger, I said, “Hey, isn’t today your guys’ thirtieth anniversary?”

My dad reached across the table and quipped, “Yeah, so I’m going to treat myself to an extra half-burger.”

Maybe I’m completely wrong and the romance a) was once there, and b) is still there, between my parents. But often I find myself wondering if they have a comfortable marriage rather than one where they are completely in love. They get along, of course, and they have children that (presumably) they consider very dear to them, and they’ve built a life together. But I wonder, do they ever feel fire for each other, passion, a love that they want everyone to know about? Did they ever? If so, can that kind of passion ever last into your later years, or is a long-lasting friendship and a sense of amiable companionship the best you can hope for?

Of course I’m young and idealistic so I want to believe that I can be passionate forever. That was one of my biggest worries about dating IBanker, my ex-boyfriend. We were friends first, which has often worked for me in the past, but sometimes I would lie awake at night wondering if I really really saw him as the love of my life and my lover, or just my best friend. I wanted both. With Guy, my current boyfriend, I don’t have that worry — but it’s only been six months so far. Six years, six decades down the line, it does seem improbable, even impossible, that the passion would continue. But you hear stories. And maybe they are true. I hope to make them so, at least.

… In any case, my parents are going on vacation, and they are happily bringing me along, so I’ll be gone until basically August 1st.

(Oh yeah — I had a comment asking me how I studied for the MCAT. It’s probably pretty late now to give any advice for the August kids, but I’m going to write a post on what I did, probably when I get back.)

For one thing, there were my parents. I’ve discussed my dad’s opinion in some length: basically, he has always thought my attending medical school would be a good idea, if for no other reason than to get some more higher education.

My mom similarly feels that higher education is always valuable. But more than that, she always wanted to be a doctor herself. Now, I would never become a doctor just to fulfill someone else’s dream, even my mom, to whom I owe more than anyone else I can think of. But she paints the medical profession in such a glowing light, as this ideal she could never quite reach herself, that it’s hard not to think she might be right and that being a doctor would be the best career for me, or for anyone for that matter.

My parents are my parents, and they’ve given me enough over the years that, while any pressure from them irked me, they kind of deserve that right. What bothered me more was the pressure (again, real or imaginary) I felt from people outside the family.

Like people within our community, family friends that I’ve grown up with for years. They always ask what I’m doing. A natural question, but for some reason I feel like they think that now that I’ve graduated I should have a magic formula for the rest of my days. If I tell them about my current job, which is not exactly challenging, they look at me like I’m a slacker. But if I add that I’m “taking a year off before I go to medical school,” they breathe a sigh of relief. Oh, medical school. That’s understandable. It’s as if they expect me to get my year of break over with as soon as possible, so I can get to my real career.

Sad to say, I always felt like my boyfriend of the time was pressuring me, too. The situation was more complicated because he began working in the summer, so he was definitely tied to his new location, whereas I was still deciding where to live in my year(s) off. A normal girlfriend — we had been dating for three years — would probably have lived with him, but I wasn’t ready for that. Nor was I ready for his steady stream of suggestions that I “volunteer at a hospital here,” or his suggesting I apply to the easy schools near him so I could up my chances of living there.

Re-reading this I sound kind of like a whiny little bitch. Oh, poor me, family friends ask what I’m doing and show an interest when I say I might pursue medicine. Poor me, my boyfriend wanted me to live with him. Like I said, a lot of this pressure was quite possibly all in my head.

But I think what bothered me was that nobody really encouraged me to take a break, or made me feel like it was okay to be indecisive about the future. I always came away from this type of conversation feeling guilty for taking a year off, as if I needed to get on with it already, as if choosing a career shouldn’t have been so difficult for me.

I shouldn’t have cared what those other people thought. Or should I have? They were important people in my life, should I have taken their feelings, their opinions into account? Or should I have said no, my career is just for me, and I’ll take just as long deciding about it as I need, thanks?

Whether right or wrong, I think I ended up choosing (am still choosing) the latter.

I finally told my parents about Guy’s plans to move to stay with me. I was greeted with all the questions that one could expect, considering we’ve only been going out a few months and it’s a pretty serious step to take. I don’t know how well I fielded them, but my parents are well aware that I’m an adult (as is Guy, clearly, and this is really his decision anyway), so I think it’ll be fine.

So, that’s about it.

You know, with all the people who get here from searching for really random phrases, I’m really curious as to if you ever find any answers from this blog. Or if it piques your interest and you have any questions. My e-mail’s right over there on the sidebar if you care to satisfy my curiosity.

When I graduated college, my boyfriend of the time, whom I’ll call IBanker, went into ibanking (bet you didn’t see that one coming!). I’d been with him for over two years by then, so I’d known about his career plan. He moved to New York City, where basically every ibanking job in the world is, and started with a very good investment bank. I debated following him there, but after a not-abundantly-fruitful job search, I ended up moving somewhere else.

We both thought two years was a decently solid base for a relationship, plus I thought I’d probably be moving in about a year to pursue medical school or something else, so the long-distance aspect seemed like a temporary thing, and not a big problem. And at first, it wasn’t. He couldn’t get away often for entire weekends because of work, but there’s very easy public transportation to NYC from here, so for the first few months I was fine with visiting him. We probably had about a 5:1 me:him ratio for weekend visits, but it seemed okay to me. He would take as much time off as possible when I came down on weekends (though I’d occasionally have to go with him into the office to finish something quick), and during the week we’d talk on the phone almost every day.

As time went on, IBanker got bigger projects at work. They were major deals, and I knew his resume was getting more prestigious by the minute, but it also meant he started working 100-hour weeks or so. (Yes, I know, around the same number of hours that a first-year medical intern works. Great.) Anyway, our phone calls all began to occur while he was at the office. Our conversations were punctuated with things like, “Hold on one sec while I figure out this spreadsheet” and “Why isn’t this working?! — oh, I see.” IBanker began to have very little to talk about besides work. Meanwhile, I was expanding into my new life and new job, meeting new people, going out to explore the neighborhood, etc., and had less and less to talk about with him.

Occasionally I would suggest that maybe ibanking wasn’t the best career path. I’d brought it up a few times while we were still in college, and now that he was in the thick of it, I tried not to whine, though who knows if I succeeded. I remember one of our conversations about it pretty clearly. It probably started off the way most of our conversations proceeded — him complaining about having to work so much, and how much it sucked, basically.

“I hate to see you this unhappy,” I said. “I wish you would just quit and do something else, or at least tell your supervisors they’re giving you too much work.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “If I complain, they’ll think I’m slacking off. And I have an agreement with them to work two years.”

“But haven’t other people quit before their two years were up?”

“Well, yeah,” IBanker admitted, “but it’s frowned upon.”

“Who cares? You hate your job, and you hate every minute you’re in the office. You should just find something else as soon as possible.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I have to do this. My parents worked and sacrificed so much to give me the opportunity to go to college and have a great career. And I want to be sure to make enough money to support them when they get older, and to support a family with you one day.”

“I don’t care about how much money you make, you know,” I reminded him. “I never have. Besides, I’m probably going to be a doctor, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry about money in the future, either. I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“But I’m doing this for you.”

That phrase. Those words. I couldn’t believe he’d just gone there.

“Never say that again,” I said. “You are most certainly not doing this for me. You may be doing this for your parents, or yourself, but I would never have asked you to do this. I would much rather you be happy and fulfilled than slaving away at something you dislike. You are not doing this for me.”

Around January or February I realized I had mentally checked out of the relationship. We had nothing to talk about anymore, very little in common, even though we’d been together for so long. I didn’t see him often and when we were able to get together, IBanker preferred to stay in and catch up on much-needed sleep, though he’d go out if I really coaxed him. It just wasn’t the same as it once was, partially due to distance, and partially due to a lack of connection. We’d grown apart because we didn’t have any time to work on staying together.

A few weeks after my realization, IBanker and I broke up. Do I think that his job was the main the reason for our breakup? Yep. It just sucked away all of his time. Maybe I should’ve been more supportive of him, and more patient, but I don’t have it in me to wait two years before I can talk to my boyfriend on a regular basis about things that aren’t his job.

Apparently, investment banking is one of the most prestigious post-college careers to pursue. People consider it a badge of honor to make it through two grueling years of grunt work and ridiculous hours. I don’t see it that way, possible comparisons to first-year medical internship notwithstanding. I don’t think ibanking is worth it, unless you love it.