Week 2: Welcome to Medical School.

So all of that orientation was a little confusing as they made it sound like they were orientating us to med school. Clearly, I was mistaken. I have officially started the "fire hydrant" phase of school.

I have to warn you (as well as myself) that I will be brutally honest in my blog, no matter how stupid it makes me look. I went through last week, week 1, like school was still warming up and that the real school would start sometime this week. What I am now embarrassed to admit is that I was under the wrong impression.

Background: Undergraduate school was pretty easy. I studied a lot before a test and as long as I went to class a few times, I got an "A". I was pretty good at memorizing things as long as they had some conceptual/visual element to them, i.e. physiology and anatomy. I also was trained to take notes and remember everything when the professor said, "Now, on your test..." I loved those moments because it was like cheating! Only the professors told us so it was only sort-of cheating.

Reality: Medical school is not easy. Take all the "stuff" that you see in your undergrad text book. Try and think back to course lectures when the professor would include an FYI or a brief in depth explanation of something only to further illustrate the testable concept. Try to remember what it was like to have a list of what you DON'T need to study along with the MUST study stuff. Medical School surprised me. It was this week that I realized that the whole time that I was waiting for someone to say, "Now on your test you will need to..." or even a "Everything that we talk about today will be on your test," what had really happened was that they assume that you were told that you have to know EVERYTHING! I'm not kidding.

Take Anatomy for example. I know my anatomy (and yours too!). I have had about four courses in anatomy in undergrad. That adds up to about 14 credit hours of anatomy. That is almost a full load for a semester, just in anatomy! So when we started anatomy last week and all we talked about was embryology and the development of body tissues, I thought we were in the preface! I thought we were just being warmed up for anatomy! I convinced myself that school hadn't started yet due to the ridiculous amount of detail they were throwing at us about something so (in my opinion) unrelated to anatomy that we deal with as physicians. HA HA! Joke was on me, folks! It is absolutely the truth if they wrote on the syllabus in big bold letters: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, KNOW EVERYTHING OR FAIL. Welcome to medical school.

But despite my assumptions and ignorance to reality, I'm not overwhelmed quite yet. First test is next Friday. We will talk about overwhelmed then. I am, however, elated! My first patient gave me my first lessons today. Here are some lessons that she taught me today:

• Exercise= surgeons can fix you a whole lot easier if something goes wrong.
• Exercise= your body hates you if driving to McDonald's is your exercise.
• No matter what anyone says, beauty is not only skin deep. Beauty is actually attached to the fascia that connects to the skin but it runs all the way to the bone. Dissection was Beautiful!!!
• I am a cutter. No matter what direction medical school takes me, I love to cut, rip, pry, search, and identify. I spent three hours in there and could have stayed longer. Awesome.
• I am also glad that I can make mistakes. It is so hard to find certain things and I end up hacking something that I will have to find later while looking for something else.
• Always have a plan. Even more important than having a plan, have a plan for what you will do WHEN the original plan fails. At least that lesson pertains to dissection. I don't think any of us were expecting having to rip away 15 or so pounds of skin, fat, and fascia in order to START the dissection, let alone how hard it would be to find the tiny veins, arteries, and nerves that we had to identify.
• A dead body has a ton more juices than you would think and they splatter on your fellow dissectors. This does not make them happy.
• I love dissecting. I think I already said that though.

We only dissected the back today, but it was still really cool. I'm getting excited for the internal organs and bones. I'll be back in the lab next Tuesday!

One last thing that I'm really loving. I am so impressed, proud, surprised by the osteopathic elements of my medical education. No where else would I begin to be a clinical doctor my first week of school. I have already role played an office visit! We have a course our first quarter about doctor/patient relationships and how to ask effective questions. I don't even know what the answers mean yet! I love the OMM training. We haven't done the actual manipulation, but the sneaky part of it all is that we are being numbed to the awkwardness of touching a stranger. I have a partner that I didn't know from Adam a few days ago and today he had to lie there while I dug my fingers into his butt cheeks to palpate the ischeal tuberocity of the pelvis. I am not kidding when I say that it doesn't phase me at all. I really don't feel awkward at all. But as I looked around the room at 172 students grabbing each other's butts, I had to laugh. Where else do you go to school and get to do that as an assignment! (no play-on words intended with ass-ignment).

In the end, (there it was again) I loved my second week. I know I have one day left but it only gets better from here!