My first semester of med school

Hi. I know I've been gone for a while, but that's only because I've been in medical school. It's about the best excuse I've ever heard, besides being dead.

So med school is simultaneously awesome and anti-awesome. The awesome part is that I've been exposed to some really incredible situations, some world class professors and a whole new group of friends. The anti-awesome part is that every waking moment is spent studying because you know you're going to get another lifetime's worth of knowledge to memorize in lecture the next day.

Incredible Situation Example - For the past 6 weeks we've been doing Gross Anatomy. Think brightly lit room with stainless steel cabinets, rough linoleum floor pockmarked with drains, loud exhaust fans, 33 clueless students in puke green scrubs and 8 dead people marinading in blue zippered-up body bags. We're put in groups with color and number designations. I was in group Blue 3. On Blue dissection days, only members of Blue groups would dissect. And on the next dissection day, the Blue team would present what we'd dissected to the rest of the class while the next color would begin their own dissections. Since the presentations were made in shifts, we really had multiple opportunities to learn our anatomy. After all, who wants to present something without knowing what they're talking about?

Anyway, the particular dissections you are assigned is just the luck of the draw. Sometimes you get a good one, sometimes you get a bad one. For instance, my buddy and I were assigned Male Genitalia and even though I had cut into our cadaver many times in the past, I still found myself apologizing to him just before I slit his scrotum open with a scalpel. Of course, 2 hours later we were pulling and ripping things in there like unskilled day laborers pulling up shag carpeting. BUT... we were also fortunate enough to be assigned the brain dissection. This is fantastic because I got to combine my love of body spelunking with my love for power tools. Yes, I had a big whirring power saw in my gloved hands, which I slowly worked all the way around my cadaver's skull; juices and powdered bone flying all over the place. I thought I was in heaven, but I was only in the waiting room. The real thing was when I was given a large, steel flat-head screwdriver with a T-handle and told to insert it into the cut I had just made with the power saw and then "keep twisting it until the skull cap loosens." I stood back with a goofy smile on my face thinking about how lucky I was to be doing something that the majority of the world will never experience. Then my buddy asked me what the hell I was doing. He agreed that we were lucky but he also reminded me that we still needed to remove the brain and identify all 12 cranial nerves. It was a good day.

Filed in: Contented • MedSchool • Mindfulness