Okay. Okay okay okay. I've had this post sitting in drafts all week and I'm finally making myself sit down and put some words to it.
I know I say this every month, but I really need to be better at keeping track of my thoughts in real time, as the month progresses, instead of trying to force things out all at once. I don't even know what to say about March at this point. It was busy. It was hard. It absolutely blew past and I feel like my head is still spinning in its wake.
We took what are infamously two of the hardest exams of all of med school as part of neuro - one on long-tract pathways and one on the brainstem. Like, eight people failed the latter exam. EIGHT. Which is maybe not the kind of thing that should be discussed on the internet, considering we're all future health professionals in the making, but it's noteworthy because that's a first for my class. Our exam averages are consistently ridiculously high. It just goes to show that neuro material is no joke. As our module director is fond of saying, NSB forces us to employ neurons we've never had to use before to study new neurons...yeah. Try thinking about that for a hot second and see how confused you end up.
From where I'm sitting now, in this first week of April, I have almost exactly one month left of my preclinical years of medical school. We have one more neuroscience-based exam next Friday followed by two weeks of psychiatry...followed by another exam...followed by a miniboard...followed by an OSCE...followed by a month of me crying my eyes off because it's officially our intensive Step 1 study period. Yikes.
Anyway. A few notes from the month:
- Match Day happened! And that's pretty much all I can think of, haha. Goes to show how monumental matching is in the life of a medical student. I attended the Match ceremony with my boyfriend's family, since he actually got matched to a residency this year, and seriously sat there fighting back tears as everyone opened the envelopes containing their future program information.
- Through AMWA this month we hosted a discussion with a cardiologist about women and heart disease [can't remember if that was in time for the last monthly post or not...] and co-hosted a forum on sexual abuse and it plays into our role as health care providers. I'm trying to schedule a couple more events to round out the year, so hopefully people start replying to my emails soon. ;)
- One of the new additions to our curriculum this year is a mandatory "career exploration project" to be completed by all first and second year students. This can take a variety of forms, but most of us are using it as an opportunity to do some shadowing outside of class, as the main purpose of the project is basically to provide us with expanded malpractice insurance. So this week I had the opportunity to go hang out with the on-call OB/GYN team on labor and delivery for an evening. I got to watch a lot of ultrasounds and follow one of the residents as she ran around the emergency department and the screening room assessing patients. I was miraculously even able to see a baby be born! The mother wasn't progressing very quickly so the resident manually ruptured her membranes partway through the evening, so I wasn't expecting much else to happen that evening because labor is a fickle process that likes to do its own thing. But lo and behold! Unto Children's and Women's Hospital a child was born, and it was beautiful. I stood to the side and observed as the resident talked the third year on rotation through the process, and found myself seriously fighting back tears. So much joy in that little delivery room, you guys. It's an amazing thing.