bored...

So I already watched Season 3 of 'Scrubs' this weekend, AND read Harry Potter 3, and took a full-length USMLE practice test. It was supposed to last 8 hours (7 hours of test + 1 hour of breaks)--is it bad that I finished in about 4.5 hours, including breaks? Probably. Oops.

I'm bored. My fiance is watching some season of '24' (does it matter which one? There's a giant disaster to be avoided, and it's all on Jack's head), and my eyes hurt, so I really shouldn't be typing, but it's better than flipping through the channels trying to find a "Law and Order" that I haven't already seen. Man, Christopher Meloni's character on 'Scrubs' was priceless--I think I almost wet myself I laughed so hard.

I just want this damn test to be over so I can worry about the wedding without feeling guilty about it. I'm not sure whether it's awesome, or highlights my pathetic-ness, but I've started receiving emails with offers of food, since I should be studying so much I forget to eat. I am such a freaking slacker! I'm definitely NOT forgetting to eat, that's for sure. Good thing I'm also not forgetting to go to the gym, or my wedding dress and I would have words here in 3 weeks. Oh my GOD I'm getting MARRIED in THREE WEEKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Better go bust out that "Worst-Case Scenario" book so I can learn how to make a bridal gown out of a table cloth. You know. Just in case I outfat my dress with all the stress eating.

School of Incompetency

There are many things I love about my medical school. Its location in one a large medical center is ideal. I have had some excellent professors, excellent and caring course directors, and great preceptorship opportunities. For the most part, the administrators seem to listen to students; when things go wrong, they listen to us and try to correct the problem.

However, therein lies part of the issue: the lack of foresight into what could potentially be a problem. For example: we have a very secure grade website. It can only be accessed with a digital ID, stored on an eToken, used on a computer with the software to download the ID. This data is then password protected. Great, right? Well, sorta. It's only great if they actually upload the grades to the website. It turns out that this uploading of grades is a volunteer job, unassigned to any actual worker. The departments can all turn in their grades, but some nameless, faceless person deep in the bowels of the IT department has to actually type them into the computer. Either that or it's all done by fairies. Very slow fairies. Our grades came in on the pharmacology exam around Thursday, over a week ago; I was finally able to access mine tonight. Why the fuss? For me, the fuss is in being OCD and wanting to know my grade. However, there are people in the class who needed to schedule the remediation test who would have been much more inconvenienced. (I'm just really anal that way.)

Then there's today's example. I'm supposed to show up at 8 am on Monday for a two-day long "Technical Skills" class, where I'll get to poke various classmates in the arm and hope that whomever pokes my arm does a good job. To date, all the communication I've received about this class was the email 2 months ago telling me that I got the May dates. I know I'm supposed to be there from 8-5 for two days, but where? Doing exactly what? Should I bring my white coat? Stethoscope, otoscope, ophthalmoscope? Extra bandages? A lunch? Will I get time to go eat lunch? These are important questions, especially those about the food. I get very cranky if I miss a meal, especially when some moron is poking around in my arm veins with a needle.

I might not be so worried about this if this lady coordinating the class hadn't already displayed amazing powers of incompetence. She requests the class to email her back with their first choice of session (of 3), so we do. There are over 200 of us, so this is an arduous process, I understand. Yet, oh wait, uh, um, it's your JOB. Don't send me a snippy reply when I do what you asked me to do. Don't be bitchy with students emailing you to try to swap dates because they're getting married on that date. My favorite, though, was when she sent out the roster list, and my name wasn't on the May dates. It was in June, conveniently located the day I come back from the wedding as a Mrs. and then proceed to my honeymoon. I emailed her frantically, waving my confirmatory email as proof of her error; she finally said "oh, don't worry about it, you're in the May session". No updated roster, no further emails.

Can you blame me for panicking a little? I started to think, what if I didn't get an email because she forgot? What if I don't get to practice poking people and they don't let me be a third year? GAH! But nobody else got an email, either, so at 2 in the morning, I finally found an email address belonging to a "Course Director" for this thing and emailed her, begging for information. We'll see. Perhaps I'll show up on Monday to find 70 med students wandering the halls in varying states of professional/casual beach attire, some (like me, the aforementioned anal one) carrying bags of medical equipment, others without even a pen in their tiny shorts and tube top.

So yeah, sometimes I love my medical school. Others...

TGIO: Thank God It's Over

So I survived the end of second year, and the end of the BS known as basic sciences. I had a test question about premature ejaculation where the answer was "prescribe the squeeze technique". I had a test question about a girl who said she "has fooled around a lot, you know, but I've only ever slept with my boyfriend [an IV drug user], and we use condoms most of the time", where we were asked "which behavior puts her at highest risk of contracting HIV? The answer (I think) was "anal intercourse, using condoms 'almost always'". Yes, they 'quoted' her condom use, which is doctor talk for "she's lying out her skanky ass". Any 18-year-old female patient with unexplained joint pain is automatically gonorrheal arthritis (because they're all sluts!) but a male with similar symptoms probably just has ankylosing spondylitis, which isn't his fault because it's genetic. We had multiple questions about the young nurse who collapses at work, found to be hypoglycemic with high insulin and low C peptide. What's the diagnosis? Surreptitious insulin injections--she's making herself sick!

I could go on, but I just woke up and I can't remember any more test questions. Suffice to say, it was bad.

After leaving the test, I worked out for the first time in weeks, finished David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day in about 2 hours, and got a FABULOUS haircut. That man will be my stylist forever. Period. I went to the mall with my newly engaged friend Basia, where we were utterly, completely girly. The estrogen was stifling. But ooooooh, so much fun! I got all dressed up and took my fiance out for Thai, then to the symphony, where they had Gustav Holst's The Planets set to film footage of, uh, the planets, taken from various NASA voyages. After such a long day, I have spent most of the rest of the weekend asleep, eating, wishing I was working out or cleaning my apartment (I've done neither), etc.

We did go to help a friend move. He's leaving a NASTY apartment for this gorgeous brand-new place with tall ceilings, crown molding, hardwood floors, granite counters, stainless steel appliances, and a big round bathtub. No, I'm not jealous AT ALL. Maybe I, too, should join a MD/PhD program so I'm flush with money. His nasty scuzzy apartment killed our vacuum cleaner, so we then played the great shopping game and went out and bought a new one, which is so shiny and pretty! (And also on sale!) All in all, a totally relaxing weekend, full of much nothing.

Now time to start getting ready to study for the USMLE Step 1, which I'm taking in 3.5 weeks. Ugh!

Powerful truth

So I was reading a blog earlier, and I came across this description of her experience with depression and how it has affected her relationship with her significant other. I'm linking to it because I find it such an amazing description of how I feel, and in much better prose than I could write.

Most people would never think I have depression. Even people who know me are surprised. When I break down, it's usually in private, because I want it that way and because I'm more likely to break if I'm lonely. I weep and weep, sobbing with grief over my life, trying to cry past the painful lump in my throat that keeps me from breathing. I then try like the devil to hide the red face and puffy eyes that signal I've been crying for 3 straight hours (a frozen spoon applied to the eyes works wonders). By the next day, I'm *fine* again, and the previous day's bottomed-out experience is nothing more than a blip, a dip in my road. What frightens me, though, is how low I go in those dips. Sure, I'm okay the next day, but that doesn't mean it's okay to sit here and weep because I'm just SURE I have no friends and no one could possibly love me and I don't want to live anymore.

Because it's past the horizon by the next day, it is very difficult to take my medication. Like any chronic, mostly asymptomatic disease, when I feel fine I think "eh, I can skip today's pill". One becomes 4 until I end up having a break down and realize it's been 3 weeks since I took a pill. I have no one to blame but myself for these breaks, then, and I then use that to beat myself up with.

My fiance is remarkably caring and supportive through all this, but sometimes I still feel a twinge of anger/jealousy because "how could he possibly understand, he's never felt this bad". I'd never want him to suffer, but sometimes I'm still angry because he doesn't understand my pain. He is the only person I will allow to see me when I'm really down (except my former counselor, whom I STILL miss since she retired). He will hold me and tell me he loves me and remind me that I have friends who care about me and that I'm not really alone, no matter how dark and cold it is on the inside.

It even feels shallow writing about it when I'm not down, because it's truly like I'm watching another person's suffering instead of my own (if I may use such a strong word as "suffering"--forgive my hyperbole). I can't allow myself to re-experience those moments because that could trigger another one, so I can't empathize with myself. If I do try to talk about such moments, it's either in the voice of a robotic cheerleader (most often) or through tears--I can't speak normally about my depressive episodes. Again, this contributes to many people not believing me when I tell them that I've been taking antidepressants off and on since I was 18. My father once asked me "if it wasn't maybe more of a woman thing, you know, a problem with hormones". Without knowing about me, I've heard med school classmates say things like "psychiatry isn't a real science--those people [the patients] need to just suck it up and quit whining". Since this feeds into my own fears and dislike of taking psychiatric medication, it's easy to let uneducated comments like these sting deep.

I could probably keep going, but sleep is going to be more cathartic. And that reminds me: I need to go take my SSRI.

New "Most Embarrassing Moment in Medical School"

So the former "MEMIMS" was the day I cried on a course director. I had gone to her to beg for mercy regarding my preceptor, as I wouldn't be able to see any more patients (and thus write them up) prior to exams, yet I was missing one patient + write-up. When I tried to calmly speak to her about my distress and panic regarding my ability to finish the assignment, I burst into tears and couldn't speak coherently for about 15 minutes. Yes, that was a proud day. Thank god it was a female course director, who let me sit down and gave me a cup of water and told me exams would be over soon and it'd all be okay.

The new MEMIMS: Today was my final exam for a pathophysiology/practice of medicine conglomerate course. I was stressed because I had procrastinated FAR too much and hadn't studied enough for this test. To add insult to injury, my studying skills were further cramped by an attack of allergies that began yesterday morning and were unfazed by the over-the-counter loratadine/pseudoephedrine I'd been taking. This stuff hadn't stopped my sneezing, but it had made me very sleepy yesterday. This morning, I decided not to take it, as I figured the sleepiness would hurt me more in the exam.

About halfway through the test, my nose started to run and I started to sneeze. I should buy beers for all the people stuck sitting near me, because I was a sneezing, sniffling, honking wreck. However, true to form, I FORGOT TO BRING KLEENEX INTO THE TEST WITH ME. So, when my nose started to run, and then to DRIP, I had nowhere to wipe/blow it.

Yes, I snotted on myself during a final exam.

I sat there and debated for at least 5 minutes--leave the test, or finish as fast as possible? Finally, in horror, I got up and asked the proctor to hold my test so I could go to the restroom. New policy dictated that she had to follow me, so she got to watch as I found a napkin outside the room to wipe my hands and blow my nose, and then as I frantically scrubbed my hands in the restroom. I then brought a 3' long section of toilet paper (the rough institutional kind) back into the exam room with me, where I'm sure 100 of my peers waited to slit my throat as I continued to sneeze for the remainder of the test.

I'm sure my mom would be so proud.

She joined the 21st century...

...and bought a 19" flat-panel monitor. Blogging never looked so good!

/end of shameless bragging

Countdown of exams until end of basic science: 5 exams and 2 finals down, 4 finals + USMLE step 1 to go...

My Seester Rocks Out

My sister IM'ed me the other day wanting my address. I had no idea why, but I was kinda hoping she was mailing me the lipgloss I'd left in her coat pocket. Then she says no, it's something else. Hmmm. I had no idea.

So the package arrived today and it was small and flat. I opened it to find The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Survival Handbook: Weddings. Awwwwwww. *sniffs*

Muchas gracias, mi hermana! And btw, what is YOUR address?