Hopefully by now you have learned not to expect much in the way of blog posts during the school year. It’s a rough time and nearly all relationships, hobbies, and other activities suffer in the thick of it.
I used to worry a lot about where the time went and fret over how little I had done in 3 hours or whatever. Now, I don’t have time for that. Anything that isn’t directly related to studying for my systems course- which right now is hematology- is immediately considered free time and I have promised myself to never regret how I spend my free time. If its free time and I want to sleep, I sleep. If I want to hold one of my babes, I try my hardest to get my sisters to let me hold them. Unfortunately sometimes OMM and DTP eat up my free time with their class requirement, and that is a quick way to get me really cranky.
“Hell Week 2.0” I think is now over. I remember one distinct week in first year that just raked me over the coals. We had back-to-back tests, Anatomy and something else awful like Embryology or something. On top of that, I was sick. I’m sure there was more to it than that, but I have PTSD and can’t remember.
This year’s worst week ever- just happened. I just had a lot going on; there were two tests and I had to do my first full history and physical on a standardized patient. This was all within 6 days but it didn’t fall on an exact calendar week so I had a weekend to study. That made it somewhat less traumatic than last year. Anyway its over and I survived. Somehow I always survive.
This “Hell Week” my sickness came after. A lot of my class and I are still fighting something viral. My nightstand is still cluttered with cough medicines and tissues but I am feeling much better. Sickness always comes with stress for me.
I think it is a part of the remnants left over from when I *cough* didn’t have it all together like I do now. Cough cough. I think all medical students are generally highly motivated, Type A’s who like organized outlines, but I take it to the extreme, and I always have. If I had time to write all my notes in perfect penmanship and white-out all errors, I swear I would.
When I was twelve I had a pack of 64 gel pens and I kid you not, they had to be put back in the box in rainbow order or I would lose it. 64 PENS. Some of us med students are more lax and some of us are more like me. I was WAYYY worse in college when the workload kept piling up and didn’t give me time to hole-punch all my papers into a color-coded, divider-laden binder and neatly outline each chapter of the assigned readings. Seriously. I really do have a problem.
Its called Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
I’ve written a version of this post several times; how I would tell cyberspace that I actually do have really bad anxiety; I could talk about how terrible mental illness is or how I think mental illness rates might be highest among medical students, but the truth is, I know very little about either of those things. All I know is what I’ve experienced.
And what I know from my experience is that I’m not really a victim of mental illness. I live a normal life. Anxiety doesn’t have its grasp on me and pull me under until I can’t breathe. There was a time when I might have said that it did, but honestly, I have a very blessed life, and always have. There were always people around me that knew me and supported me and didn’t let me get too far away before I was shown some perspective. I worried all my life. When I was little, I remember worrying a lot about my family dying, awkward moments, and getting sick when I was away from my mom. Now, pretty much all I worry about comes down to one thing: “Am I good enough?” Am I good enough at school, a good enough friend, am I going to be a good enough doctor, am I a good enough aunt, am I good enough to pass boards.
For the most part, though, its under control. I have functional anxiety. Enough anxiety to keep me working hard and not enough to keep me in bed, too scared of failing to do anything. I have had those days- though not in a long, long time. I call it functional anxiety and it’s livable. My “anxiety” habits are things that happen to me involuntarily that I didn’t know were pathologic until college. I thought they were normal. I bet a lot of my classmates do the same things because stress does some crazy things.
Functional anxiety means my lower lip will always need chapstick. I bite and peel the skin off of that lip until it bleeds. It means I peel hangnails back, not out of boredom, but because I’m so twitchy. It means I can’t get through a single exam without wiping the sweat off my forehead. It means I have to pee right before a test and then I sit down to take the test and I have to pee again. It means I get really hot and sweaty when I am uncomfortable. It means I have to walk and take deep breaths when I’m really mad. It means I cannot keep my fingernails painted because I pick the polish off as soon as I’m alone with my thoughts.
These things are concealable. Most people wouldn’t know, and don’t know, that I am physically not able to listen as they quiz each other right before the exam because I am in my own head, taking deep breaths. It’s not something that they have to be conscious and courteous of, to spare me the agony of triggering my mental illness. I like that I have to deal with it. We all have our own adversity. It just so happens that mine is diagnosable- and also manageable. It’s my functional anxiety, and I’ll survive it. Just like I always do.
Tag: tests
I have started my second year of medical school. I’m actually two and a half weeks in.
I’m still in the classroom, but since only years 1 and 2 are done on campus, it gives all of us MS-2’s this false sense of being “top dogs”. We’ve been showing the first years around all summer, and now we can pop backs so we think we are some hot stuff. Then the dream stops and we wake up to the nightmare reality every morning that we still actually only know very little and boards loom on the horizon like that scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts are all walking toward the space ship dramatically. Will we all just burst into flames and never make it there?! Will we get halfway to the moon and then freeze to death?! Will we make it home to our lives and loved ones triumphantly?!
NOBODY KNOWS!
Sometimes I don’t feel like walking forward towards that spaceship. It seems like too great of a risk. Studying for the MCAT depleted my gumption reserves. It gave me mono and walking pneumonia and insomnia and anxiety and the sweats and nightmares. I always felt like crap, just completely run down for that 6 weeks or so I studied; only surviving by way of coffee and sonic drinks. Now that such conditions are normal for me as a medical student, I wonder how preparing for my tortuous first round of boards will plague me.
Okay, think happy thoughts! That test is not til next June and I am loving school for the most part. The transition back into a routine is always a little rough after a break though. Especially with the added change of living situations.
I moved out from living with my parents back in July. I live much closer to school now, with two classmates. My house turned out just the way I wanted it! (Easy to say when your dad is the contractor.) It’s cute and cozy and it felt like home right away. Though it was still hard to move out permanently- even at 23.
I think I got burned out being at the school all the time last year, so I study at my new house a lot more so far this semester. Since all of my roommates are medical students, (which I highly recommend doing!) noise is never a problem, and I get a lot done at home. Sometimes I think I live by myself, it’s so quiet!
It’s strange how my study habits change so quickly and seamlessly when I’ve been doing this school thing for so many years.
I want to do a study doing a functional MRI on medical students’ brains before first year and then after they graduate. Just to see what the heck goes on up there. I think it probably actually gains mass from sheer info and also probably starts to just fritz out on occasion during important situations especially. It would also be great to do a study on how many words we read a day or some other way to quantify the vast amounts of information that pass through in ear and out the other.
I’m also open to writing a book or piloting a TV show about the medical school experience if anyone with money or power is reading this. Its the most exciting thing I’ve ever been through, which is sort of sad because the majority of what I do is sit there. However, when asked, I bet money that YOU, Regular Joe, would like to see the process of taking a mostly kind and hardworking (but still dumb) person and turning them into a wonderful, knowledgable doctor- I think Regular Joe would want to see that. It’s got everything:
Romance-there IS dating in med school
Roller coaster of emotions- test grades, fake patients, and prostate exams, oh my!
Drama/Tension- “They said we would have 2 full hours, not 1 hour 50 minutes for this test!”
Fun/Action- med students have been known to throw a nice formal ball AND get down in sand volleyball. That’s riveting stuff!
If fishing for crabs in Alaska gets a show, medical school should have a show.
That’s all for now!
Eat, class, study, run, sleep, repeat!
Its been a pretty hellish week. Last week, I think I was operating on the fumes of a month long exhaustion situation and just got flat out sick. I was nauseous, my back hurt, I had a headache, I couldn’t eat, I had no energy and no amount of coffee was helping. I was falling asleep anytime I sat still. I went home early one evening for a dentist appointment. And oh goodie, I have TMJ! Guess what causes it? STRESS! I told my dentist my situation with medical school and all got the “bless your heart” look. He knows what it’s like.
Anyway, I had a huge Friday test in Histo and then another one on Monday in Anatomy that I didn’t do well on at all. I could blame it on many things: Not feeling good, having too much material, the awful Friday/Monday test situation, etc. But, I’ll take the blame for it and just say that I was not ready for that test. Still, I know myself well enough to know that I won’t get them all. So I took the good with the bad. I did pretty well on Biomed, I just didn’t get the anatomy one this time.
I stepped outside on one of the first truly chilly nights we’ve had this October. Some generic Pandora hiphop station starts up in my earbuds and I start to feel freedom in my very first steps off the porch. I didn’t bring a watch. Didn’t need one. This run isn’t for time. Its for clarity. By 16 seconds in- I guarantee you- its not school on my mind anymore. Sometimes its nothing on my mind at all. 7 minutes in and I might as well be flying. The wind is just cold enough to bite at my throat and ears a little, but I don’t care. Chilly fall weather that you can still wear shorts in- is prime running time. Especially at night when the street lights make the wet roads look like black glass reflecting it to twice the city lights. I blow through cross walks and stretches of street without sidewalk. Up and down curbs, around bends, and mud holes. I cross the street but am sure to run straight down the double yellow line in the middle of the road a few steps because its where I feel the most free; like nothing can stop me- not even city ordinances and 2-ton hunks of metal.
In running, it’s never mattered to me whether I’m puttering and sputtering and choking and hurting just to keep putting one foot in front of the other, or if I’m in cruise mode, just chilling at a smooth pace, enjoying the view. I could even be gutting it out, leaving it all on the line grimacing with the speed of my own legs’ muscle memory out running my own lungs. None of that matters. I’ve always just been chasing that feeling. Maybe its runner’s high. I don’t know. At a certain point, though, the body takes over- if my mind will let it.
Its a place where my leg turnover carries me further than I thought I could go after not running for 9 days 16 hours and 21 minutes. Like pedaling a bike upside down. If you crank the pedals a few times, the wheels won’t quit spinning for quite some time. Its just residual motion and it doesn’t require any thought whatsoever. It’ll just stop whenever it stops. That’s what my legs feel like.
Or that feeling I get when I give a little extra power in my hamstring to leap an extra-long stride’s length off a curb and head downhill, busting out the bass drum tempo to my song with my feet. It’s a feeling I would imagine getting when you go up a ramp and land on the other side of ten buses all in a row and land safely on the other side.
It’s a feeling when I don’t feel like my legs or lungs want me to keep going because they’re hurting, but I keep going somehow as if the act of running were involuntary. Like it comes naturally.
Its going so fast I feel my heart up in my throat. I know I can’t hold the pace for long, its just nice to amp up and feel my body working with me not against me for once. Its slowing down and feeling the tension come out, the adrenaline ebbs and flows and I get comfortable again.
It’s feeling comfortable on a run at all. Ever.
Who ever thought running would be my biggest comfort during medical school?
Running makes me powerful, joyous, competent, and aggressive, but yet, graceful. I feel loose and free and fierce and accomplished. I feel feminine and strong and not anything near weakness. I feel confident and beautiful and happy. I never feel like I don’t measure up, because its just me there and I am running and that is all I am doing. I feel like I’m doing something, because I am.
Every step is quantifiable, definite, appreciable, and proven. Every step proves something to myself- that I can go one more step. I look back at all the steps I’ve taken and can’t even trace the path I ran 8 minutes ago with my eyes. Do you know how few times that happens in life? Where you can work- and work hard- and then look at where you came from and where you are now and SEE- actually SEE- a quantifiable difference that can’t be argued with. Its an incredible feeling. When I study and study for 14 hours a day, I go home with nothing. I have no proof I can see. I have nothing to show for it. Only time and tests will tell whether that time was worth something- if I gained anything from that work.
On a run though, I come home with work I can see. The sweat on my face and shirt. The five miles of pavement I left behind me. Chewed up, spit out, burnt up asphalt that I conquered with my own two feet. Even the pain in my left foot tells me I’ve done work.
Running gives me things I don’t get to experience a whole lot anymore. It gives me a good dose of accomplishment, stands me back up, builds confidence, and makes me happy.
It’s the whole theme of steps that gets me and keeps me going in school. The runs carry me through in more ways than I can count. That even if its baby steps, slow steps, big steps, or steps where I flat out stumble and fall and get back up again, I’m still getting somewhere. I try not to forget that when I’m endlessly studying. Each powerpoint, lecture, sentence, note, drawing, and test is a step and I’m getting somewhere whether I see it or not. My steps aren’t always the best or fastest or more graceful, but they mean I’m working. And whatever else anyone around me is doing, I get a lot of satisfaction out of knowing I’m out on the road taking laborious, painful, glorious, work-for-every-last-one-of-them steps, and everyone is driving by fast in a car acting like they’re getting somewhere.
The Honeymoon Phase
Medical School and I are still in that honeymoon phase. Everything that happens is novel and exciting, and I’m still soaking it all in. However, yesterday was my first medical school exam and I think this “boyfriend” of mine might be slightly abusive. All told- after one week, the test covered somewhere around 16 topics or chapters. We had one hour of instruction for each chapter. I didn’t feel dead immediately afterwards and actually was pleased with my score, but by the end of yesterday, I NEEDED to lay down. You know your entire life is studying when “indulging” involves paying the extra fee to take the turnpike so you can get home to lay down faster. I also have been purchasing things left and right with loan money. Some things I needed (granola bars) and some things I decided I deserved (running stuff). I’m finding that I am very reward driven, and I end up negotiating with myself in my head even though I will really end up changing that negotiation (i.e. lying to myself) to get/do what I really feel like getting/doing in the end 🙂 For example, as soon as I woke up this morning I was trying to schedule my day so that I could get a nap in ASAP. At first it involved me saying “Okay Andi, just get through all the power points this evening really efficiently and then go to bed early.” Then I changed it to “You can study before dinner, take a nap, eat, and then study again.” Now the plan is to take a nap after I finish this blog and study later. Unfortunately the distractions and temptations that plagued me in undergrad are still a bump on the study-struggle-bus route only I don’t have the luxury of being able to play catch up and space out the workload a little. If you get behind, you get BEHIND, and you get behind QUICK. Because that test yesterday? We have another one 6 days from now over the next 18 chapters.