New Years Resolution!

This morning I laid in bed thinking how much I wanted to re-unite with that thing. What's it called? Oh right, "life". And when I do, it'll probably be awkward since it's been so long since we've hung out. This semester is going to be different though. I am going to make our relationship work!

The last quarter of my classroom training in pre-clerkship (i.e. before hospital wards) begins tomorrow. The routine begins again - start of semester and RF is happy-go-lucky. Things are looking rosy for him. He enters the boxing ring to fight off the contenders. Standing at the other corner - early mornings, late nights, condescending teachers, arrogant peers, super keeners, ladadadada. All good until BAM! K.O. as exams enter. Before the unavoidable K.O. though, I'm going to make this relationship with life work out. I refuse to let medicine consume my life.

"So, RF, what are you going to do?" you ask. This is where resolution edition 2011 comes in: I'm going to go out of my way to pick up "destressing hobbies" and avoid burnout (aside: according to several tests, I am at "very severe risk or burnout"). And along the way, I'm going to blog about it to make sure I stick to them. It'll be kinda like a fat camp diary - except instead of shedding the chunk, I'm shedding the stress. Feel free to throw random suggestions for stress reduction my way! I'll definitely try them if they don't involve harming little puppies.

Burnt

8 months into school and what a change of view I have of the medical system. It sucks. Medical school sucks.

I used to be the life of the party - lived the urban yuppie life, hit the outdoors all the time, and just lived life. Coming into school, I made a decision to keep living life. This was easy for the first couple of months. After all, they do treat us pretty nice here at my school. Then when the first batch of exams came, I thought - holy frack I'm out of here. I stuck through it in hopes of it getting easier.

3 months into my second semester now, I couldn't help but wonder why I don't have that urge to "do stuff" in life anymore. I was troughing and rarely wanted to make plans to hit a party or workout at the gym. Anyone who knows me knows this isn't me. It's like I've had the living bejesus sucked out of me. I was telling a friend about my "troughing" and finally she hit me on the head and said, "wait, you still haven't figured out the obvious reason of why you're troughing?". It took a moment and then it all hit me.

Even when I'm away from my books, medicine is on my mind. There's the ever looming thought of everything I have to do. There's the huge amounts of gunk I don't know that I should know. There are the fake people at school I have to deal with. There is the shitty doctor who I have to shadow every week to deal with. And the thing I hate most, is when I get sarcastic comments from ppl outside of medicine about "oh wow - you're going to be a doctor. whooopdy doo. good for you. make mommy proud". Maybe if they tried working 100 hour weeks only to realize you still might fail at what you're doing then they'd at least give me a break. Oh btw, mom never asked me to be doctor.

Did I love the idea of getting into medicine? Absolutely. Do I love medical school? Absolutely not. Do I miss life? More than anything. I'm going to be hopeful though and keep on trekking.