| | Well, yet again I'm burnt out. This time it's only been really
for the past day and a half, but the super-long 8-hour study session
marathons for 2 weeks have taken their toll. Exams are next week,
and I'm sitting here, doing laundry, chatting on IM, thinking that
maybe now would be a good time to fire up the (now dusty) PS2. I
miss video games.
I'm sure I'll do fine, but frankly it's just really, really hard to
keep struggling uphill through all of this. It's the pressure of
it, too... the pressure to perform. I mean, I'll be blatantly
honest. At this point, I'm not going to fail any of my
classes. I know several of my classmates for whom that's a
concern, and I'm grateful it's not me. Still and all, now there's
a second question. Can I honor? And does it matter?
Honoring is only important if you want to get into competitive
residencies.
I suppose I'm starting to think that it does. I know myself, and
I know that I like fun toys, and really difficult things, and
procedural stuff. That means the more competitive residencies,
whether it be laparoscopic surgery, or ER, or what. I highly
doubt I'll be a GP. It's too sedentary, in a way. That
being said, GPs are the gatekeepers, and need to keep all of their
medicine so that they can correctly funnel people's issues to the right
specialists. I'm definitely not trying to knock on GPs.
One of the 4th years I've talked to said that you find out eventually
if you have a medical or a surgical mind. Medical minds like to
sit around and think about the problem for long periods of time.
They mull over differential diagnoses. They, in an ER setting,
will pull up a patient's past history and peruse it before entering the
room. They are the kind of people who go on to be neurologists,
GPs, and shrinks. Surgical minds, on the other hand, want
answers. They like results, and quick fixes, and decisions.
They (obviously) tend to be surgeons, and ER docs, and
radiologists. They are the ER doc who walks into the room and
instinctively knows if someone is sick or faking (interestingly enough,
apparently there is some level of secondary cues that you can learn to
pick up on- acidosis, ketosis, jaundice, etc that are not normal in
healthy people).
I don't really know where I fall. I do know that sitting around
in small groups and not getting anywhere for an hour on a case kills
me. I also know that I really enjoy getting the answer
"right". Wait-and-see doesn't really appeal to me (a few entries
ago, the example of the woman with the ulcers is a perfect example).
Eh. I'm procrastinating. I should be working, so that I can
get honors, so I can go on to be a cardiovascular surgeon making
$600,000 a year with a huge house, fast cars, and 3 divorced trophy
wives I pay alimony to.
Sarcasm, of course. I guess, though, I've always been the kind of
person who likes to keep all my doors open. Keeping doors open
means honoring. Honoring means kicking my ass for the next 2
weeks, drinking 5 sodas and coffee every day, sleeping poorly, and
grunting through it.
On the blackboard outside our classroom somebody wrote "It's hard to see the forest... because the trees are in the way".
Someone else wrote in reply "...but the trees are so beautiful!"
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| | Posted 12/5/2005 4:19 PM - 11 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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