For our most recent reflection about med school, we were asked to write a letter to our best friend describing the experience of being in gross anatomy lab. Here is what I wrote:
Dear best friend,
We are now six labs into Gross Anatomy during our M1 year at UIC, and I can’t say that I love it, though [hopefully] I am learning a lot in the process. Lab occurs every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from around 4-6:30. The lab facilities are located on the seventh floor of the College of Medicine building and sport the gruesome tagline “where the living learn from the dead.” All 185 of us change our clothes in an overheated, formaldehyde-drenched locker room across from the bodies and the changing process is an interesting corollary to the dissection room: hundreds of hot, live bodies as opposed to tens of cold, smelly ones. It vividly contrasts the living and the dead.
Once you enter the dissection laboratories, a rush of chilly corporal preservative smells greets you. The bodies lie on metal tables, enclosed in thick white plastic bags. Each time we go up to dissect, we must unzip our bag, lay out our instruments, and unfold the skin and superficial layers of muscle and bone that we have already looked at. It’s the body as a book, and we must turn past the pages that we have already read.
The actual appearance and tone of the flesh is much different than in real-life—most color has faded to a muted yellow-tan-white and most things that we touch, the lungs notwithstanding, have been firm. The homogeneity helps you to forget that it is a person and also frightens in its distance from personhood. That dichotomy is the hardest split to navigate in the lab. On the one hand, this experience is supposed to teach us to be avid students of human anatomy, dispassionately scrutinizing every nerve and muscle as a potential site of therapy and intervention. You simply cannot think too much about the humanity of a person when your scissors are cutting through their heart muscle. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one must keep the ultimate end goal of helping live people in mind as corpses surround you. It is challenging to hold both of these perspectives in mind (and in body) during a two or three hour dissection.
Finally the dynamics of cutting through a body with a group of people is interesting because the eyes and action of five other people mediate your experience and emotion. There are the overeager, though misdirected scalpel-wielders who jump at the chance to look for a structure embedded in tissue or fat if it means hacking their way in the body. There are the readers, who want to keep the dissection on track by referring constantly to the dissection guidebook. And there are those who carefully and tenderly poke into the body cavities when their turn to hold the knife comes around. I am some combination of the two final lab personalities, and my tablemates display different proportions of each of the dispositions. Thus dissection has its own body politic and share of human drama. This is, I surmise, a nice corollary to the teamwork that we will do as physicians, as each health care professional will bring their skills and attitude “to the table” and somehow or another we will have to learn enough about the patient to treat them.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Stealing from School
As many of you know, I have started medical school in Chicago. This has put both the year of-no-buy and my blog on hiatus over the past weeks (although there is an arguement to be made that the blog is on permanent semi-hiatus) as I get settled into the new world of medical science, cadavers, and classmates. As I am back to no-buying and blogging, I will defer writing about moving for no money, and making new friends for little money, and instead post a school assignment. We have to keep reflection portfolios about our development as physicians at school. Here is my first installment, with more to follow as the portfolio grows:
I have answered the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with the response, “a doctor” since people have asked me that question. At age five, this may have been because the possible answers were limited to doctor, lawyer, professional athlete, astronaut, and confusingly, President of the United States. (I always wondered why there were enough slots in most professions for people to enter those fields, whereas there can only be one president every four year. Your individual odds are terrible). As I grew older, and my convictions that medicine is the best field for me deepened, I, paradoxically, felt freer to explore other interests and passions. While I contemplated majoring in biology in college, my advisor told me to do something that I would never be able to study again, so I opted for French History and Literature. Not the most career applicable major, but I loved the very personalized course of study that I followed and support that I received from faculty and advisors. I learned how to think critically and write (and write and write and write) in my major, which are two skills that served me well on the MCAT, at least on the verbal section.
Within the first six weeks of medical school, my suspicions about there being science medical students and non-science medical students has borne out. I have come to think of myself as a humanities leaning science person, and thus despite the deluge of information pouring over our heads, I make time for the New York Review of Books and a John Updike novel. I would not be me if I was not reading something currently and I am determined to make literary reading a part of my life during both medical education and practice. The other divide that I sense in medical school is the difference between people who are fresh from college and those who, like myself, are several years removed from their undergraduate days. The younger ones are young, tend to be quicker on the knowledge uptake, and also faster on the party circuit. My group of friends are all over the age of 25, and we are all adjusting to being students again, especially students of medical learning.
Now, on to perhaps the most important question of this first reflection: Am I glad that I am here, finally beginning my medical career? The answer, despite the fact that the clinic seems impossibly far away from my current life, is an unequivocal yes. Once the application/interview/decision cycle was completed, I harbored a tiny sliver of fear that I had possibly been wrong after all of these years. What if I did not like medical school, or after interacting with my classmates, professors, and medical staff understood that I made a bad choice? I don’t know what I would have done then because mercifully I still feel shivers of anticipation at the thought of being a practicing physician. I admire several of our course heads for the clear, level-headed introductory courses that they are providing for us, and have been impressed by the doctors on staff of UIH that I have come across. A friend of mine from college who is an M3 wrote in an email several weeks ago that “at some point during the first two years everyone [meaning every student in a med school class] falls in love with medicine itself.” I am lucky to count myself among those who fell hard and quickly.
I have answered the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with the response, “a doctor” since people have asked me that question. At age five, this may have been because the possible answers were limited to doctor, lawyer, professional athlete, astronaut, and confusingly, President of the United States. (I always wondered why there were enough slots in most professions for people to enter those fields, whereas there can only be one president every four year. Your individual odds are terrible). As I grew older, and my convictions that medicine is the best field for me deepened, I, paradoxically, felt freer to explore other interests and passions. While I contemplated majoring in biology in college, my advisor told me to do something that I would never be able to study again, so I opted for French History and Literature. Not the most career applicable major, but I loved the very personalized course of study that I followed and support that I received from faculty and advisors. I learned how to think critically and write (and write and write and write) in my major, which are two skills that served me well on the MCAT, at least on the verbal section.
Within the first six weeks of medical school, my suspicions about there being science medical students and non-science medical students has borne out. I have come to think of myself as a humanities leaning science person, and thus despite the deluge of information pouring over our heads, I make time for the New York Review of Books and a John Updike novel. I would not be me if I was not reading something currently and I am determined to make literary reading a part of my life during both medical education and practice. The other divide that I sense in medical school is the difference between people who are fresh from college and those who, like myself, are several years removed from their undergraduate days. The younger ones are young, tend to be quicker on the knowledge uptake, and also faster on the party circuit. My group of friends are all over the age of 25, and we are all adjusting to being students again, especially students of medical learning.
Now, on to perhaps the most important question of this first reflection: Am I glad that I am here, finally beginning my medical career? The answer, despite the fact that the clinic seems impossibly far away from my current life, is an unequivocal yes. Once the application/interview/decision cycle was completed, I harbored a tiny sliver of fear that I had possibly been wrong after all of these years. What if I did not like medical school, or after interacting with my classmates, professors, and medical staff understood that I made a bad choice? I don’t know what I would have done then because mercifully I still feel shivers of anticipation at the thought of being a practicing physician. I admire several of our course heads for the clear, level-headed introductory courses that they are providing for us, and have been impressed by the doctors on staff of UIH that I have come across. A friend of mine from college who is an M3 wrote in an email several weeks ago that “at some point during the first two years everyone [meaning every student in a med school class] falls in love with medicine itself.” I am lucky to count myself among those who fell hard and quickly.
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