Mexico Medical Student |

I have been reading a lot of medical blogs for some time. I enjoy almost all of them, even if they are not in any field that I personally like or would chose to go into. Whether they are written by a Chief of Medicine, your neighborhood family physician, a nurse, or a tech, those that write about their work and patient experiences provide such vital information to those of us not quite “in the trenches.” At times, the experiences are banal, sometimes they are humorous, too many times they are tragic, but almost always they are enlightening. I read medical student blogs too, and certainly the more linked and “popular” ones have great stories to tell about their patient experiences or their growth as clinicians and people during their med school careers.

Why then do I have such an inferiority complex about writing? It’s something I love to do, but I tend to be too much of a perfectionist about it. I’ll start a post and take far too long to actually get it up on the page, wrangling over sentence structure or word choices. I don’t like posting about what I had for dinner–it sounds narcisistic, but my standard for posting is what either I think someone else would want to read, or even more narcisistic (!), what I think I would want to read later, looking back on that particular day. I guess I feel as a personal blog, it’s all good, but I wanted it to be a medical student’s journey that was different than most being in Mexico, educationally and culturally. Although I’m staying true to that (with understandable forays here and there), there’s just not that much to tell that doesn’t involve seemingly endless lectures about basic sciences, multiple-choice tests, and amatuerish fumbling trying to percuss an abdomen like it’s a ripe melon. Everything about my experiences screams “newbie” and I’m fine with that–it’s what I am. But I am impatient to do more, see more, and write more. I think my primary audience if there is one would be pre-meds, and that’s pretty darn scary! I’ll just write when and about what I can, and hope there is a readership that cares. Yes, I mostly write for myself and would still write even if no one was looking, but I wouldn’t care about how it looked, grammar, etc. if it was just a series of entries on my personal computer.

I have a large list of sites I regularly read and want to share, but I just haven’t had time to do the site organizations I’ve been wanting. I use Drupal because I had grand ideas of splitting content for music/arts, medicine, and life in general with separate link contexts, feeds, etc. but now that I see that’s way too much than I have time for, I probably would be better off going back to WordPress or hell, just Blogger. But that would involve yet another migration, which takes its own time.

Boy this was rambling. I promised myself before I sat down to write (in the library betwen classes) that I would do minimal editing and just get posts out there, grammar and spellings be damned. Must….fight…edit…. But honestly, I have anatomy lab in 10 minutes, so that’s a good enough motivation to just hit “submit.” Until next time….. –ec