Mexico Medical Student |

Last week was bad on all levels. Claudia left back the states on the weekend in a very stressful trip insofar as getting her home from Monterrey to Texas and how that all panned out, so Sunday I was out of it. Monday was a holiday, but honestly I was really recovering from the last day and a half, not really resting or catching up on studying.

The the real hell began. Claudia called me from a doctor’s appointment that they needed to move up the delivery a week, which threw everything I had planned out regarding school out the window. I would not miss my renal physiology partial exam, but I’d be here just in the nick of time not having been here for more than 75% of the lectures. Wonderful. Also, my clinical classes and community medicine would now be affected and I’d need to schedule those makeups. But most of all, I would be gone from my pathology midterm…more on that later.

I tried working with my school about absences and their answer was basically that they couldn’t approve or assure anything before the fact, that a committee has to justify the absences, take into consideration x number of things, etc. but no special considerations were to be given under any circumstances: if I went over the allotted absences for any class or missed an exam, I’d have to stay a week after the semester is over for segundos which is usually reserved for people who fail. AT our school, attendance is taken like little high schoolers and if you go over 15% absences for a class, you lose the right to take your “ordinary” final. The problem with segundos that the entire grade for a class is determined by that one exam; it’s meant to be a punishment even though they bill it as a “second chance.” I don’t need a second chance, I need to not be denied my first chance.

As much as I want to bitch and complain about the inconsistency/corruption here (which unfortunately is a mirror of the whole country), the reality is that they haven’t decided anything yet. I’m just not the kind of person that can compartmentalize everything into neat packages and not worry about things smaller than this, much less for major things like this. I would have liked to believe I attended a school that said, “Don’t worry; go home and be with your family, congratulations and we’ll work everything out when you get back.” I’m not asking for special treatment academically or to be relieved of any scholastic responsibility, just don’t make me stay here another week which is one week less out of only 4 with my family, just because of your bullshit “rules” which have no basis in reality whatsoever. (and that get broken by them all the time, such as many days going by where no attendance is taken, which I thought was soooo important….)

Anyway, I’m getting mad again, so I have to stop, because I’m not done with UAG. We had our pathology midterm cancelled because administration caught wind that the exact same test we got was in circulation beforehand. There was no cheating, no foul play, just a mistake on the part of the path department releasing it before it was “decomissioned.” Someone complained–we’ll never know for sure who–and administration’s decision was to cancel the exam and give it to us again. I won’t get started on how they do test banks and other idiocies here, because I’ll take all day. Rather than decide to retake the exam in short order while the information was still fresh even though that might mean having it within a few days of another exam (the horror!!) our idiot, lemming class who feels like the more time they have to study it’s somehow going to help them (when in reality they just won’t study that much longer until the last minute) voted to have the midterm AFTER the final, two weeks after the class was done, because there was no other test at that time. Let that sink in for a while…. No, I’m not kidding. All the above happened before Easter. We were just told of the exact date of the 19th after our Easter break two weeks ago, so by the time I’m scheduling this absence stuff, the artificial date imposed on us was only one week old, yet administration is acting like I should have planned better.

This is country where abortion is illegal, where doctors actually try to coerce women away from allowed medically indicated pregnancy terminations (medically allowed when indicated only in 1st trimester, before you can get a CVS much less an amnio–let that one sink in too), but the attitude for my child’s birth is like it’s being treated as an academic impediment that I should have planned better. Students from later semesters have confirmed heavily that the “committee” is very subjective and makes their own decisions about what constitutes “deserved” in spite of any official documentation. Just so you get an idea, I asked the main guy in charge what he thinks would be excused given a C-section out of the country and he said “3 days, certainly not more than 4.” My jaw dropped — two days is travel/flight, so that leaves one MAYBE 2 for a C-section/delivery? Claudia might not even be out of the hospital, but I say, “nope, gotta go honey, I can’t miss nutrition and physiology?” I’d laugh if it wasn’t so pathetic.

My general pathology final was Friday, and I might have well bubbled pretty patterns on the scantron because it’s not going to count for anything — the only reason I showed up was to get a feel for the kind of questions they’d ask. So that makes TWO tests that gets cancelled on my for no fault of my own. Thanks UAG — you suck. But don’t worry–I’ll take the test and knock it out just like I have done on my cancelled tests and all will be the same in the end, gradewise.

But I will never get that time back, and I will never forget.