Mexico Medical Student |

Nothing profound will be in this post, I promise. I’m just trying to get my groove on studying. If you were to have asked me about predictions at the beginning of this semester, I would have said this is when I’d be having a blast: other than our ever-present [pre-]clinical (hands-on) classes, the only book-lernin’ classes are pharmacology and systemic pathology. Some beefy red meat there–the medical education equivalent of a 2″ high porterhouse.

Why then do I feel like a sickly vegetarian, not wanting to raise my LDL in hypercholesteremic ecstasy? Well, to be fair, it’s not that I don’t want to as much as I can’t seem to get it all in. To make matters worse, I can’t enjoy the juicy cutlet simply for what it is, because (in this all-too-worn-out analogy) I have to describe it, characterize it, classify it, file it away in a database comparing it to others, etc. In simple terms, I can’t leisurely turn the pages of the textbook and simply say, “Cool!” or “How interesting…”

Tomorrow’s exam is on vascular pathology (including all the vasculitides, athero/arteriosclerosis, aneurysms, etc.), the heart and pulmonary pathology. Basically everything cardiovascular, from the smallest capillaries to “oh shit, this aortic dissection sure came at a bad time”; all of the funky and sad congenital malformations of the heart and great vessels, heart failure, ischemic heart disease, cor pulmonale; and that leads into all the COPD, pulmonary blah blah. It’s all interconnected. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this, everything, and I mean everything will involve the kidney at some point or another, I guarandamntee you. The beans rear their little retroperitoneal heads everywhere.

See? I told you nothing fascinating was in this post. I’m just killing time. I’m tired of having to be a fact-spitting monkey almost as much as I love what it is I’m learning. After all, learning it for real (at least as best as I can with a screaming baby in the house, which–believe it or not–is probably still more conducive to studying than our poorly-managed library) is the only real reward I have to give myself at this point.

And I’m SOOO OK with not remembering that one little factoid that differentiates rare-ass disease #1 from even-more-rare disease #2. The gunners can fight for those bones; I prefer to enjoy a slightly more panoramic view.