SPARKLED*

I think I may be in love with one or both members of Flight of the Conchords.

If only I got HBO at home..

I'm still trying to figure out if being related to when you just want to be listened to and total silence when you'd like to be supported is a flaw in men.

Not that I don't do it myself frequently, but if you have a bf, should he relate to you on all levels like this?

birthday, weekend off, everything fine and THEN? Flu! Out of nowhere, monday morning, I get the damned flu. The bed-ridden, miserable, achy-all-over flu. I've been taking this time to re-read Order of the Pheonix, because it's been quite a while and if I see the movie I want to be able to complain about it correctly. (or praise it.. whichever) Nothing much else going on.. more of the same. Hoping I get off this fever-up-fever-down rollercoaster before I travel to a wedding on saturday.

After I saw the man die in the hospital on Thurs, I was pretty shaken up. I had a few good cries over it that night and decided not to go back to the hospital on Friday. Everyone I told I felt like they were secretly calculating all these things about me, if she didn't even know this guy and she's this upset, how will she handle it? Watching people helplessly doesn't seem like something that would get easier. Ever since Thursday, I've had a secret inner dread about going back to the hospital. But today as I was in work, the woman who oversees our department came in and told me my boss had had a heart attack & was in the hospital. So my boyfriend & I rushed to the hospital to see him. He seems okay and everyone seems cautiously optimistic. Stents for blockage and so on. As I sat there in the ICU with him I kept thinking about how I didn't ask him enough questions when he told me about his chest pain. All these questions and explainations I should've asked for became immediately clear to me. I know it's not my job or training and anything more than a "go see the doctor" could be dangerous, but I should've pushed for him to push the doctors more. I felt like I hadn't done enough. And it sounds strange, but it dug me out of my hospital rut. I'd like to see if I can shadow an ICU doctor now. Maybe a cardiologist.

Otherwise, all there is to say is that it's too damn hot.

Today was a lovely day. I did absolutely nothing.. XD

I was going to blog about how, for the first time ever in my life, I saw someone die today during a code; it shook me up quite a bit. But instead I'll just continue ranting about my experience. I know I shouldn't be so frustrated because eventually I will get to a school and city that will actually help me more, but I still am. My school has no pre-med advisors, so I don't really have anyone helping or guiding me. Now think about if no one in your circle of family or friends is involved in the medical field, you're not close to a family doctor, you have no pre-med advisor with helpful guidance along the way, and a lot of people call you crazy on a pretty regular basis. I am confused and frustrated. Granted, most of it is lack of sleep in the past few days, but it would help me to know if I'm just doing this as an exciting look into medicine or if it will actually be of use to me later. It's kind of scary to be navigating this fjord alone. (I don't know.) Thanks to Lone Coyote I am enlightened and hopeful in addition to being scared I'm doing something worthless to med schools. (it's still not worthless to me though, I've learned quite a bit) Of course, the hospital I'm in is a county hospital, as I've said there isn't a high volume of pre-med students and it's not a teaching hospital in the doctor sense. (There are plenty of other medical professions observing though - they're a little more hands-on than me. Training and such.) The doctors don't even ask the patients for permission for me to stand around and observe, which I would assume is some kind of HIPAA violation, though I don't really know and no one seems to have minded, most people seem to think I'm an assistant. I'm confused but I think I'll make it. I still have 2 and a half years to make everything right.

To say that my experience shadowing has been underwhelming would be something of an understatement. Don't get me wrong, I've still got that new-pre-med-"fresh meat"-smell that means I get excited at being able to go into the hospital for anything other than an admission, but the hospital I'm at is rural to say the least and not exactly familiar with my type. (That type also being pre-med.) So I ended up being a nurse's shadow. Which is cool. I can definitely now understand why nurses garner more respect than doctors in these here parts. I have a pretty good idea of what nurses do now; unfortunately, I still don't have a good idea of what the doctors do (besides be dicks).

Now, I'll start this off by saying I have starry eyes, I don't deny that. I'm a pre-med with some of the biggest stars in my eyes you've ever seen, the word "cynical" doesn't exist in my medical dictionary yet. I know it's not "cool" to not be cynical about modern medicine, but let's face it: I'm not. I have plenty of time to be cynical when it's deserving: say my attendings are horrendous, I'm overworked, overtired, and cramming for tests. Right now I'm perfectly happy being an unapologetically excited student, even though I think I have an accurate idea of the medical profession unaided by tv drama and books. Let's just say, I thought the whole ER experience would be a little more glamorous and exciting. By glamourous I mean: colleagues trading new medical findings and discussing cases. And by exciting I mean: more than 8 patients complaining of 2-week-long constipation. Is this really what constitutes an ER? Doctors sitting behind a computer & barely seeing patients for 3-5 minutes, even though it's incredibly slow? Was my idea of medicine so romanticized that I thought every once in a while a doctor discussed an interesting case rather than bitching at nurses about hospital protocol for 10 minutes?

I had such a hard time relating to anyone as well. I just felt.. in the way. Some parts of it were really exhilerating (maybe one day it will be me behind the computer?) and some really exhausting (I'm already sick of the condescending attitudes.) I certainly earned a new respect for nurses, because all of them did what they could to help and guide me around, even when they were cynical, I understood. How could I not, having been sick of it for the couple of hours I was there? I had a big feeling last night that this would really be a test on my perception of real medicine and how it will affect me. I know that all who have gone before look at this unimpressed medical machine and say, "Not I. Never will I end up this cynical and angry at patients." But let's face it, who knows where I'll be 20 years from now? Nobody starts off thinking "I can't wait until I'm comfortably jaded with this whole process." No one thinks, "helping people be damned, I just want to do what I can to seem competant at medicine and maybe lecture a few druggies along the way." But it frequently is the reality in medicine. As for today, I'm just waiting for tomorrow to really make a judgement. Emergency departments are pretty malleable, right?

Tomorrow I start at the hospital. I'm actually pretty excited, except that I really need to go shopping for some clothes and I'm too lazy.. we'll see what happens :D

Lately I'm surprised at how everything seems to twist its way in my mind that no matter what I do or don't do, I'm constantly thinking of how I'm letting someone down. If I screw around at work or take too long a lunch, I'm letting my boss down. If I don't stay up half the night and spend time with my boyfriend, I'm letting him down. If I don't eat, breathe, and dream science I'm letting my future self down. Even if I do eat, breathe, and dream science I'm not eating, breathing, dreaming the science I need to (physics and orgo) or math and I'm letting future me down, and present me as I spend at least half an hour a day chiding myself about not doing more. If I don't do the dishes I'm letting my dad down. And on and on to infinity. I can't imagine why it's so hard for me to grasp that no one really cares about these things, yet still I feel the only thing I really have to myself is running, and if I don't do that daily I'm letting me down and my boyfriend down and that's just ridiculous. When will I stop being so disappointed in myself and blaming others for it?

The past few days as I've been taking my study breaks and reading med blogs, something has begun to weigh on my mind: how will I feel 5 years from now when everyone is done and I still have 5 more years to go? I love medicine now, but it's dawning on me just how long everything is. I read a lot about second thoughts when it comes to medicine, and I think that having serious second thoughts in which you question and answer yourself is important. Why? Because if you never honestly think about what you really want and don't want out of all this, it's my opinion that you're doing it for the wrong reasons. We who want to help people realize that there are many other ways we can help, ways that don't consume so much of our lives; we can become social workers, nurses, teachers.. Even if they take several years of schooling, they don't usually take several years of working 80+ hour weeks. It's a little intimidating. Medicine isn't a dogma, it's something I think you should question yourself constantly about whether you're worthy to do it. Think of all the people who have proved to you that you could trust to put your life in their hands, I'm sure there are few, even few doctors. And that's another scary thing, even if I work tirelessly on learning science, even if I build the best bedside manner in the world and want to help everyone I can, I'm not sure that will be enough. Granted, these are all ways that are important to helping a lot of people and being a good doctor, but there's something else that I haven't figured out yet that I'll need to be a great doctor.