Since I last posted, I finished my 4 week radiology clerkship and just finished the first two weeks of my neurology clerkship doing pediatric neurology, and let's just say my lack of posting can somewhat be blamed on the old adage, "When you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
I think radiology is a fine specialty, but a really miserable rotation as a medical student. I had a radiology fellow say this to me, so I know I'm not alone in the feeling. Radiology as a medical student has been likened to be as interesting "as watching someone read." I honestly wished I liked it more - I actually really like the concept of radiology and anatomy, but we can just leave it at radiology is not the career for me.
So far, pediatric neurology was fairly depressing - dealing with death in children is not easy. Some day I will try to tell the story of the first (and so far, only) death I observed last summer, but I'm not quite ready to describe it yet. In addition, neurology just has many attributes that don't mesh well with me - I will attempt to write about this more later, but feel free to read my post from first year, cross one specialty off, in the meantime.
Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about is the third year of medical school in a more overall sense. Bear with me for another analogy:
Imagine you want to become a restaurant manager. You've already been to culinary school and know a ton about food. But in order to become a restauranteur, what you have to do is pay to rotate through different restaurants every two weeks. Every two weeks you are a waiter at a completely different restaurant - Mexican, Italian, American, French, etc, etc. And every week you are rated on your ability to be able to answer questions about the entire menu whenever the manager asks you, you are expected to work well with the other waiters and bus boys, you're expected to be friendly and accommodating to all the customers, work whatever hours you are assigned, and it's generally perceived that unless you use your own spare time to come up with unique additions to the menu, then you probably aren't very dedicated. There are some skills that you can carry from one week to the next - but in general, every two weeks you encounter a steep learning curve.
This sounds utterly ridiculous, right? A crazy, but maybe efficient way for you to become a good restaurant manager. But this truly is a comparable analogy to how we are trained during this year, substituting medical and procedural and physical exam knowledge and skills for the skills it takes to be an excellent waiter. On top of this, add a bunch of Type A personalities and feelings of guilt and failure about any imperfection and it's not surprising that articles like this are so unfortunately real.
With expectations and stakes so high, it is easy to forget that it is natural to struggle to excel at something when your work is constantly shifting. I find myself in the hospital sometimes longing for a "work home." Just a desk. A desk that is my place to sit, with people around it who will also be there tomorrow. I find myself jealous of the nurses who are just free to be good at their job and have plenty of time to do it. I find both of those emotions pretty strange, because a huge part of what appealed to me about becoming a doctor was avoiding a cubicle and being in a job where I could continue to grow and change. But it makes sense that in my constantly shifting world I would long for some continuity.
But where I find myself is when I embrace the change. Man, that sounds so freaking cheesy, and I'm sorry about that, but really... While part of me longs for the day when I can just be settled, I am forced to remind myself how exciting and dynamic my life is now. I am young and single and at the beginning of a career that could take me in a million directions - from operating on people to working abroad to starting a foundation to teaching students to researching cancer. I don't need to know the answers now. I don't need to be the expert now. This year, I have to cope with change. But I also get the opportunity to grow by being flexible and adaptable. I get to be open to being influenced by people. I get to just take it all in and work as hard as I can, and hope that along the way I grow closer to the person and doctor that I want to be.
