Sacrifices
Medical school requires tremendous sacrifice on the part of medical students, their family and friends. Here is a list of potential things that will either directly clash with your study-time, or nicely summarize life during medical school. This post is meant to be partly humorous, and partly true!
(in no particular order)
1. Eating becomes a chore – you will eat anything to fill you up as fast as possible, just so that you can get back to studying.
2. You will be relatively out of touch with the news, because “television” is not in your vocabulary anymore.
3. Watching TV for fun sets of a “tick-tock, tick-tock” sound in your head.
4. Your physical health will suffer unless you consciously pull yourself away from your work to go to the gym for an hour
5. The extent of your social life will be your classmates, as these are the only people who really understand what you are going through.
6. You will see science and medicine in everything you talk about, one way or another.
7. You will crack nerdy jokes and laugh at them. Yes, this is a sacrifice.
8. If you see 3:00 on your clock, you will be unsure of whether it is AM or PM.
9. Everything else during exam time is unimportant, except studying.
10. You will count how many hours you have left before your exam..18 hours….12 hours…5 hours…and you will gauge an adequate sleep:study ratio in the given time.
11. Taking 4 exams on the same day, each consecutive week, will become normal.
12. Your list of voicemails will grow larger and larger because you haven’t been around to answer phonecalls.
13. You will continuously tell non-medical folk that they just don’t understand what it’s like to be a medical student.
14. After all this work, your ego will suffer when someone asks you about a certain medical condition, but you can’t recall exactly how it works, or you just don’t know it yet.
15. Your hands will ache from writing out mountains of flashcards or typing up tons of notes.
16. You will become shorter.
17. You will start growing bald.
18. You will grow wider.
19. Your sense of style = PJs and sweats to class.
20. You will start forming dents in the library chairs
21. You will literally see people at the library studying and leave for the day, and see them again when they show up the next morning…and you haven’t moved from your seat.
22. You will begin to forget birthdays, events, and other scheduled things in your life, due to the sheer amount of information you commit to memory from your classes/readings.
23. You are so thankful when classes start at 9AM one day.
24. Yawning becomes the way of greeting a fellow medstudent, and it’s perfectly acceptable to do so.
25. You will rejoice when Daylight Saving Time “falls backward” in the fall, so you get an extra hour of studying.
#6 is the worst I think. When I started I was so sure I’d never become one of the brainwashed drones who couldn’t think about anything but medicine. That didn’t last.