oh, how i miss those premed days..

at burningman 2003
Originally uploaded by hibiscusfire.

hey guys,

this is a mass mail apology to all of you i have been ignoring this past
month (or longer - i know, i suck!), and will, unfortunately, continue to
ignore until mid march. ;-)

med school is fucking crazy. i have about 5-8 hours of class a day and i
have 3-4 hours of reading for each one of those classes (do the math!) that
i have to do before i even start learning the material (memorizing the
formulas and chemical equations, looking at hundreds of histology slides,
applying everything i learned about heart flow and artery distension to my
physiology labs, and practicing the physical exam procedures on any fellow
med students who are willing to be poked and prodded with a stethoscope
while they study).

needless to say, i'm not doing all that. no one is. we just should be in
order to get through this quarter, and we're all about two weeks behind
(school started three weeks ago). in the last week, my body has decided to
protest to the stress by not waking up until i have at least 7hours of
sleep, which would be a luxury, if didn’t induce even more stress by cutting
into my valuable study time. so i've stopped going to class, (who knew i
was not an auditory learner!) , and i've invested in a value pack of index
cards. for a brief moment of crisis this week, my computer broke, but i
raced to apple, handed them the flat $300 fix it fee without even blinking,
and got my computer back in two days.

fortunately med school is also awesome. i think i would absolutely love
what i was learning, if i wasn't so busy trying to cram it into my head
(it's like trying to enjoy that hot dog in a food eating contest). i can
now pretty well listen to your lungs and your heart, and if you are a guy, i
can check your prostate and poke around for hernias (yes, we had a paid
model for that - we couldn't seem to get any students to volunteer the way
they do in osteopathic schools) :-) next week is pap smear and breast
exam. oh boy!

in histology, we're learning to identify every part of a cell, vessel, nerve
and tissue under light and electron microscopes, which is fun, but extremely
time consuming. this week in physiology, we're learning about the physics
of blood flow in the body, the different muscle contractions in the heart,
the electrical potentials that that lead to muscle movement and neuronal
transmission of signals (and memorizing all the horrible physics equations
to calculate them!) in biochemistry, we're learning about all those things
at a biochemical level: how does aspirin work? what are cell membranes made
of? how is cholesterol and lipoprotein and phospholipid and sphingomyelin
synthesized?

and that's just the start!

i'm also volunteering several times a month at a clinic, where i interview
and examine patients under the supervision of a doctor. it's a clinic
primarily for drug users, sex workers and the homeless, so we deal with a
very vulnerable and underserved population, but in a single day, we can also
usually take care of their most urgent need. the doctors who are willing to
supervise this clinic are, needless to say, pretty motivated and inspiring
(one of them is our dean!), so it's definitely helping me realize that i
have a chance at having the type of fulfilling practice i went into medicine
for, whether it's in rural, international or urban medicine.

ok, so that's my life in a nutshell. and an apology for the silence. i
realize some of you were worried that i wasn't even sending out my regular
politically inspired emails. (is that man still president?) as for all
that, thank god for the privilege to bury one's head in a physiology book at
times like these.

hope you are all well.
back to the hot dogs...
-agnieszka