4th year limbo

I've hit limbo. I finished - and hopefully passed - the dreadful CS exam on Monday, and now, all I have left is a few more interviews, a few relaxed rotations, and of course, The Match. In between now and then, I'm getting time to reflect a bit back on that remarkable experience called "medical school" and quietly worry about everything I will forget before I become an intern.

So about medical school...It is, no matter what the hype and anti-hype, a unique and unforgettable experience. The first two years consist of unending late nights of cramming and frequent benchmarks of "firsts": first time cutting into a dead body, first time performing the dreaded DRE, first time drawing blood, first time playing out that interaction of a doctor-patient encounter. I have to say that I look back on those years fondly, in that way I look back at that time in high school when we would voluntarily let our coach yell at us while we sprinted into shape back and forth across the basketball court: with a mix of nostalgia and the relief that I never have to repeat something like that again.

Nothing in the first two years, however, could prepare us - or in anyway leave a more lasting impression - than third year. Though we all faced that year with fear (fear mostly based on the misguided perception that anyone would actually put a patient's life into our hands), third year was an incredible time. We had the unique privilege to see, do, and experience pretty much anything and everything in the medical world, to take part in some of the most important moments of people's lives, to encounter intricacies/challenges of our future profession without any serious responsibility or grandiose expectations. Though it felt intense and scary at the time, we were merely nudged and prodded, sometimes even simply coddled, by residents and attendings who really just needed us to be upbeat, interested and willing to learn.

During those 10 months, I (kind of) delivered babies, scrubbed in on dozens of surgeries, took care of sick kids and made them better, got to know teens with psychiatric illness and see what it did to their lives, watched people die for senseless and random reasons, watched people recover against all odds, and slowly, somehow, really began to learn medicine.

Now, the 4th year is more than half way through, and I try not to obsess over my match list while at the same time attempt to motivate just a bit to refresh my medical knowledge before it all fades away. Most of all, I sit in 4th year limbo, with quiet- but growing- trepidation that in 192 days someone will expect me to be their doctor.