MD 0.75

It's been one week of my last year of medical school. To say it's gone by fast is an understatement. I always start off every rotation anxious, petrified that I know nothing. And I'm sure that with every rotation this year it will pretty much be the same. My last week of M3 year, new M3s from a different school were starting. As an almost M4, the residents relied on my fellow veteran M3s and me a little more to help out in training the new M3s on how to scrub and gown properly and how to access the computers. It wasn't until then that I realized just how much I have actually learned this year. I may not be the most skilled at wading through the symptoms patients have and what to do about them, but I don't have to give a second thought to scrubbing and gowning to get ready for surgery, I know where to look in the computer for the information I need on a patient, and I can at least come up with a vague idea of what's going on with the patient most of the time. I've almost taken for granted how easily some of these things are to me now, because I'm so used to doing them day after day. 

I started my M4 year teaching "Clinical Skills" for two weeks, where essentially I'm turning around and taking what I learned this year and teaching it to the new M3 class. We run through patient cases, grade progress notes, and teach some of the basic skills of third year like suturing and blood draws. I was so worried that I was incompetent and couldn't teach any students. I've had no experience, and I was initially worried that I didn't pass my own clinical standardized patient exam at the end of the year. How could I be qualified to teach M3s if I failed at what I was supposed to be teaching? But I passed, giving me a little boost, and my last week around the new M3s before I left gave me a little teaching experience before I plunged into clinical skills. I think I could definitely use a little work in how to explain certain skills, but I still have this week to work on it.

Unfortunately, with M4 year comes a whole different kind of stress though, and balancing that with rotations is a new challenge. I'm trying to study for my next board exam that is in exactly 1 month to the date, which is difficult. I'm burnt out, and sick of studying, and it's been difficult to do so this past week with being up at the school all day and then coming home to an overcrowded apartment. I keep telling myself to just hold out for one more month, and then I can breathe. But I know that after that, then it's trying to impress the physicians for letters of rec and to stand out on my audition rotations. And writing a good personal statement, for which I've been having quite an impressive writers block. A whole lot of complaining and moaning, I know. But as much as I dislike the stress, the studying, the insane difficulty balancing a personal and work life (my boyfriend and I were joking around a couple days ago that a fancy date at this point would be McDonald's since we've been so busy- and so poor that we haven't had time to really go on a date for well over a month), I wouldn't have it any other way.