My original plan was to update my blog on Monday (Labor Day and my day off). I planned to tell you all about the exciting health care events I attended this week. Unfortunately, I had a difficult Psychopathology (=psychiatry) exam Tuesday morning, which put me in a “funky” medical school mood. I remember why I updated my blog less frequently last year; the reason was to protect you (my beloved readers) from these moods that I can’t seem to escape from.
My exam was NOT the same as what I had studied. I also had to take a neurology online quiz, and that went poorly. And all the sudden… medical school panic set in! The panic goes something like this…
“Oh wow. I feel behind. I feel dumber than everyone around me. I’m not sure I can ever catch up. Everything feels like it’s too fast for me. Maybe they made a mistake when they let me into medical school? I’m not sure I can handle the constant studying. I don’t have time to do anything else right now. I should go bury myself 24-7 in my neurology book, talk to my professors, buy some extra books, and organize a study group! How overwhelming. Am I really going to make it through second year? AH!”
I feel pretty childish when I get in this funk. Being older is supposed to help me be more mature and give me perspective to pull myself up. Yet I still am frustrated by my performance on exams and quizzes, and being older seems to make the memorization and studying harder. Unfortunately there is a LOT to memorize, and not much time to do it. And currently I am still feeling pretty funky about it all.
Last night, somebody told me that maybe everybody feels like this sometimes, but nobody shows it. And, I realized I would be giving a false impression of medical training if I protected you from all the doubt, frustration, and anxiety that I (and perhaps all medical students) feel, even when apparently everything seems to be going well.
life gets crazy from time to time. just remember what the end result will be from all this work, and how you will be helping hundreds if not thousands of people one day. keep your chin up.