The more you know

As unlikely as you might have thought it to be, it’s true — as of April 30th [Day 159], I’m 1/4 way closer to having 2 extra letters at the end of my name. Summer has never felt so refreshing. You might be wondering, “So what have you learned in a whole year of school?” Well, wonder no more:

Things I have learned:

- Best/Cheapest breakfast tacos/hole-in-the-wall in Galveston = La Estacion. Of course, my biggest revelation would be about food. My faculty facilitator treated our small group out for lunch here, thereby sealing his status as my favorite faculty member. (My loyalty/favor is easily bought with good food, in case you’re interested in attaining similar status.) Dr. C and La Estacion, where were you the first 7 disappointing months of my medical education? If you’re interested in visiting La Estacion, there isn’t an actual sign on the outside; look for pictures of an astronaut next to a palm tree next to a train. (If there is a theme in the window decoration, it’s completely lost on me.)

- Sometimes you have to sort through a lot of headache-giving, hypertension-inducing, high-strung people to find some real gems to save you from the insanity of it all. (Non-med school people are also highly instrumental in the restoration of sanity.)

- Eye twitches are generally benign — good thing because I was starting to get real worried about the one that wouldn’t go away in my left eye for weeks… Studying brain tumors at the time definitely didn’t help to alleviate my paranoia.

Things I still have not learned:

- How the hell I will get through second year. Around February of second year, there’s a kick-off party for board exam preparation (“Step 1″ of 3), which is essentially a not-so-subtle hint/kick in the pants for you to start devoting most waking hours to studying. The word on the street is that if they – the elusive puppet masters pulling the strings our medical education – don’t think you have a good chance of passing the exam (i.e. you score poorly on practice exams), they’ll ship you off to some camp in Iowa for a few months where you pay thousands of dollars for them to make you study and learn everything, lest you fail the real deal and skew the school’s Boards passing rate. This is all hearsay so far, but second years tell me that there have been a few students who didn’t study enough, then mysteriously disappear for a while. (I’d like to imagine second year as a Vaudeville show, then a cane yanks someone off stage because they suck. Except here they yank you off, and you pay them an exorbitant amount of money. Hey, I didn’t say the logic was perfect.) It’s never a good sign when it’s past midnight on a Friday/Saturday, and you see MS2s still studying. The future does not look bright for yours truly…

- How to stay awake during 8am (gave up on that) 9am (that wasn’t happenin’ either) 1pm (hey, cut me some slack–it’s after lunch) lectures.

- On a more serious note, how the health care/insurance system really works. However, this story gives me heart that good, albeit slow, changes are coming our way. (The fact that it was ever okay for insurance companies to unilaterally cancel policies once the policyholders actually got sick blows my mind, and not in a good way.) Power to the little people! *fist pump*

Oh, I guess I also picked up a few things about medicine…

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