The flood continues

Just finished Block II examinations Tuesday. They went decently enough. I wonder if I will ever cease to be amazed by the volume of material we cover.

Anyway, in anatomy we covered the upper limb and thorax, along with development of the cardiovascular system, heart, muscle, skeleton, and skin. For histology we looked at bone, cartilage, blood, connective tissue, and hematopoiesis.

Training has been decent – linear and progress is slow and steady. Diet has been pretty awful lately. I dislike thinking about food and hunger when I’m reviewing for exams, leading to me shoving everything down my throat to quell my appetite. I’ll clean it up now.

It’s a bit sad after exams. I felt a momentary purposelessness. However, the next day greets me with another few lectures, and the march goes on.

Some thoughts

I have always heard that medical school involved copious studying, but as with all experiences, it’s impossible to understand a process through anecdote. The sheer volume of material that is presented to us as medical students is so great it is terrifying: a vast, mercurial ocean of correlations, causalities, and outright facts of human development and histology.

Every week the tide of the ocean rises and threatens to sweep me off my feet, but I manage to keep myself firmly planted to the earth and make connections between the information. When I see a term repeated and understand it in a completely different context, I flush with pride because I know I have properly internalized the material.

The subtlety of all this is that I’m only about a month and some into this herculean undertaking. I still have three and a half blocks left of this semester, let alone 4 other semesters.

The thing is, my motivations stem from my desire to be less ignorant about the entirety of human anatomy, microanatomy, and development. After I master these concepts – which are all universal truths – I can harness them to affect the human conditions of my future patients. It is with deep humility that I understand that I am entirely unqualified to hold the tenuous life of a dying patient in my hands. I want to reverse that notion and be able to confidently recreate a person’s life through my academic undertaking. Otherwise, my studying is moot, useless, and in vain. A degree is a piece of paper. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is, in my opinion, a waste. There should always be some intention behind any academic pursuit. That is the mark of maturity.