Drawing blood

I have to admit that I am drowning in work at the moment, but I just have to take time to write about some stuff. Med school has gotten pretty overwhelming suddenly. Today is exactly one month since I started; yet it seems like I have been here for so much longer. It's crazy. I guess they took it easy on us for these first few weeks. We just had an exam 2 days ago, and we have covered so much new material since then, that I feel like I am already weeks behind! How is this possible??

And then when classes and the amount of new information become so overwhelming that I just want to hide in a dark corner and cry... then, I am reminded of why I am here. Human things. Every week, we have a 2-hour "class" when we meet in a small group of 8 with a physician. We have the same physician for the entire year and maybe even beyond. My preceptor, is what we call her, is really amazing: a pediatrician at Bellevue, she is the kind of person I can just tell loves teaching so much. We have to do specific things in our weekly 2 hours, like learn to measure blood pressure, take other vital sign, do physical exams, etc, but she also just talks to us about what it's like to be a doctor, about her path, her family, work-life balance (she has 3 kids!), and she brings cookies every week! We can ask her anything, talk about anything, be silly, serious, whatever. It's really 2 hours when I don't worry about the million steps in embryogenesis or the proteins involved in every singe signal transduction pathway in the cell!

Next weekend, I am also starting this new thing called the New York City Free Clinic. It's an NYU-sponsored clinic for the uninsured that's nearly completely run by medical students: there are only 3 attendings there every day. As a pre-clinical student volunteer, I have to go every other Saturday, work with a clinical students and see patients, do labs, refer them to NYU-affiliated physicians if they need some further care. The cool thing is that NYU also takes care of their follow-up appointments, meaning that they can go see specialists for free, at least as long as their care is connected to what they went to the clinic for in the first place. Tonight, I had to do training to be able to do this next weekend (more training to do next week). Part of the training was to learn taking blood. Because we will be taking (or at least attempting it) blood from these poor uninsured people. I don't want to go into the moral implications of this; is it ethical that these medically underserved populations have to deal with getting stuck by first year medical students? (Of course, this is not the major issue here, but let's not talk about that.)

So the older students showed us how to do it, in about 3 minutes. Then we were paired up. Wow, that first moment when you have that needle in your hand and you actually have to stick it into another person, it's scary as hell! I was constantly asking "does that hurt??" "I am so sorry!!" The first 2 times, it didn't go into the vein. Poor guy was holding up pretty well. Then he went, and got it on his second try (I do have pretty good veins). It took me two more tries on different people with better veins, but in the end, I did get it on a more muscular guy with nice veins. When I saw the blood rush into the base of the needle, I was so happy!

There are so many things that go into being a physician! It's not that I didn't know that before, but I am just now realizing how different all of those things are. Of course, you have to know the science, you have to be a compassionate person and care about the people you are treating, and then there is this manual side to it. What if someone is just flumsy? They could not be a surgeon for sure. But even simple things like drawing blood and measuring blood pressure are not all that trivial.

The point is, there is sooo much to learn! At this moment, it seems utterly impossible that I will ever be able to learn all of this! Even just embryology for this next exam! But let's hope things will come together eventually. And that next week when I go and see real flesh and blood patients in my all-too-white white coat, I will stand up to the test.