Learning

I was talking to a friend from grad school over the weekend who is now a postdoc. She said she couldn't imagine going back to school and having to study again. I tried to argue that what she was doing in a new lab - learning new techniques and such - wasn't so different. I think we all learn tons and tons of new things every day of our lives, even if we don't realize it. But I do have to admit, she was right in that med school is different. What she was talking about was not the learning, but the studying. The need to remember, memorize, regurgitate. The thing is, I love learning things - but who likes taking exams? And yet, to take exams means you have to memorize. And preferably remember, at least for a few hours, while you are taking the test. Or in the case of doctors, preferably for good. Right?

I just took an exam yesterday, in pulmonology. Less than two weeks ago, I took an exam in cardiology. In a another two weeks, we will have another exam in lung pathology. Then anatomy. Then nephrology. Then god knows what... and this will never end. Literally, will. never. end.

Some days, it feels like I am being run over by a truck. Or, it's more like there is a person - the professor who happens to be lecturing - throwing heavy objects at me at a very fast pace; I am expected to catch all of them, stuff them in my head as quickly as I can, and then remove from from my head just as quickly to make room for things a different person will throw at me next week. It's like myriads of information is flying in through one ear while just as much is flying out through the other. Continuously.

A few weeks ago, I was feeling really overwhelmed by cardiology. It was our first real "medical" unit. We were actually learning about real diseases, what they looked like under the microscope, how to diagnose them and how to treat them. For the final, we had to learn to read EKG's, heart sounds and murmurs and also hundreds (or so it seemed) of heart disease medications. I thought it would be impossible. I spent lots of hours in the library making index cards, giant tables, taking hundreds of pages of notes and eventually, it all somehow went in my head. And it was kind of fun (except for the endless hours in the library while others were enjoying life out there somewhere). It was so interesting. Then I took the exam. It went great. And then I was done. I was tired. I just wanted to see some friends. See a movie. Have a drink.

But medical school is like a train going at 120 miles an hour, never slowing down. So the next morning - actually, the same afternoon - we started the next unit. I figured that after what I had just accomplished, it would be a piece of cake. So I ignored school for a while. I went to class, but then I did other things: I went to see a movie, I met friends for dinner, I got drunk, I went to New Haven to visit a friend, I refereed some fencing. And then there was already another exam looming in the near future. Again I felt like there was just too much to learn. And I did not even find pulmonology interesting: it's basically Physics. Pressures, volumes, tubes, resistances, lots of equations and calculations. But there was I again over the weekend, locking myself in the library (well, for some of the weekend) and on Monday morning, I took another exam and it went well once again.

And today, the train kept moving. Every time, I promise myself that I will do a better job keeping up with the pace and the material, but sometimes, one just needs a bit of a break. I have no idea what I would do if this went on for any longer than 4 years. It seems impossible enough to get through that many! And now I don't even remember what my point was...