The Times they are a Changing

Sitting in class trying to learn about neuromuscular disease. My mind follows the material only slowly. The words of the lecturer jumble in my mind. “What is normal?” “What is abnormal?” “Does normal even exist?” These questions swim through my mind. An un-rested brain is no good at processing complex information. What happened to the sleepy days of winter break? Where did the sharpness of the first week of school go? Where is the excitement to learn these new things go? The truth is, I can feel myself becoming more tired, more wasted, less clever. Waiting for the lecturer to say something that will snap me back into reality. The distractions around me are numerous: the colleague on facebook beside me, the giggling students sitting in the back, my own search for a face that seems enthused. There has definitely been a shift after the break: we are more tired than ever before. 2/3 through the first of half of med school. I think that we are all beginning to understand what the classes ahead of us said about 2nd year Medicine. Things get much more difficult. The feeling of that amongst my classmates is palpable. I feel it myself and I’ve always tried to avoid the drain by filling my time with things outside of medicine. Now, for the first time, I fear that – at least for the next few months – studying medicine will actually engulf me. My greatest fear.

Perhaps I should write a book about the process of going through medical school. The way that the pressure continues to mount the further you go in your training. Perhaps some people would like to know how sometimes you feel like a robot, programmed for efficiency but not for empathy. Perhaps it would seem ludicrous how much information you are expected to retain, a growing database each year, within the same number of years that they had before the internet (how did people even know things before wikipedia?). Some days I really miss the carefree days of undergrad. I try always to remind myself why I am here. Why I wanted to join this crazy profession in the first place. Often I am wowed by how cool the things I get to learn are. I suppose that now is not the time to learn those things on my own terms. But that time will come soon.

Not all days are like this. But today, I miss reading books for pleasure. I miss staying up at night chatting with friends or working on hobby projects with no need for store-bought stimulation (caffeine!) because you never feel tired when you are having lots of fun. Now, I’m drinking coffee at night. Both an early bird and a night owl. It is indeed exhausting.  I think it’s about time for a Sabbath. I’ll take a break, have a nap, read a book, talk to a friend, eat a real dinner with family. And tomorrow, I’ll be ready to go back to the grind.

The times they are a changing

Sitting in class trying to learn about neuromuscular disease. My mind follows the material only slowly. The words of the lecturer jumble in my mind. “What is normal?” “What is abnormal?” “Does normal even exist?” These questions swim through my mind. An unrested brain is no good at processing complex information. What happened to the sleepy days of winter break? Where did the sharpness of the first week of school go? Where is the excitement to learn these new things go? The truth is, I can feel myself becoming more tired, more wasted, less clever. Waiting for the lecturer to say something that will snap me back into reality. The distractions around me are numerous: the colleague on facebook beside me, the giggling students sitting in the back, my own search for a face that seems enthused. There has definitely been a shift after the break: we are more tired than ever before. 2/3 through the first of half of med school. I think that we are all beginning to understand what the classes ahead of us said about 2nd year Medicine. Things get much more difficult. The feeling of that amongst my classmates is palpable. I feel it myself and I’ve always tried to avoid the drain by filling my time with things outside of medicine. Now, for the first time, I fear that – at least for the next few months – studying medicine will actually engulf me. My greatest fear.

Perhaps I should write a book about the process of going through medical school. The way that the pressure continues to mount the further you go in your training. Perhaps some people would like to know how sometimes you feel like a robot, programmed for efficiency but not for empathy. Perhaps it would seem ludicrous how much information you are expected to retain, a growing database each year, within the same number of years that they had before the internet (how did people even know things before wikipedia?). Some days I really miss the carefree days of undergrad. I try always to remind myself why I am here. Why I wanted to join this crazy profession in the first place. Often I am wowed by how cool the things I get to learn are. I suppose that now is not the time to learn those things on my own terms. But that time will come soon.

Not all days are like this. But today, I miss reading books for pleasure. I miss staying up at night chatting with friends or working on hobby projects with no need for store-bought stimulation (caffeine!) because you never feel tired when you are having lots of fun. Now, I’m drinking coffee at night. Both an early bird and a night owl. It is indeed exhausting.  I think it’s about time for a Sabbath. I’ll take a break, have a nap, read a book, talk to a friend, eat a real dinner with family. And tomorrow, I’ll be ready to go back to the grind.

The Mamas and the Papas

Hands down the best thing about being back in Manitoba for school is having my family close by. Final block exam in one week. Stress usually does two things to people: It makes them become super meticulous about the things they think they can control (for example, people that clean-up and rearrange their rooms a million times during exams because something even slightly out of place is toxic to their studying), OR it makes you let everything go and you become engrossed by a *hopefully* balanced chaos. I am 100% one of the latter. A couple of weeks before exams I find myself eating poorly, neglecting to exercise, leaving things untidy, all the while justifying that i’m just too busy with school and volunteering and other things to be bothered by the minutia. The result: messy apartment, disgruntled appearance and take-out. A sorry sight for the eyes. Now for the Mamas and the Papas. When I was in undergrad at St. FX I would do this basically every exam period (my room mates had the same habits so you don’t even want to know what that combo looked like). I would speak to my parents, tell them about my stress, but they could do very little about it (except send the occasional care package).

BUT NOW, although I am still living on my own, my parents are close. Last week I stopped by my parents house for dinner. After seeing me, my mother knew that things were not looking good. Her reaction: to cook a weeks worth of meals for me and delivery groceries to my house! Amazing! As much as I love to be an independent woman, I won’t deny how unbelievable relieved I was to get a week of home-cooked meals and fresh veggies and fruit. I keep telling myself, “One more week. Just one more week!” Then I can finally breath. At least for a couple of days before the madness starts again! Song that is keeping me going: This Year by the Mountain Goats http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYCzDhaRV60

Extracurricular extravaganza

It’s really hard sometimes to find a balance between school, work and extracurricular activities. It’s a process that I’ve been trying to master since high school. It was much harder to strike a balance in undergrad, and it’s even more difficult to do so in medical school. But this week, I had a triumphant victory.

At the beginning of the week, I took a long hard look at what I had planned for myself this week and started to wish, as most of do, that there were just a couple more hours in the day. I thought with dread that it would be impossible for me to find a moment for myself…just to vegetate for a minute. But this week ended up being miraculously organized – and not because everything went according to plan.

It’s so tempting, as school gets more and more busy, to abandon all prior commitments and just become engrossed in your studies. Don’t get me wrong – I think that it is very important to make your studies a top priority. What I’m getting at though is, that schoolwork can’t be your only priority. And there probably won’t be tons of people who tell you this, but it’s actually ok to invest your time doing things that you love to do.

For instance, I volunteer at an inner city drop in centre as a homework tutor for kids. I’ve been involved in this program for as long as I can remember (I used to attend it when I was a kid). The first thing that I think of doing when I get a bit stressed out is to skip homework club. I mean, that would free up a solid 3 hours. Then, I think about how important my presence is there, not just because I’m helping with homework, but because after so many years, I’ve become one of the constants in a lot of these kids lives. And they have become a constant in mine. This week, Wednesday rolled around and I had not yet completed the assignments that I needed to do, but I still decided to go to homework club. It’s so funny how much better my perspective was after spending time with kids, joking with them and helping with homework. I realized that they are as much a constant in my life as I am in theirs. And I love volunteering!

At the end of the day, you never feel bad for doing stuff that you love to do. It actually helps you study more effectively if you know you have something that you love to look forward to.  Homework club was just one of those moments this week for me as I went through my gamut of extracurriculars. Do I regret “losing” 3 hours of studying. Absolutely not!

If any of you are interested in finding an awesome place to volunteer. This might be the right place for you! You’ll probably find a program that fits right into what you love to do! www.westbroadwayyouthoutreach.com

Late Night Sleep Tight

IT has finally hit me.
The mad panic as you realize (usually incorrectly) that you know nothing and exams are right around the corner.

WHAT DO YOU DO?
I usually go through a few phases before I snap back to reality:

“Tito’s Phases of Panic”
1. Wide scale panic – this is the “wow! my life is in shambles, i’m never going to be a good doctor” phase that thankfully usually lasts less than 5 minutes
2. Fear of the future – this is the phase where I picture myself falling into a sinkhole of failure. I spend about 10 minutes in this phase imagining myself in some form of remediation
3. I NEED a plan! – this is the phase where I come up with unrealistic study goals that involve reading whole textbooks in a week ( I have actually tried this before and don’t recommend it), leaving ample time for review
4. Get REAL – this is the phase where I calm down a little, come to grips with my mortality and try to come up with a plan that doesn’t involve not sleeping for a week.
5. Start up/Shut down – this is the phase where I start studying and realise that even my reasonable plan is going to be difficult to accomplish. Sigh.

I can’t believe that it is already the end of October. How did that even happen? I downloaded a countdown app on my phone and largely ignored it until the other day. Why did I not think of the consequences of putting my multiple mini-projects before school-work sooner? I looked back and thought about all the times in my life that I have gone through the phases of panic and realised that there were far too many to count. So in the unrealistic “I NEED a plan!” phase, I stayed up until 4am studying, only to come home to my apartment which was freezing cold because the boiler broke! There’s nothing like an ice-cold bedroom to snap you into the “get real” phase. So now after slugging through a night of no sleep (my teeth ache from shivering) I am on the grind. Trying – desperately! – to catch up and get ready for exams.

Floored

I have finally gotten settled back into a new school year and wow do I ever feel behind! Who would have thought that almost two weeks off would leave you with that feeling? It’s crazy how quickly things can pile up and I am definitely starting to feel the pressure of 2^nd year Med. The funny thing is that most of my time has been spent during extracurricular activities and volunteering, so it was definitely time well spent. I promised myself that this year I would take on less responsibility, but now almost a month in, I’ve decided to accept my fate as a responsibility magnet.

I went to the Canadian Federation of Medical Students AGM in Saskatoon to sit in on their Global Health Program session. This was my third meeting and definitely the most productive. It was so exciting to be amongst a group of strong-willed, passionate and driven medical students committed to advocating for change in world, especially in low-resource settings. It was a great weekend of collaboration with my peers and an excellent way to share resources and ideas with student’s nation wide. I definitely don’t feel bad about missing school for that.

The day after I got back from Saskatoon, two of my best friends arrived! They had taken the train all the way from Nova Scotia and stopped by as they headed to B.C. They were here for a total of 8 days. Did I do any school work during that time – besides going to class and clinic, of course? You bet I didn’t! Instead we caught up (it’s been over a year since we’ve been able to hang out), saw the Arcade Fire (a fantastic show) and reminisced about good times. Having them here was like a time warp. It felt so normal to have all of us sharing an apartment again, but alas, it could not last! I am still a student after all.

They left me behind, but not empty-handed! One of them was sick while they were here and as a lovely parting gift, I received the most bizarre head cold of my life that basically knocked me out for the majority of this past week. Med school, oh, Med School! Will I ever catch up with you? It may not feel like it now, but I know that soon I’ll be laughing at how freaked out I’m getting when I still have almost 2 months before the final.  Somehow between now and then all of that information will get crammed into my brain just in time to regurgitate it onto test paper. I think the thing that always freaks me out the most is the fact that I’m learning all of this not just to pass a test, but also so practice medicine in the future. People’s lives depend on how well I learn my stuff. For me that has always been more than enough motivation to learn what I’m being taught – and learn it well!!

Hit the ground running

The first week back at school was strange. Somehow the places that had been far too familiar now seemed somehow new and different. Everything was so clean, so tidy, so bright. The halls of the Brodie Center were such a sharp contrast to what I had become accustomed to while working in a hospital in Nigeria over the summer. Everything about being back in Canada seemed so dry, so sterile, so silent. Nothing at all like the bustling rush of urban Nigeria.

Perhaps too it was the realization that I was no longer “Dr. Americana” as I was called in Nigeria. I was – am – a medical student.  It’s funny how much of your life can change in just a few short days. As I sat through my first classes and caught up with my friends I kept thinking things like, “Four days ago it was 40 degrees with 100% humidity”, “Four days ago I was checking babies pulses and saying goodbye to all of the amazing people I had met and who had become my family”, “Four days ago I was dreading this very moment, sitting in class once again.”

So much of my perspective has changed by having the opportunity to live and work in medicine in Nigeria. It made me remember part of why I wanted to study medicine in the first place. My experience there had not changed me fundamentally as a person, but had definitely given me insight to my strengths and weaknesses in medicine and made me start to look at the Canadian Health Care System from a whole new angle.

I won’t lie. I spent a great deal of my first few days complaining about being in school once again. But then it hit me: What an incredible privilege it is for me to get a chance to learn what I’m learning! As much as I wished I could stay back in Nigeria, I am of no good to the people there with just a big heart and only one year of medical training under my belt. My education in medicine is about so much more than just getting a degree, but about the incredible impact that I can make on my community, my country and the world with it. I know that it sounds incredibly cheesy. And I know that everyone has heard the whole “education is the key” thing a million and one times. But after a whole summer in place where access to education is limited, I can clearly see the truth of that statement.

So now…no more complaining. It’s helpful to think about all that I’m learning in terms of its future impact and not my current state of being overwhelmed.  I’ve decided to just pull up my boots and hit the ground running, and maybe with that attitude, I’ll be more successful this year and in my future career.