In our first Introduction to Clinical Medicine earlier this week, our professor went through the basics of exams and bedside manner. He went through how to get a patient comfortable with you touching them and how to get the patient to trust you enough to for them to actually listen to what you have to say. In a few weeks, we'll be able to examine our own patients, take their histories, and listen to their heart and lungs. We'll get to where our white coats with the stethoscope around our necks and actually do what doctors do, which feels really cool. We have to learn a lot of textbook information each week (mounds of buzzwords, slides, graphs, and studies), which isn't fun, but being able to go hands-on with patients, that is.
Okay, now on to the show!
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This is really my first big break since the beginning of the week. One thing I've really come to find out from medical school is that it is a lot of work. And I hear the readers that are in or have already gone through medical school all yelling a resounding and simultaneous, "Duh," it really came as a surprise to me.
Lets put this into perspective by giving you a glimps into my day tomorrow:
- 7AM: Wake up (read as try to wake up and press the snooze alarm)
- 7:30AM: Really wake up
- 8AM: Make coffee and head out the door by 8:15AM
- 9AM: PBL Lecture - Failure to thrive
- PBLs are in class discussions where they bring a case forward that we evaluate. It helps to teach us the steps in diagnosis and the importance of research in medicine
- 10AM: Stem cells and Lineages
- 70 slides
- 11AM: pH, Amino acids, and Peptides
- 40 slides
- 12PM: Food time! My favorite time of the day
- 1PM: Protein structure
- 40 slides
- 2PM: Principles of differentiation
- 120 slides (Just kidding, it's only 80)
- 3PM: Head to the gym for some non-medical "me time"
- 4PM: Head home and start organizing my notes
- The professors go so fast when the lecture, easily going faster than a slide every 30 seconds, and my notes start entering a realm of incoherence around that time
- 5PM: Find some dinner around the house
- 6PM: Start reading through the books to grasp key concepts I might have missed
- Four to five lectures a day means four or five full sections in a textbook
- 7PM: Start relating my notes to the powerpoint slides.
- 11PM: Catch half an hour of random television
- My mind needs some numb time at this point
- 12PM Head off to bed
All in all, expect to spend an hour of time at home studying for each hour in class. It's not something that you can get around. Gone are the days when I had freetime I guess, but I signed up for it!
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