I Wanna Talk About Med School until ILX comes back

OK so enough of this random med school interludes on other threads.

--I just got back from Minnesota last night, sorry I could not figure out a way to come introduce myself for reals, gbx-wolf. Minnesota's neuro program was pretty rad (although tbh I am feeling three other places a lil more at the moment), and now I am wearing a sweet Goldy T-shirt. I have been collecting merch from places I like, so now I can be accused of belonging to like a third of the Big 10, plus others.

--I have realized that I really like the interview parts of the interview day, because you get your best sense there of "Do I mesh with the philosophy/intentions/goals/whatnot of this program" and "what can this place do for me". But there is also all of this other stuff during the course of the day where it's just like "Oh man I have to go tour the call rooms." All call rooms are EXACTLY the same except sometimes there's a TV and sometimes there isn't, and sometimes there's a window and sometimes there isn't.

--Every time I have to write Thank You e-mails I get super lazy, which is why I am writing this instead.

i was just about to start such a thread ^____^

you two :DDD

i love reading yalls med skool posts for that vicarious thrill of what if tbrr

bummer about not getting a chance to meet up, but that's life in the fast-paced world of ~healing~

i really enjoyed my neuro rotation @ FV. really nice residents (hi s4m, sup m0h4n), interesting attendings (h0we11 is hilar), and good teaching (fi01 was great, and i would just like to point out that i have an otm impression of him irl). i gather it was The Shit program some time ago, fell from grace for some reason or another, and that its now gathering steam again. having the ANA in town can't hurt (soz again to plasmon for missing you when you were here for a conference ("conference")).

program "fit" is huge, imo. obv i am not on that part yet (graduate 2013), but i think for your non-gunner specialties the esprits de corps shared by residents and staff and faculty is at least as important as a program's reputation. or, at least, is to me, future family physician. that and location: i feel sorta lucky that i'll be able to regionalize my choices without worrying too much about research and funding and the like. i'm on psych right now* with a guy who's matching (hopefully) into ortho, and he's definitely got a "needs of the service" attitude; getting into a program, anywhere, is his top priority.

*psych is really, really, really interesting. i'm loving it, almost to the point of temptation

i thought that was u ;)

Yeah the gap between what I have to do in a not-that-competitive specialty (esp as a US allopathic school grad) and what the surgical subs/derm/rads people have to do is almost unfair. Like, unless you totally fuck up it seems like Internal Med/Neuro/Peds/Fam/possibly some others are foregone conclusions for matching basically wherever. I feel like one of the bigger reasons I ended up in Neuro is because I found people who got as excited as I did about the same stuff I did, so I am always kinda watching for the residents/attendings who are super-excitable.

One of the real neat things about UMN is that they have a newish Prog Director and a newish Chairman and so they're just kinda taking all ideas right now, including more work with the AAN. They showed us the new building and mentioned a couple times how AAN people were just out at Hennepin sayin' what's up a couple weeks ago. I wanna do med education stuff for the future (I get to interview applicants now! It is so fun!), so that was particularly intriguing.

And then next week I am going to that other big hospital in Minnesota. Everybody is always like "Even if you don't want to go to Rochester, you have to go see it" and I am not unopposed to Rochester, I think. It is not the most ideal location but I think they even admit that up front.

yeah i haven't been to that other hospital, but it sounds like a p impressive operation. it's funny to see how docs at fvrs/hcmc bristle a little bit whenever pts drop the m-bomb, tho

smdh @ my ana/aan gaff

http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die/read/nexus/

Yeah, most people I've talked to who work in hospitals want no part of a lot of the stuff that goes down in hospitals. Like, if someone told me now that I'd die in a month unless I got a solid organ transplant, I'd probably just focus on enjoying the hell out of that month. Maaaaayyyyyybe I'd take a kidney, but the life of the immunosuppressed is just not a thing I'd be happy with.

real talk

haven't read the article there yet but fwiw i think this is why patients make good doctors, maybe? like not to be all "im on psych right now" but actual empathy is a rare thing in medicine, inasmuch as the oncologist treating her patient very probably has not ever actually had cancer, and cannot truly understand what that's like. she's got like pseudoempathy, just tons of well-grounded sympathy in aggregate, from years of experience. this might be why the "psychiatrists are nuts" thing bears a bit more fruit than the other stereotypes: loads of 'high-functioning' people have invisible mental illness that hasn't been public, or impeded their ability to do their job, the way that something like renal failure would; and from my v narrow experience, a lot of the people that work on the ward (not excluding myself btw) seem a little...sub-clinical, in their presentation ifyouknowwhatimean

also man i gotta say that real-deal mania is a g-d thing; catatonia is impenetrable, and alternately ominous or bathetic, but never peaceful; and florid life-threatening anorexia is a tragic and profound thing to behold, particularly in a straight male. the 'straight male' part only being notable because there is a tendency i think to feminize eating/dysmorphic disorders, which, when a man with anorexia shows up, gets him tagged immediately as 'gay', because obv real men dont have "body issues." (<---ugly euphemism alert). so seeing a straight man with anorexia, and bearing witness to his ordeal (which imo includes having to eat when every impulse says DO NOT EAT THAT...refeeding Tx for anorexics is psychic torture i imagine which is an interesting ethical issue but w/e), was a bit eye-opening.

then again completely pathologizing anorexia is an easy way to steam-roll the cultural/societal/whatever pressures on women to meet body-norms. so \(°_o)/

btw i mean this seriously someone could probably make a p dece dissertation out of The Risks Of Being Female. many medical risks are v specifically lady-business (i will never die in childbirth), but a lot are overdetermined, at best, and many have nothing to do with physiology.

Lots of people in LTC seem to be a bit...subclinical, too. I wonder what it is.

Hypomania was so harrowing for me that it was the only time in my cycle that I ever considered suicide. I can't imagine how horrible full-blown mania would be. (I also wonder about the mentality of people who actually enjoy hypomania and/or mania.)

Mayo basically was what it was said to be (minus the "Rochester is the most horrible place ever" talk, Rochester is small and fine, whatevs): Just absurdly fancy and big and impressive, but it makes you feel like everybody is super-into medicine. Which is, obviously, a good thing, but it made me feel like I would not be good Mayo people, since I am basically ILNFL me like 80% of the time (including in the hospital, tbh). Whereas other places would always bring up the goofier parts of my application, they were mostly just about research and patient stories (which again, is fine, just, y'know, not where I am going to stand out).

This is how people make ill-informed decisions, y'all.