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Late April update…

Fair warning: I’m writing this post under the influence of a strong dose of ibuprofen. I just had my wisdom teeth (all 4!) taken out on Monday. Everything seems to have healed up nicely, with only a little residual pain.

I cannot believe that my postbacc studies begin in less than 30 days! I’m incredibly excited and nervous about the opportunity to focus on my premed studies. While waiting for classes to start up, I’ve been trying to get “in the zone” by reading. Some of the medical-related books I’ve recently read include:

The Intern Blues by Robert Marion.

On Call: A Doctor’s Days and Nights in Residency by Emily R. Transue

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

I highly recommend them all. What attracted me to these books (specifically the first two), was the subject of medical internship. Internship is the first year after medical school, where freshly graduated med students work at a hospital as an actual doctor in a specialty of their choice (pediatrics, surgery, internal medicine, etc.). Internship is typically known as one of the most challenging times of a young doctor’s life, due to the amount of information that they are expected to know, number of patient cases they are required to work, and long hours they must dedicate to their new profession.

Up until about a year ago, I never really had an idea of how much doctors must sacrifice for their profession, especially in their post-med school years. Family time. Social time. Heck, any leisure time at all is scarce between shifts during internship and residency years. This is definitely not the cushy, high-paying, high-status job that some people believe it to be. And given that Obamacare makes it through the Supreme Court, doctors will only continue to face even more paperwork, more patients, longer hours, and less pay. In other words, make sure you REALLY want to be a doctor before applying to medical school!