Reality

Notice how I have not written anything since I started school? That was the cold hard grasp of reality seizing the enthusiastic premed. Med school... is hard. (I know, I know. It is shocking.) We have class most mornings from eight till noon, then again in the afternoon on one of the two afternoons a week we aren't scheduled to be in lab till five. In the evenings I read anatomy and biochemistry, either at my carrel in the library, listening to the ambulances and sobbing families, or in the comfort of my own home, listening to the meth addicts screaming from my driveway or the sweet neighborhood kids breaking glass bottles out in the street. That is an exaggeration. The meth addicts usually wait until three in the morning to resolve their drama, when I am (or would have been) asleep. It rarely interferes with studying.

But I survive. I wade through the endless swamp of origins and insertions and aponeuroses and GLUT receptors and cytokines and cultural sensitivity, swatting away the gunners which bite peskily at my exposed skin. I trudge along, daring to hope I will one day reach the estuary of residency and some current will carry me into the sea of medicine, where I'll most likely drown. In debt. Actually, that is not a half-bad overblown analogy. You are a med student. You are struggling along, it isn't pleasant, and every so often the thought comes to mind "Maybe I could just quit." Sure, you could quit. So you stop. Stand there a bit. Maybe turn a circle and fully take in the dark water and drooping, desolate trees surrounding you on all sides. A red-headed woodpecker sounds in the distance.

Which way is the exit?

Or, better yet, you could take a break. Get airlifted out of the swamp, and put back at the mouth next August. Retrudge all you have trudged so far again next year, back to this moment, two tests behind you, one final in front, wondering why, why haven't last week's anatomy grades been posted yet? After all you have been through, is it so much to ask?