October 1, 2006

• Ignorance is Bliss..

  It sure was nice not to know anything. Those days are long
  gone.

  Before medical school-or even just last year-I didn’t know a
  thing about disease. What makes you sick, how you can die, how your body can
  fail on you. And now that I do, it’s a frightening knowledge.

  With every new organ we study, I basically learn
  more ways
  that I can die. More things that can go wrong, more ways that I can get
  sick,
  more complications and symptoms I could have in the future. First with
  the
  heart, you can have a heart attack. Duh. But you can also have sudden
  death-your heart just stops. Or you could have a clot that you have no
  clue
  about go to your brain or your lungs or anywhere else and kill you.
  Then with
  the lungs, there’s a ton of really nasty diseases that end up in
  honeycomb
  lung. Or you can get a number of respiratory infections that’ll do you
  in. Then
  onto the kidneys. Plenty of ways those can just stop out of nowhere. or
  there’s GI, with cancer everywhere. (What’s worse, a significant number
  of
  these diseases are what medicine likes to call “idiopathic.” That
  basically
  means no one has a freaking clue what causes them.)

  The funny thing is, for those first 25 years, my risks were
  always the same, my chance of developing any of these conditions never changed.
  It’s only that my understanding of them has changed. Hell, my risks have
  probably decreased now since childhood-I eat better, I get more exercise, I’m
  much more hygenic-but I still feel like all of them are just waiting to get me.
  Any inkling of a sore throat jump-starts the thought-process quite well: “Is it
  strep? If so, am I going to develop acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis
  and start peeing blood? Or maybe I’ll get post-strep endocarditis. Listen. Do
  you hear a murmur?” This is contrary to the fact that I get maybe one or two
  sore throats a year anymore.

  on the plus side while ignorance is bliss,
  knowledge is power-when i do get a sore throat, i can always grab my
  penlight, say ahhh, and actually understand what the hell i am checking
  the back of my throat for. And the occasional attacks of my med student
  syndrome cause me to go that much more in depth with my studying, so i
  can figure out what to do, or who to see if i do have something, and
  maybe even catch it before it becomes serious

  Because colds are like that, you know

  -J

  • 9:30 pm
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