February 23, 2009

• Why I hate being a med student…the riposte

  So a few posts back, I posted on why I love being a medical student. However, as much fun as I usually have, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops in physician training land. So in the interests of fairness, I am going to take this post to tell you a couple of things that have made my chosen career irksome at best.

  1. You ARE a student. This was my number one reason why I love being a med student, and at the same time one of the things that occasionally make me throw up my hands and scream in frustration. I can’t just sign off on something harmless and have to get approval for everything. Every note I write, every physical exam I perform, everything I do affecting patient care is utterly redundant, as the resident, fellow, or attending have to go back and do it anyway for medicolegal purposes. At a certain point, you cant help but feel rather impotent. It can be tough to feel like you are making a difference when you know anything you do will have to be done over and basically is just creating more work for someone

  2. Loans. I am sure you all saw this one coming. I havent added it all up, mostly because I am frightened to, but I will probably end up with about 200K in loans by the end of med school. It can really suck going through your 20′s accruing debt, living the student life while your friends are working, making money, buying homes, building up their investment portfolios and the like while I will spend the next 8-10 years of my life paying back a significant portion of my paycheck to the banks. Not that I was unaware of this going in, but sometimes I really envy my friends who graduated and started earning positive income right off the bat.

  3. You NEVER stop being a student. The first week of medical school, we were all told that half of what we learn over the next 4 years will be wrong. Unfortunately we dont know which half. And sitting through 2 years of 8-9 hours a day of lectures you feel like at some point it will come to an end, and you can start DOING. But even in residency there are journal clubs, noon conference, morning reports, M and M’s. Its a great educational experience, and it is equally important to stay up to date on the latest techniques and knowledge in the field. However, it means that for the rest of my professional life I will still be attending lectures on a daily basis…and c’mon, how many of you would want to sit through an hour of lecture every day about what you work in, no matter how fascinating you find it?

  4. Shit runs downhill. When beginning my 3rd year rotations, I laid out the medical student hierarchy as follows. Attending>Chief resident>resident>intern>nurses>janitorial staff>decorative plants>med student. And for the most part, I wasnt kidding. You are at the bottom of the totem pole…you know the least, you get picked on the most, and since almost everyone you work with evaluates you, you end up sticking around even when you have nothing to do. This gets better with each succeeding year, but that still doesnt make it fun.

  5. Its hard to get time off. Now I am not talking about vacation time, though that is certainly true as well. And I am sure this will apply to residency too, but since you are constantly jumping from rotation to rotation, it’s hard to find time for basic things like, oh going to the dentist or anything else you have to schedule in advance since you never know your call schedule until that month. When you are back and forth in between states, it gets even harder…I have been waiting to have my wisdom teeth removed for the better part of a year because I cant find the week i would need to recover.

  6. It strains relationships. Many people view medicine as a selfless profession, but in actuality, it’s an incredibly selfish one. We require a tremendous amount of patience and understanding from our friends and family in order to deal with our schedules and time limitations. It has certainly made dating more difficult, that’s for sure. The statistic is tossed around that doctors have a higher rate of divorce-unless they are married to other doctors-and I believe it. I think that is why the doctor-nurse relationship stereotype works so well…sometimes it feels like no one can understand you unless they have been through it themselves

  7. It skews your perception of the world. I used to be well informed on art, current events, movies, literature…a whole host of topics from A to Z. Nowadays it can often seem that I have nothing to talk about but things that have happened in the hospital. I miss feeling cultured. I have started to gradually get that back, but med school really pushes you into a vacuum in some respects, and when you spend all day talking to people about their sickness, it can really make it hard to talk to people about anything else.

  8. **Update from agent eric** it’s not like scrubs, er, or greys anatomy at all. Especially greys anatomy, because the people I work with have talent and brains, and spend their time treating patients not sleeping with each other.

  Despite all that though, I would like to think that given the option, I would go back and do it all again. I guess I will have to check back and see in another couple years.

  -Almost Dr J

  • 8:21 pm
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