It Is What It Is...

Done w/ i-med. Been there, done that, and got the vomit stains on my jacket to prove it.

Had a very strange en-masse exit interview with the aging program director and five other med students. Funny how different people perceive a situation in very different ways. I left the hospital with basically a neutral and more or less happy impression, having learned some good stuff, met some good people, endured quite a few indifferent and/or lazy people, survived one death threat and one attempted mugging, and found it all basically par for the course.

Of the five other students in the room, two were also sort of neutral about the experience, two were barking pissed off, and one claimed to have had an ecstatically good time that kind of left everybody else in the room with their eyebrows raised.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the three of us who found the experience more or less neutral all had paying jobs doing something or other before coming to med school. My hypothesis is that if you've worked for a living, you know that "baseline" for most people in most jobs means taking a lot of shite along with whatever satisfaction the job might bring. Anything better is icing on the cake, and that icing is usually what you scrape together for yourself.

Going right to med school out of college that may not be so clear. Thinking about myself at that same age, especially considering the school I came from, I also had expectations of the world that were not all that realistic. Nothing wrong with ideals, unless you're shocked that other people don't share them. And they almost never do.

So I was a little embarassed for my two classmates who were kind of screaming at this aging doctor who is the program director at this hospital (even though his stories about monkeys in Costa Rica really were of questionable relevance to our education...) I was wondering, have these people never been in a crappy situation before? Really?

As for the ecstatic kid, I'm not sure what his deal was. I think he was actually sincere. Or maybe he got into the pharmaceutical locker.

Round Ten: Cardiology. Should be a kick.