Bride Day!

As any med student can tell you, losing a full day of studying can feel horrible... Losing multiple partial days can feel worse.  Most brides will tell you the bachelorette party is probably one of the best parts of the wedding festivities, and bridal showers are a great way to spend time with your nearest and dearest. Because I have finals and boards coming up, I couldn't spare multiple weekends so I had my shower, a wedding dress fitting all in one day. It was exhausting but such a fun day!! It was great too because my sister, who lives on the west coast was able to be there for all of the festivities.  My friends rented a sic room at the Dream downtown hotel in the city.  It was awesome- great photo ops, delicious cocktails, and morning after poolside basking. 

Spring Break!

This week has been spring break, which translates to a week and a half of uninterrupted study time.  With my fiancé in Mexico for the past three days, you'd think I would get in a ton of study time.  Well, it's good to make plans.  Work has gotten done, but there have definitely been a few days were instead of working the 10 hours a day I intended, the hours add up more to a modest 5.  One day I spent the entire time on the couch watching House.  It turns out that the house writers in season 1 LOVE vasculitis…. apparently its in the differential for everything.  Also caught a pretty blazing error in the first season, they refer to Toxoplasma (Toxoplasma gondii) as a fungus.  It most definitely is not a fungus, and in fact is a protozoa that spreads through cat feces.  It's generally not a problem unless you are pregnant or immunosuppressed.

In other news, my mom, brother, and sister (who flew in from Oregon) are driving up from DC for my bridal shower/bachelorette party tomorrow.  I decided to put them both in the same day because 1) I couldn't afford to lose two study weekend this close to finals/Step I and 2) My sister/maid of honor lives in Oregon and I wanted her to be able to attend both without breaking the bank of air fare.  Because the wedding is so close to my Step I date (5 days after), I couldn't put the events in the wedding week due to fear of being massively hungover on my wedding day.

3rd Year Clerkship Order

We got our clerkship order for next year yesterday. Our school assigns clerkship with a computerized lottery system. First everyone ranks 90 different scheduling possibilities from 1 to 90 then a computer works some magic and assigns everyone their own schedule. Generally, if there is something that you think you might want to pursue, you want it in the middle. There is some other general wisdom, like having Internal Medicine first prepares you for the rest of the year, but having it last is really great for Step 2. My schedule is near perfect. 

The only thing I would change is to have Neurology between Surgery and Medicine. Those are two pretty intense rotations, and at 8 weeks each, having them back to back can be rough. I'm SUPER happy I have my electives last. Either I will pick really easy ones sonOncan study for Step 2 or I'll pick something in OBGYN so I can get more letters. Peds is first which is excellent- have absolutely no interest in Peds and I'm not a huge kid person so will be glad to get that out of the way. OBGYN is situated dead center which is awesome. Next up is rotation location lottery. 

Home Stretch

It's almost April. I have 11 weeks and 3 days until I take Step I.  I'm in that strange place where I really want time to slow down because I have so much stuff to do between now and then, but I also want time to continue to go by quickly because I can feel the familiar twinge of burn out.  Second year has been rough. First year, I was extremely good at school. I was near the top of my class in all classes except biochem and I still felt that excited twinge of competition that drove me to succeed and perform well on my exams. Now I'm just tired.  All I want to do is pass. I've been dragging all year.  I'd like to say its because I've been distracted by the wedding but I really haven't.  I'm just exhausted, and sick of sitting in a chair memorizing information, 80% of which I will most likely forget and never use in my career.  There are days when the only thing preventing me from quitting is my massive student loan debt.

All of that said, I'm really excited to start third year.  I know the hours will be long for some rotations,  but I do best when I actually get to interact with people.  I love interacting and building relationships with patients.  I recognize the relationship building is limited in 3rd year because of the rotation schedule, but even getting to see the same person a few times and working with them is really what I look forward to. This is probably why I'm leaning more toward OB/GYN and less toward surgery.  I do enjoy operating- the precision, the physicality, the ability to actually be able to "do something" for a patient.  I also really like building relationships.  Enter OB/GYN a nice blend of the two.  It's also a relatively positive specialty.  But I digress.... All of this is literally MONTHS away. Now at the end of second year it feels almost like the light at the end of the tunnel that just keeps moving.

The highlight of my week was picking my "grid" for the order of my rotations next year. Basically we  rank various orders of rotations by preference then some computer algorithm tries to give everyone their highest ranked choice.  In the next step, we will pick WHERE we rotate. Which I'm also very excited for. Anything that involves looking forward is exciting. Anything that involves doing the work I still need to do to get there is torture.

Recovery

I always feel like it takes several days to recover from a big exam. Our most recent one was on Friday. Since it was match day, they decided to make our exams be one hour earlier so we wouldn't have to listen to all of the commotion being made by people in a far happier place than we were. We started at 8 am and ended at noon. 4 hours, 255 questions. It was awful. So awful that by the time you get to the last 20 questions, you don't even care anymore. You just want to bubble in all C's and be done. Add to that the 2 week run of chronic sleep deprivation and you end up with a severe post exam hangover. 

Luckily for me, I decided the weekend needed to be full of activities:

-Friday: after the exam, went home, had a strong cocktail and passed out. Woke up, showered and drove into the city to Brooklyn for my friend's birthday party. My fiancé met me there, we had a lovely time and were home in bed by around 2am. 

-Saturday: Woke up at 7:30 so I could wash off the stench of hipster cocktails before the F and I left for our 9:30 am appointment to see an apartment.  The apartment sucked. Next, I went to school to teach science to some middle school kids in the STEP program.  F picked me up at 2:30, we took our dog to the dog park then went home. I promptly passed out. Woke up to eat dinner then went back to bed. 

-Sunday: had another apartment appointment at 11, home by 12. Worked on catching up on emails and wedding things until we left around 4. Drove into the city to go wedding suit shopping then met another old friend for dinner in the east village. Home by 11, went immediately to bed. 

Needless to say I'm still recovering, while also trying to learn GI pathology. 

Test Week Truth #4

Sometimes you have to chose not to worry about the small stuff.

Due to the facts that I am getting married in 3 months and my fiancé and I have been in a bit of a back and forth with our landlord (who has decided she wants to sell the apartment we are living in and therefore would like to be showing the apartment in April… 2 months before my boards/ finals/ wedding), there are some issues that come up that need solutions. I tend to ruminate over problems and after I spend half a day ruminating over them, I talk them to death once my fiancé gets home or with whoever will pick up the phone and listen to me.  This is clearly not a good way to handle things so I came up with a little flow chart for problem solving wherein the end task is always to remove the problem from my head, at least for the time being.

1) Does this problem have a solution that is within my control?
     -NO --> let it go, there is nothing that can be done
     -YES --> Question 2

2) Will waiting X days to deal with this problem change the outcome?
     -YES --> Outsource problem to fiancé/parent/friend
     -NO -->  Set a date (usually the day after exams) to handle problem, until then, don't think about it.             Nothing you do now is going to change the outcome.

3) It's impossible to stop thinking about this problem, I'm super pissed/stressed and can't get it out of my mind.
     -Set at timer- 30 minutes to come up with some kind of solution that is satisfactory.  Decide to re-visit this solution after the exam or outsource executing the solution to someone else.


Per our apartment issue, I decided a decent solution that I could control would be for us to give our one month notice and just move over a weekend.  We'd hire movers, I would go stay at my in-laws during the process so study time would be minimally affected.  I found one of those corporate apartment companies, called to see if they had vacancies, and scheduled an appointment for Saturday morning.  Are we actually going to move?  I have no idea, but I do have a plan that is acceptable, and haven't thought about it since (aside from writing about it on this blog post).

Test Week Truth #3

Getting creative with white board surfaces is a always a good idea.