JACKIE: The Sweetness of Accomplishment

To follow up on my comrade Tony’s somewhat embarrassing moment in small group, as told below, I will describe my incredibly awesome experience at OPEX. OPEX stands for “Outpatient Experience”, and is the part of our curriculum where we each go to a different outpatient clinic every other week and shadow a primary care physician for the afternoon. This interaction is one-on-one and can often lead to feelings of utter dismay, since one’s preceptor might ask one questions that one never knows the answer to.  However, the other day I had an OPEX moment in which I felt like a complete medical genius (as opposed to feeling like a kid in a dunce cap as per Tony).

We are now studying Psychiatry in class, but we just completed our study of Neurology. Neurology involves numerous questions that require you to “localize the lesion.” This means that you gather a set of symptoms (e.g. numbness on the left side of the face but not the forehead or weakness of the right leg from the knee down) and use them to determine where in the brain, midbrain or spinal cord the lesion has occurred. Lesions range from stroke to infection to transection.

Last Wednesday at OPEX, I fully localized the lesion and made the correct diagnosis all by myself! I was able to recall all of the information I needed to adequately do this, elicit the relevant symptoms and history, and make a proper diagnosis.

I’ll tell you what, folks: medical school can be a discouraging, frustrating experience. There is too much to know and not enough time to learn it. But the fact of the matter is, it just takes awhile to truly gain medical knowledge and be able to apply it. This explains why it takes at least 7 years to become a doctor. But, as overachieving students, it is hard to remind ourselves that in our second year of this 7-year process, we must not expect to know everything yet! I know this may seem obvious, but it’s just not that easy to keep in mind, trust me. And since we can’t always keep this in mind, we endure moments of major frustration. Yet those moments when you DO know the answer, when you are actually able to help someone in real life; ah- it makes it all worth it.