BRITTA: Decisions, Decisions

Med school is hard, no joke.  There is always something you could be (and probably should be) doing to prepare for small group, to practice your clinical skills, to study for the ever-looming exam.  It is overwhelming sometimes, and if you’re not careful, you can forget that a world exists outside of the textbooks, articles, and anatomy objectives.

It was two weeks before our Skin, Muscles, Bones, and Joints exam, and I was already panicking.  Sure, two weeks might sound like a lot of time to prepare, but it’s surprisingly short when there is a blam (what we call a block exam) awaiting you at the end.  I had been hard at work all week, with the prospect of a visit from my husband Adam over the weekend to keep me going.  Adam hadn’t been having such a stellar week himself.  He’d been kept late at work every single day, trying to troubleshoot various problems that kept arising.  He was stressed out and frustrated.  Then came the really bad news.  Adam didn’t think he would be able to make it up to Atlanta after all.  I was disappointed, but I understood.  And after all, I had so much studying yet to do that we would have just hung around in the apartment while I crammed and Adam played solitaire.  It was probably best that I remain undistracted and concentrate on being super-productive.  These thoughts barely had time to form when Adam followed up his announcement with a question.  “Do you think you could come down this weekend instead?  No big deal if you can’t – I just thought I’d ask.”

My immediate instinct was to back out as quickly as possible.  “Let me think about it,” I said, knowing full well in my heart that it wasn’t going to work out.  But then I started thinking.  The thing is, knowing how busy I was planning to be that weekend, Adam would never have even asked me to drive eight hours round trip unless he really needed me to be there.  Shrugging, I said to myself, “It’s pass/fail,” and told him that I could make it.

Now, just in case Drs. Schwartz or Eley happen to be reading this, don’t worry – I took all my books down with me and studied there.  Still, I probably lost a point or two on the exam that I could otherwise have gotten.  In the end, though, it was worth it.  It’s that human connection to others that keeps us sane during our time here, because like I said, med school is hard.  Often you have to make time for those connections, because if you wait for the free time to just appear, you’ll be waiting a long time.  Yes, medical school is important.  But other things are important too.  That weekend down in Savannah, I felt lucky to be at a place like Emory where they also realize that.

Here I am with our dog Penny, whom I also enjoy spending time with.

ANTOINETTE: Food for Thought

It’s been a hot minute since I last updated – six months to be exact – but who’s counting except Editor/Task-master Tony Chin-Quee.  What has belligerANT been up to for the past 1/2 year?  I went to East Africa (hujambo rafiki!).  I started clinical rotations.  I went to Puerto Rico (hola amigo!).  I watched yet another childhood friend walk down the aisle.  And talked a different childhood friend through a protracted 30+ hour labor (for her second child).  I even delivered a few babies myself.  A lot has happened.

But more pertinent to this blog entry, I spent a week in rural southwest Georgia providing free health care to migrant farm workers as a part of my family medicine rotation with the South Georgia Farmworker Health Project.

Did you know that approx 85% of fruits and vegetables produced in the US are still hand-harvested and/or cultivated?

Did you know that there are more than 100,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers in Georgia?

Did you know that the life expectancy of migrant farmworkers is 49 years, compared to the nation’s average of 75 years?

The project was started in 1996 by Tom Himelick, an Emory PA, and is a collaborative project between Emory’s Physician Assistant Program, Emory’s Dept of Family and Preventive Medicine, the Southwest Georgia Area Health Education Center and community partners in Valdosta and Bainbridge, GA.  Every spring, students (both PA and medical), medical residents, faculty and volunteer interpreters spend two weeks providing free basic health care and routine dental care along with clothes & food donations.

We worked in migrant camps, packing sheds, apartment parking lots, fields, essentially any empty space.  Typical clinic setting: 2 lawn chairs, patch of grass in the middle of a field or lot, medical tools in dirt beside chair.  End scene.

In its first year, the project served about 100 patients.  Fast forward to 2009, over 1700 patients were seen… in over 100 degree weather.

It was a humbling experience and yet another reminder that I love what I’m doing.

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“The hands that feed us are often invisible hands, hands of people who work in the shadows of a multibillion-dollar industry without enjoying its rewards.” – The Human Cost of Food