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.