It’s seemed like forever, yet it happened in the blink of an eye

I held a human heart in my hands today, and it actually took me a few minutes to realize how amazing this was. Human anatomy has become such a part of our everyday lives that even pulling the heart out of a cadaver seems commonplace now. How much has changed since I started medical school!
Instead of going to bed in the wee hours of the morning, I actually get 7 hours of sleep most nights. I dress up for class sometimes. I see patients in OPEX. I vacuum my room more than once a semester. I’m even going to get a pet soon. Wait, have I become a real adult?
I don’t think so. I still have way too much fun hanging out with my classmates, making silly jokes, playing taboo, or going out on the weekends. I still don’t do laundry for the 2 weeks leading up to a module exam. And I still consider pop-tarts and coke (from the vending machine in the med school) a meal when I am crazy busy with an anatomy dissection.
So much is different in medical school but I feel that most things have changed for the better. It’s great to know that what you spend hours studying will actually help your future patients. And Emory is wonderful about reminding us that these hypothetical patients do actually exist. We see them in OPEX (or our “out-patient clinical experience”, I do mine at a private pediatrics clinic), where I have the opportunity to interview and examine patients. It’s amazing to learn about the disease Bronchiolitis in a pulmonary lecture at 8am, and then be listening to a child’s lungs with Bronchiolitis at 3pm on the same day. We also have patient presentations about once a week. During these presentations the lecturing doctor will bring in one of his or her patients with the disease that we’re about to learn about, and interview them for an hour in front of all 140 of us. These patient presentations are amazing in every way. The patients often give us great advice on what they want from their doctor. Listening to these patients share their stories helps me remember the topic as no amount of studying could accomplish. How do I know Flolan, a drug that treats Idiopathic Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, has a half life of only minutes? Because a woman with IPAH told our class of the stress of having to mix her medication at home correctly and hook it up to her IV within 3 minutes or she may die suddenly. And our lecturers are always offering us new ways to see even more patients if we want to! After a transplant surgeon gave us a lecture on lung transplantation during our pulmonary module, he offered to let anyone who was interested come in and observe this surgery. So I am currently making sure to keep my phone on “loud” during the night so I don’t miss a 2am call from the Emory transplant center, informing me that a lung transplant is taking place and that I can come in to observe. Emory only does about 30 of these surgeries each year I feel honored to be able to observe one of them.
So maybe tonight I’ll be holding live human lungs in my hands. Oh how things really have changed!