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.

BRITTA: My Body of Knowledge

Welcome back! I hope that you had a lovely Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice/December! Since the last time I wrote, we M1s have faced a number of new challenges and obstacles. We’re now solidly into the Human Disease portion of the curriculum – more interesting, yes, but also a lot more work! The most exciting part for me has been getting into the anatomy lab. At first, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, to be honest with you. Surprisingly, it turns out that a dead body is completely different from a living, breathing human being. They feel so cold and stiff and…dead. My first contact with our cadaver was two Tuesdays before Thanksgiving when my group and I came in to roll him over in preparation for the first dissection. At Emory, we dissect our cadavers in groups of 6, paired off into 3 teams of two. (We call our group the Supergroup – we’d hate to be too modest!) The teams alternate, each one performing 5 of the 15 total dissections over the course of the year. It makes for a lot of work during your dissection week; on the other hand, you’ve got plenty of space since you’re not trying to elbow your way in amongst 5 other people. But I digress. I was telling you about the first time I met our cadaver. The first dissection was scheduled for the back, and since he was facing upwards, we had to roll him. That doesn’t sound too hard physically, I know; the emotional strain was something else. It felt so insensitive, somehow, flipping him like a big sack of potatoes. Maybe if the six of us could have turned him more gracefully I would have felt better about it, but it was our first experience turning approximately 180 pounds of dead weight, and we were not particularly adept. I hurried out of the room as soon as we were done, thankful that my partner Chrissy and I were third in the rotation and not due back to the lab for another couple of weeks.

Eventually, however, I had to come back. I sat down at the table, bracing myself for the moment when I would have to touch him, and then all at once grabbed hold of the leg and made a quick, long incision down the tibia. The first few cuts were disturbing – it’s an odd sensation to cut into a human body. Respect for the dead is something engrained into us, I think, more than I had ever realized. It was amazing how quickly I adjusted, though. Distaste turned to tolerance, then tolerance to enjoyment. By the end of our first three hours in the anatomy lab, I discovered that despite my apprehensions, I loved anatomy. There’s something fascinating about getting to dig through the layers of the body to see what lies underneath. It’s something so few people outside of a medical school get the opportunity to experience. (As a caveat, I will say that I have been considerably more frustrated with our current dissection – the neck. Too many nerves to keep track of! Still, I can’t deny that it’s interesting.) It also helped me considerably to find out about the stringent requirements necessary to donate one’s body to a medical school. Anyone who donates their body absolutely knows what will be done with it (and to it); that’s the way they wanted it to happen.

So that’s my introduction to the wonderful world of anatomy! Whether you can’t wait to race into the lab or are dreading the moment when they drag you kicking and screaming inside, you can’t deny that it’s a major rite of passage.

Me rocking out on the drums on my brother’s new Wii game (Rock Band 2) at Christmas break!

BRITTA: Just the Beginning

It’s funny that I’m writing this from Emory School of Medicine, because growing up, I was sure of only one thing career-wise – there was no way I was going to be a doctor. I have to look back at that now and laugh, since at this point in my life, there’s nothing I can think of that would suit me better. But let me start at the beginning. As a young lass, my dream job was to become a farmer – grow lots of fruits and vegetables (I pictured farming basically as a glorified backyard garden), drive around on cool tractors and combines, and get to play in the dirt all day. I grew up in small-town Kentucky, so there was ample opportunity for me to admire the farming life in all its majesty.

Here I am in the center with my brother Jordan (left) and my sister Kara (right). Yep, that’s one of our miniature donkeys. Cute, huh? Note the stylish coveralls we’re wearing for barn detail.

My dad was (and still is) a family practitioner back home in Elizabethtown, but despite that, I decided early on that doctoring was not for me. Dirt was one thing, but blood was another. Even in later years, after I had discovered some burgeoning interest in the medical field, I had a hard time with this. Let me tell you, there is nothing more embarrassing than passing out while shadowing in the emergency room of your local hospital in a small town. I’m pretty sure that at least half of the nurses on staff that day were parents of my friends from school, and of course, the first thing the ER physician did was call my dad. He in turn called my mom (out of a meeting, no less), and they both drove down to the ER to get me, where I was having my chin stitched up in the emergency psychiatric room, since it was the only one available. I was 20 at the time. Anyway, it just goes to show that even a squeamish person can be a doctor – or at least a medical student.

There were other reasons I was against becoming a doctor. You’ve probably heard a lot of them in general before, and if I went into a lot of detail, it would sound too much like my AMCAS essay, so I won’t talk about them here. Also, I don’t have any funny/humiliating stories connected to those other reasons. Suffice it to say that as my carefree undergrad years at beautiful Notre Dame (go Irish!) progressed, I began to have a change of heart and was solidly convinced that medical school was for me by the beginning of my junior year. After graduation in May 2007, I took a year off to get some experience working as an EMT and to get married to my wonderful fiancé, Adam. He was in Flight School for the Army at the time, so we decided that I would wait a year so that my start of med school would line up with his reassignment to a new post following his graduation. Knowing that wherever the Army decided to send him would play a huge role in my med school choice, I decided up-front that I would not get too attached to any of the schools that I visited. That resolution held pretty well until I came to Emory, when I immediately fell in love with the School of Medicine, the staff, and the students. I was both elated and depressed at the same time, since I figured there was no way the Army would send us to Savannah (the closest post to Atlanta for which we were eligible). However, approximately one month before the May 15th deadline to commit, we learned that we were indeed headed for Georgia, so I started getting ready for life in the bright lights of Atlanta!

We’re almost three months into medical school right now, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s all that I hoped it would. The pace has picked up gradually as we’ve moved through our modules, and I think some of us (me, at least) are starting to feel a little stress as we move through the week. Luckily, we have our weekends free, which leaves lots of time for relaxing with friends and getting to see some of the city.

Here’s me in my brand-spankin’ new white doctor’s coat at our White Coat Ceremony a couple weekends ago. The handsome fellow standing beside me is Adam. He flies Blackhawk helicopters, in case you were wondering what came of Flight School