Review: Sawbones (A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine) the Podcast

Something that I've very recently discovered are Podcasts.  I realize this is about a decade late but I never quite understood the concept of podcasting.  To be honest the reason I started to explore is because we could subscribe to our course podcasts and have them automatically be downloaded when they were ready.

After clerkships began I had to spent a considerable chunk of time in the car and after a while the same four songs on the radio start to be more of a headache than any kind of enjoyment.  Some of my favorites include Radio Lab, 99 Percent Invisible, Stuff You Missed In History Class and of course Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine.

I only happened to find this podcast more recently when a fellow medical student mentioned it in passing.  Sawbones takes a casual and comedic approach to some very serious medical history.  The hosts are a husband and wife pair Dr. Syndnee McElroy and her husband Justin  The two of them have amazing chemistry and their episodes are always well researched. . The topics they choose are essentially well intentioned but wholly incorrect, understanding and treatment of disease from back in the day.

One of my favorites episodes thus far has been one entitled Self Surgery that discussed some historic instances of people taking a knife to themselves, essentially performing self surgery.  Other topics have included: bloodletting, lobotomy and weight loss.

Overall I give it five stars for being both entertaining and intellectually stimulating simultaneously.If you're a semi-history buff and have any inclination towards medical history definitely check this out.

Now that my surgical rotation is over I just gained about 6 hours a day back into my life and am hoping to get back to my reading list which includes a fair handful of medically oriented texts including Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis and Complications by Atul Gawande.

Any other recommendations for this pseudo-Medical history buff?

Sometimes I Feel Like A Thankless Child

To those of you who are still in the midst of  pursuing a seemingly elusive goal of being in medical school I highly encourage you to take a few moments and jot down why you want it so badly.  Make a quick list of all the reasons why you want to be a doctor and how you will feel once you achieve that monumental goal.  For those of us in the thick of it, in medical school or beyond, try as hard as you possibly can to mentally rewind back to that point.  Remind yourself of the passion and burning desire that brought you to where you are, especially one the days where all you want to do throw in the towel and curl up and sleep.  The following is an anecdote that a woman shared at an informational meeting I decided to check out (a little because I was interested in the group and a whole lot because I wanted some free Thai food) early on in my first year and has haunted me, in the best way possible since.

***

It was a beautifully sunny day as everyone filed into the windowed room and took seats around a large, oblong table and scattered seats along the wall.  Students chit chatted about needing to get back to class and wondering when the main attraction, free thai food, would finally arrive.  Meanwhile quietly in one corner a young woman sat with her hands neatly folded in her lap with a white lab coat.  She didn't make conversation but smiled politely.

The meeting began after everyone was done scooping little heaps of pad thai into their plates and shuffled back to their seats around the table.  Some introductions of board members were made and the general idea of the student organization was described.  At the close of the meeting they asked for any questions or comments and after some expected questions the young woman in the corner raised her hand and said "could I please share a story with the group".

The club president smiled at her and replied "of course"

"I had always wanted to be a doctor, it was just something I never thought was possible for me.  I was married very young.  I spent most of my life in Africa and when I came to the United States I did not think that even going to medical school was an option for me.  I was always one of the brightest girls in my class and I even went to college but it all seemed so far away. By that time I was already a mother of two young children that made a very busy schedule for me.  Somehow I managed to secure admission into a program that allowed me to do some coursework and upon successful completion they would allow me to go to medical school.  I could not believe my eyes or ears and I worked hard, so hard to make sure I could do it.  My grades were all very good.  But then I started to notice that my youngest son was not speaking as he should be, he was not developing at a proper pace. The doctors said that he had autism.  He would need speech therapy and physical therapy.  Hours of individual attention was needed and my husband he worked.  He told he he could not do anything we needed the money, he had to go to work.  I was left with no choice and I had the acceptance letter in my hand and I declined my admission to medical school.  After all of that work, someone had to take care of my son.  I had to care for my child and I had to give up my dream for it.  I wish my husband had supported me more, so I could achieve my dream.  Even today when I walk on the sidewalk and I am walking in one direction and one of you, a medical student, is walking the opposite direction and passes by me in a white coat.  I stop and I turn around and I look at you walking away, I see my dream that I had walking away from me.  I am so happy for each of you and I am so sad for myself, that I did not find a way to make my dream"

The entire room sat in silence.

***

Sitting in that room with nothing on my mind besides needing to get back to class at the end of the lunch hour this woman's story really touched me.  I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.  This story just serves as a stark reminder that this is an opportunity that we were lucky to have been given.  It sucks sometimes.  Its really hard.  It makes you want to punch the wall.  But no matter why you did it, there was something that drove you.  If you can keep a piece of that with you, remember back to the time you would have traded anything to be where you are today, everything gets a whole lot easier.

A BRS is Worth A Thousand Textbooks

I’m going to share with you all what I think is one of the most, if not the single most useful piece of information that I didn’t figure out until about half way through my first year.  Something you may have started to notice is that I like creative titles, it keeps things interesting for the reader but also pushes me to keep the content something challenging to write—something I would want to read.  Anyway so as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words and let me tell you there are some BRS books that are literally worth their weight in gold (I’m using literally correctly here, they are MONEY).  Let me explain a little more.

As I mentioned in the last post study guides are the way I like to study.  Typing up all the information into handy little bulleted nuggets that I can sit and gnaw on.  Although there is much to be said for reviewing individual powerpoints to make sure you understand what the professor is really honing in on, a true understanding of basic underlying concepts will get your incredibly far, especially in physiology (but I’ll leave that for a post on study habits or lack thereof). 

So lets cut to a few weeks into school when there was a book sale where all the M2s and beyond put for sale a bunch of books that they didn’t need anymore.  As I wandered past the stacks of netter flash cards, clinical case files books and a smattering of assigned textbooks I kept catching glimpses of these compact little books with titles like BRS Physiology, Rapid Review Histology, BRS Anatomy so naturally not knowing what they were I figured I’d just buy the one that had the largest stack and figure it out later.  I then went home and proceeded to buy every single required text book from Amazon BIGGEST MISTAKE EVER.  I was kicking myself in the face 3 months later when I realized that one of these little guys I’d picked up from the book sale was sitting on my book shelf staring me in the face as I trudged my way through histology.  

The only "textbook" that was
ever worth what I paid for it

Alright, I know what some of you are thinking, WTF IS A BRS.  BRS stands for Board Review Series.  Essentially these books are created to put together all of the most high yield information for a certain subject and created a bulleted/outline type format of a book for review.  Although these are more useful come time for Step Prep (I’m not there yet so I can’t comment with much confidence) these are hands down the single best study aid you can use for medical school.  Notice I said aid, I don’t encourage skipping all your classes and exclusively using a BRS but as a supplement these are phenomenol.  Different people have different preferences among the different companies for particular subjects and there are a lot of them out there so do your research and get yourself some of those.  If I were to recommend one BRS that is an absolute must have is BRS Physiology by Costanzo.  Just trust me, by the end of M1 you will come to understand how absolutely mind blowingly amazing this book is and that Costanzo is baller status.

This is not to say that there aren’t some textbooks that you’ll have to fork over the cash for because you absolutely need to have a Gray’s Anatomy for Students because there can’t be a review book that is quite as thorough for the little nit-picky things you need to know for anatomy.  You absolutely have to have something like Ross and Pawlina for Histology because the plates at the end of each chapter, in full color, are incredible and there is no resource that can fill in for those.

All I’m saying is you have to feel it out and see what you need and explore what is out there and find a combination of sources that work for you.  Some people swear by class notes and textbooks and if you are that person then by all means do that.  But for the rest of us that need other supplements, that are constantly hoarding sources I would highly encourage and recommend looking into subject specific board review books because they are concise and great for review and they come with review questions (ß another money in the bank situation, in medical school you will become a review question whore, you will do anything for more practice questions). 

You’ll be surprised at how exactly your coursework will follow with the material presented in these books mostly because to a certain extent there is a standardization of what medical students need to learn so the basic, giant, overarching concepts get nailed down pretty hard no matter where you are and so these books are a great little supplement.

That is of course just what I found to be true, as with any advice I give here, it is such an individual process this is just my take on it.  You will start medical school and you will have trial and error and eventually it will click and you’ll find your groove, until then it kind of feels like you’re walking up on a down escalator.

If you have any personal recommendations or general comments or questions about study skills or aids please leave a comment

Moral of the story: when and if the upperclassmen have a book sale be the super informed M1s that charge in their and snap up all the BRS books for $6 a pop.

Med School's Eyes Are Way Too Big

Everyone has had those days.  When you are so voraciously hungry you are confident you will be able to put away 4 boxes of Wendy’s chicken nuggets, a chicken sandwich, a side of fries and a large frosty.  Then you get your food and by the time you’re on the 5^th nugget you’re barely nibbling.  Cue the “your eyes must have been bigger than your stomach” which never made sense to me because that’s anatomically ridiculous but the gist of the story is you bit off more than you can chew, literally.

So now the title makes a little more sense, right?  I think that medical school’s eyes are far too large for my academic stomach.  Let me explain a little bit further.  The biggest shocker to me was not the difficulty of the subject matter in medical school but rather the sheer volume.  Never in my life have I had to study so many things at once.  Its like the academic wizards over in the college of medicine walked through a buffet line of classes and decided to just pile on heaping loads of biochemistry, histology, anatomy, physiology (which should be its own freaking restaurant) and all the other classes until it started to get so high they couldn’t see over the plate and then continued piling it on.  

The biggest mistake I made was underestimating when people described the volume of material, I figured I could handle it.  I did handle it, everyone does, but it is an epic shock to your system.  Here I have to warn that everyone has a very different experience and I can only speak form my own.  I have never been the type of student that holes up in the library right after class to review notes from that day or to pre-read chapters, I barely get to reading the chapters in the first place.  Medical school changed all of that. 

Study guides, those are my favorite.  I’m a study guide maker.  I’ll type up all my little notes from all my powerpoints with doodles and scribbles and bullet points and amass all of that information into a neatly stapled packet from which I can review.  And when I say review I mean just read over and over and over until I know what is going on, that’s the only way I know how to study.  Here is a little comparison, in undergrad I thought 6 page study guides were intense.  Any more than 8 pages had to be some kind of epic final exam study guide for a class that gave a cumulative final.  The first time I put one of these little guys together in med school it was like 34 pages long.  That’s not even a joke.  Its really difficult to explain that it isn’t really overwhelming, you know its what you have to do and so your mental mindset evolves and adjusts to your present circumstance.  At first you may feel a little at sea but then its fine and you just go with the flow.  

Being the kind of person that you are, utilizing the study skills that you have been have brought you as far as it has so whatever methods you have employed has obviously worked for you. Being in medical school is a shocker to the system, no doubt about it.  You will study harder than you ever have in your life, you will spend more hours sitting at a desk reviewing notes than you ever thought possible, your body will hate you for not sleeping enough because you got distracted by whatshouldwecallmedschool’s tumblr page instead of reviewing for shelf exams, but that is what its all about.  At the end of the day, you figure it out. 

Honestly, in retrospect, I can now say that it wasn’t all that bad.  In the throes of it, I was miserable, but I made it through and so did everyone else. People tend to overdramatize and act like being a medical student means you have no friends, no social life, no nothing,  I strongly disagree.  It is what you make of it so the biggest thing you can take with you to medical school is a positive attitude, as cheesy as it sounds, its so easy to get sucked into the vortex of complaints and frustration but don’t let yourself do it.  There are too many negative nancies in medical school just looking for something to leech on to and complain and whine about, FIGHT IT! You’ll be so much happier for it in the end. 

A little introduction

First things first, right? Who the hell am I? Why am I writing a blog? I hope in this first post to address some questions and then delve into the nitty gritties of M1 (<-- if you don't know what that means then probably the rest of this blog will be uninteresting to you either that or you call it MS1 and now I'm judging you.

Who am I? I have just kicked off what I have been told by many is the last summer of my entire life because my first year of medical school has just ended, so to answer your question: medical student (and for the uppity follow up lurking in some of your minds: I attend an allopathic medical school in the United States in a large Urban city)

What is this blog about? This blog will help document what I have experienced in the last year which was my first year of medical school as well as into the future as I progress through the remainder of my medical education.  Although I in the future I hope to mix in some posts that are in real time as things occur--for the first year I jotted some journal entries down and hope that using the added benefit of hindsight will be able to present a more complete picture of what this year was.  That being said this is in no way meant to lump all medical school experiences into one, this is my own personal journey and I hope to share the things that I learned, my successes and failures, random thoughts I had etc.  

Why am I doing this? I wanted to consolidate all my thoughts about this year into a format I could refer back to, I want to be able to reflect back on my naivety as I progress through this and hopefully have a way of keeping myself connected to the youthful energy and passion that I brought with me in this process. 

What does the title of this blog mean? I wanted to have a title that encapsulated exactly how I felt about the academic path I have chosen.  Much like the literary character Godot and MD seems like such a highly elusive and esoteric concept to me.  Most of my life I thought that once I entered medical school I would feel different, that I would feel like a future doctor and right now I don't and thus I am waiting for MD both figuratively and literally. 

I want to thank you for sharing your time with me and I encourage each one of you to share your own stories, pointers, tips, questions and experiences as well.

Happy Reading