back to the grind

So after an incredible weekend of doing whatever I pleased, it's back to the grind again.

Today we started histology and physiology, and the day went by like a blur. I'm definitely feeling most unexcited about histo--seems to me like another rather useless bunch of information to learn with no real practical application. ...Unless of course you're my mother, or any other pathologist who is happy to sit in their dimly lit office staring down a microscope all day. But as my mother (and anyone who will listen to me) already knows, I am not going to be a pathologist. Or a neurologist. Or a psychologist. Or really any doctor who uses any specific body of knowledge that we've covered so far in the first year of medical school (histo, neuro, human behavior in medicine... hmm).

To balance out the depressing academic side of our studies, we start our clinical part of the semester this week. I'm shadowing a family medicine doc each week for the rest of the semester, and I'm not sure it bodes well: this afternoon I called her office to confirm our meeting time later this week (after I had sent a very politely, meticulously spell-checked email earlier last week), and was told by the secretary that the doc was with a patient and that she would print out my email and show it to the doc, who would call me back.

So I hung up the phone, feeling relieved that I had Made Contact and All Was Well, and waited patiently by the phone like a pre-pubescent girl waiting to hear back from a boy from school. (And like a pre-pubescent girl, I did some cyber-stalking of my doc with Google.)

I noted the time when I hung up with her secretary: 3.13PM. Okay, I thought, it should take her about 15 minutes to call me back and confirm the time since primary care appointments usually only last like 15 minutes, right? Well I sit there waiting, waiting, staring at the phone.... Then I turn on the TV and zone out for a while.... and 30 minutes later and she hasn't called, so I go and lie down in bed, but not before checking five times that my ringer is on LOUD AND SHRILL so that I won't miss the call if I doze off.

Well, of course I did doze off and she never called and now I don't know if it's because she was with that patient for a long time and forgot, or if being a primary care doc is really as hellish and busy as they say. So busy and hellish that you don't even have time to call back a perfectly earnest and fervent first-year med student, who will HANG ON YOUR EVERY WORD because you're a REAL-LIFE doctor?!?!? (And more importantly, not the type of boring doctor her mother is.)

Perhaps my time would have been better spent pre-reading. (Always a BIG bonus when you're already "behind" after the very first day of class. Hell, I was behind before I even got to class.)