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Brains, Planes, and So Much Hand Sanitizer

by | Apr 29, 2015

The temperature is well above freezing, there are leafy green things growing outside, and the birds have come back in full force. I guess it’s been a while since the last time I wrote considering that I was excited that the temperature was in the high 20s at that point. It’s been a very busy past few weeks, with the end of CNS, spring break, the beginning of Infectious Disease, and Second Look Weekend, so I guess it’s best to start from the beginning.

With the end of CNS came the end of anatomy. I was really sad that anatomy was ending because my dissection group became really close over the course of the year, and it was going to be strange not seeing them at least once a week for dissection. Naturally, we had to take a picture…

The best dissection group ever.

I think we all managed to cope, though, because spring break started as soon as we finished the CNS exam. For spring break, I headed to New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA!) with my BMA family (that’s the Black Medical Association for those confused by all of the acronyms). We were headed to the Student National Medical Association American Medical Education Conference, conveniently shortened to AMEC (now you understand why we use all of the acronyms). This year’s theme was “Unsilencing the Unheard and the Underserved.” The talks were inspiring, and it was great to be around so many physicians and students who are so passionate about putting an end to health disparities.

UMMS's M1 and M2 delegation

Outside of the conference, we also had fun exploring NOLA. We did some shopping, listened to some jazz, checked out the architecture of the French Quarter, and ate delicious beignets at Café Du Monde. Did I mention that the temperature was also in the 80s the entire time we were there? I was able to catch up with friends from the interview trail and even from high school! I was so sad when I stepped off the plane in Detroit to 35-degree weather (at least it was above freezing), but that didn’t last for long at least.

M1s looking classy

And a fun one

The next morning, we started our Infectious Disease and Histopathology blocks. The ID block, fondly nicknamed “Bugs and Drugs,” is our first taste of what M2 life will be like. The M2s (almost M3s!) told us that ID was an M2 class taught in M1 year, and they were definitely right. The workload has definitely increased, but the material is so interesting. Usually we have lecture from 8-10:30am or so, followed by small group. I transitioned to a dedicated streamer back in November, but I’m actually going to class this block since I have to be at school for small group anyway. Twice a week, we also have Histopath, which is taught by our hilarious pathology faculty. I have to say that I really like this block. It makes the epidemiologist in me very happy, but it makes the germophobe in me very leery (there is NEVER too much hand sanitizer). The Cliffsnotes of ID:
1. WASH YOUR HANDS!
2. We should really give our immune systems a round of applause.

Last, but most definitely not least, is Second Look Weekend. After MONTHS of planning, SLW finally happened! We welcomed 185 admitted students back to Ann Arbor to have a second look at the place we call home. Appropriately, the theme was Welcome HoMe. I was one of the Clinic Visit Co-Chairs, and it was so great to watch everything come together as so many admitted students returned to UMMS. I was able to meet or catch up with so many M0s, as we call the incoming class, and they are people who I am so excited to train with in the future. They have come from a variety of backgrounds and have done some really great things, so I can’t wait to welcome them back again in the fall. Class 169 is going to be amazing.

A great end to Second Look Weekend

As always, thanks for reading! Don’t forget to wash your hands…

Snow Days and the Windy City

by | Mar 4, 2015

Happy March and hello from CNS! At the beginning of each new block, I’m always both excited and nervous. I’ve heard quite a bit from various M2s about how CNS is a challenging block, mostly because the brain and central nervous system are phenomenally complex. One look at the schedule told me that this is going to be a very busy block, and a quick glance over the anatomy labs let me know that I need to start learning neuroanatomy right now. However, something else the M2s mentioned was how rewarding the sequence is after you’ve put the work in. With that, I’m definitely looking forward to the next few weeks, at the end of which lies a well-deserved spring break!

That’s my next month in a nutshell, but I’ll share a bit about the last one, since it’s been about a month since my last post. Last time I wrote, we were back in Endo/Repro (our fond term for Endocrine and Reproduction), which ended up being my favorite block of the year thus far. I loved how all of the different hormones functioned in carefully regulated and intersecting pathways. I also loved how things in different lectures were connected, and the connections definitely helped me learn the material.

I was studying one morning and looked up to see this.

During Endo/Repro, we were lucky enough to have a snow day! I wasn’t aware that snow days happened in med school, so I was super excited when I got the email that classes were cancelled. While we still had to watch the previous year’s lectures and have a lecture rescheduled, we also got to play in the snow. We’ve had a relatively light year in terms of snowfall, so it was really great to get an actual snow storm (I’m from Michigan and went to undergrad near Lake Michigan where the snow was always at least knee-deep in winter, so I love snow). This was the first time that two of my friends had experienced a snowstorm, so naturally, we had to show them all the fun ways to play in the snow. We really wanted to build a snowman (Frozen pops into my head every time I say this), but the snow wasn’t packing snow (yes, there is a particular type of snow that is required for building snow people and making snowballs). We settled for snow angels. Sometimes it’s great to just play like we’re kids again. It was a great study break, and we had a very legitimate reason to drink hot chocolate after.

Angelica and Marina played in the snow for the first time and Lauren, Victoria, and I tagged along.

Snow angels!

I think that there are very few things that can top a snow day, but a runner up may be that the Endo/Repro exam opened a day early and the anatomy practical for the block was also a day early, which meant that if we took both exams by Thursday night, we could have a 3-day weekend. I ended up doing just that and took off Friday for a long weekend in Chicago. My roommate and I were planning on attending a conference about health care that weekend, so the long weekend made the trip worth it. On Friday night, we went to a comedy show at The Second City. Notable alums of The Second City include Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert, so we were super excited for that experience. The show was absolutely hilarious and a nice intro to the Chicago comedy scene.

Saturday was the conference, and it was pretty amazing also. One of my friends from the med school interview trail actually told me about the conference (side note: make friends on the interview trail. Some of them could be your classmates, and you will see others at multiple interviews. Sometimes they even send you information about really cool conferences). So not only did I get to see one of my interview trail buddies, but my roommate and I also got to learn a lot about the challenges of the current health care system and possible ways of ending health disparities by making changes to the system. It was a great conference, and I met a lot of other medical students who were really passionate about bringing change to end health disparities. I left feeling incredibly inspired, and I think I may go to the conference again next year. On Sunday, we met up with another one of my friends who’s currently in med school in Chicago. We had originally planned to go back into the city to do some touristy things, but it started snowing really hard, so we decided to leave the city early, which turned out to be a good decision (there were several accidents and resulting traffic jams).

Definitely one of my favorite cities.

The next day, we started our immunology block. I definitely had a hard time transitioning from a three-day weekend to a pretty intense block, but we definitely had to jump right in. Immuno was a really interesting block and probably one of my favorites this year, but it was definitely a lot of information in a very short period of time, so it was stressful at times. I was worried for a bit that my immune system wouldn’t hold out until the end of the block (many of my classmates were getting sick… the irony of getting sick during Immuno), but it did, and I’m really glad about that.

And that brings us back to the first week of CNS. For the first time in a while, the temperature was above the teens, and it felt practically balmy outside (even though it was only 28 degrees), so everyone is really excited about the prospect of spring. With that, it’s back to the books for me. As always, thanks for reading!

Slow Waves and Biorhythms

by | Jan 30, 2015

Hi everyone! Wow has it been a while. A very late happy new year to you!

We hit the ground running when we came back to school on January 5th. It was somewhat difficult to get back into the swing of school, especially when we were so excited to see each other again after the break. We jumped right into a 3-week gastrointestinal (GI) block that involved some pretty cool dissections and a lot of biochemistry. Now, I can’t help but think of exactly what happens to the food I eat…

Speaking of food, Restaurant Week was the week of January 18th. Restaurant Week is when a lot of the restaurants in downtown Ann Arbor have really great specials as a way to allow townies and visitors alike to try something new. I went to a restaurant that serves tapas, and everything was delicious.

I also celebrated my birthday with some nice surprises from some of my classmates and a few friends from grad school. One of the surprises was birthday cake, which I definitely wasn’t expecting.

Last weekend, I went to the Biorhythms show. Biorhythms is the med student-run dance show that happens twice a year. I have to say that I am always surprised by how many hidden talents UMMS students have. There was singing, dancing, and a whole lot of silliness. I think I may have been convinced to participate in the spring show.

Finally, SECOND LOOK WEEKEND! M0s—get excited! Your current M1 class is working hard to plan the best Second Look Weekend ever, and we are SO excited to have you all back in April! I’m one of the clinic visit co-chairs for Diversity and Health Equity Day, and we have some great things planned for you. We hope to see you in April!

For now, it’s back to our new sequence Endocrine and Reproduction. Thanks for reading, and until next time, Go Blue!

Lessons in Empathy… and MSK

by | Dec 14, 2014

A beautiful show of solidarity from UMMS students, residents, and faculty. Photo credit to Sam N. and Matthew S.

Before I came to medical school, I had more than one family member or friend tell me that I would leave cynical and void of empathy after four years. I was outraged since I prided myself on my compassion and, to use the colloquialism, my bleeding heart for social justice. Medical school would never beat that out of me. However, sometimes I find myself frustrated when so many sources around me are telling me that medical school is designed to beat the empathy out of me (whether they are right or wrong we will leave to interpretation). This was on my mind when we read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman for our Family Centered Experience (FCE) course.

I first read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down during grad school, and revisiting it while deep in the first semester of medical school was a change of pace. It’s the type of book that people interested in public health drool over—colliding cultures, mistakes in the health care system and the public health arena that shouldn’t happen, and possibly preventable tragedy due to these mistakes. I promise that medical and public health professionals are not morbid people—instead we simply want to solve problems and learn from our failures so that we don’t make the same mistakes twice.

However, like any person who rereads a book, I found things that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it wasn’t so much that I hadn’t noticed them but that my perspective has started to change. One passage in particular stood out to me. Fadiman writes,

“Medicine, as it is taught in the United States, does an excellent job of separating students from their emotions. … The emotional skin-thickening is necessary—or so goes the conventional wisdom—because without it, doctors would be overwhelmed by their chronic exposure to suffering and despair. Dissociation is part of the job” (Fadiman, Pg. 274-5).

Medical school does have the potential to beat the empathy out of us, but only if we let it. Yes, we are thrown volumes of information at rapid-fire pace and we are forced to repeatedly look death and suffering in the face, all while being chronically sleep-deprived. That can easily make anyone lose empathy.

However, when I see a patient in pain, I still feel for him or her. When I see tragedy happening in the world, I am still saddened. I even still find myself wanting to fix all of the heath system’s—and world’s—problems. I believe that this is because I absolutely LOVE what I do. Sure, the things that I mentioned aren’t always pleasant, but when I’m faced with unpleasant situations, I try to remember that the good that I will one day be able to bring to my patients outweighs what I’m experiencing right now.

Luckily, I have a beautiful support system in some of my medical school classmates. They are wonderful people who check me when I complain and remind me what a privilege it is to be here. They make the studying fun and the hard days a bit easier.

Right now, we’re working our way through the last week of musculoskeletal, or MSK. We’ve spent many nights covering white boards with all kinds of information about so many muscles, but it’s really gratifying when we’re in lab and we realize that all of the work has paid off.

A furry study buddy, a Christmas tree, and Netters. MSK studying at its finest.

Of course there’s still time for fun, extracurricular activities, and causes that we care about. I have been hosting applicants and leading tours on interview days, as well as participating in the University of Michigan Student-Run Free Clinic (but that deserves a post of its own). It’s also near the holidays so my roommate and I have been baking a lot for our various groups and meetings (our apartment smells amazing). Other recent school-wide events have included Galen’s Tag Days, preparation for Biorhythms (an amazing dance show put on completely by med students), and auditions for the Smoker. Students also took part in the National White Coat Die-In (check out #whitecoats4blacklives on Twitter).

National White Coat Die-In. Photo credit to Sam N.

Next week we have our MSK exam, which brings the end of the first semester of med school. I can’t believe it’s gone by so quickly, yet I can’t wait to spend the holidays with family and friends back home.

Thanks for reading!

Reference
Fadiman, A. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1997.

Run, M1s, Run!

by | Nov 2, 2014

It’s strange to think that only three weeks ago, we were beginning our first organ sequence. Now we’re in the last week. It has been amazing to learn how the heart, lungs, and circulatory systems work (it is fascinating to see how everything is so interconnected and how each lecture built upon the previous one). Not to mention that in the past few weeks in the anatomy lab, I’ve held a heart and lungs in my hands. We even had the chance to participate in the Cardiac Classics, in which patients with different heart conditions came in and allowed us to listen to their hearts so we would understand what murmurs, bruits, and other cardiac abnormalities sounded like. I think it suffices to say that cardiovascular/respiratory has been a wonderful experience thus far.

Several of my classmates and I were able to put our newfound knowledge of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to good use recently… through dancing and running.

A few weekends ago, we had Fall Ball, which is basically med school prom. We had a chance to get dressed up (many of the men even wore bow ties– super classy) and dance the night away. It was fantastic to see everyone looking so fancy and to watch people let loose on the dance floor (one of our Deans may or may not have stolen the show, but I won’t spoil that for future classes).

The first dance of Fall Ball. Yes, it's the Wobble. Photo credit to Grace.

During the same weekend, several M1s really had the chance to challenge our cardio/respiratory systems by running the Detroit Marathon or Half Marathon. I ran the international half marathon. The marathoners and half marathoners ran together for the first 13 miles, so six of us made the decision to run at a pace that allowed us all to stay together, and it was so much fun to run as a group. We experienced the sun rising over the Ambassador Bridge, Canadian humor (my favorite signs on the Canadian side said “You are NOT almost there!” and “My grandpa runs faster than you!”), and running an underwater mile (through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel). We also had our own built-in support system for when the run was rough and our legs (and heart and lungs) were tired. Even though we had to wake up at 3am, it was totally worth the experience, and I think we’ll all be running together again soon.

Race conquered! Time to show off the shiny hardware. Photo credit to Christine.

But in the meantime, we’ll be wrapping up cardio/respiratory this week and moving onto renal after that. Until then, thanks for reading and as always, Go Blue!