May 11, 2012
Note: It's difficult to describe the darker, despairing moments that I seem to encounter during my sojourn as a medical student. This entry comes from a Facebook post I wrote after having finished the last two weeks of final testing that capped my first year of medical school. Hope, courage, disappointment, despair, the energy to strive on, hopelessness, and confusion. Handling life under the psychological threat of medical school creates an interesting emotional terrain. Herein lies a painting of this emotional landscape at a particularly bleak section of trail along my journey.
It seems med school is a bit like a maze in which the walls are adorned with the points of a thousand needles. And we students are balloons, floating through the unknown. Inevitably, I will run into a needle, and I must pick up the pieces... dare to try again. So I work incredibly hard, and inflate the balloon of my dreams so that it can keep carrying me on. And at the end of the unknown maze and it's challenges, the professor tells me that my grade doesn't matter--that I'm back to square one--and hands me a test that has so very little to do with the information I've learned this year, assessed in a style to which I am unaccustomed. And I feel the needle sinking in, and the balloon pops, and I wake up, feeling as if I was willfully led into a dream by those who handed me accolades for my achievements--tricked into thinking that my efforts and my sacrifice had bought me success. But the trophies are gone, and there's nothing left to show for the pain and the blood I'd paid for them. Learning is great--but we rank those who learn. And I have nothing to show for it but the pieces of my broken balloon...
