Ever heard that saying "I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either..." That is how I feel about anything non-studying related. I can only do one non-studying thing a day, which makes it really hard to be an adult and handle medical school at the same time. And I certainly can only have fun once a week (what we call our one fun per week). Sometimes when friends call to see if I want to meet up all I can think is "I can only have one fun per week. This is not your week. Next week doesn't look good either." And it isn't becaue I don't want to spend time with my friends, I love them, and I love having friend both in and out of medical school. But if I spend too much time away from my books I feel a sense of panic filling me up, that no one but another medical student can understand. And, for all my non-medical school friend out there, I would just like you all to know that I generally have more fun than a lot of other medical students. So just think about that when I can't go to Film on the Rocks or Trivia every week :( or salsa dancing as much as I want to. Or even to the gym more than twice a week it feels.
I remember one time last year I was studying, I'd been trapped at home for a couple of days due to the snow, and a friend came to pick me up and take me boot shopping. And I found boots fairly quickly within the venture, and then decided that it was mean to not spend more time with her, so suggested we grab some coffee. About fifteen minutes into coffee time, I started panicking. I couldn't believe that I was out of my house, not studying. All I could think about was getting back to my studies. It was awful. I think during second semester of my second year I did actually put fun to a stop in the middle of the fun more than once saying I had to go study. I once didn't let my mom finish a story because a panic attack started.
The problem is, there is always more studying that we could do. Taking a day off is a big deal, because think of all you could have learned in that day! Think of what you could have learned in that half hour! So we put things on the backburner. We start by eliminating big things. Date nights, movies with friends, dinner out more than once a week. And we feel like we're doing okay, balancing studying with a social life. Some people are better at it than others.
But then...then it starts getting to be too much. Every second we are away from studying we feel like we should be studying. Now granted, not every second I spend studying is actually spent studying. But if I'm not studying I'm generally obsessing over how I should be studying. Luckily I've gotten a bit better at repressing these panic attacks, but they can get bad. It gets to the point where anything not studying is considered a study break. And suddenly my fun for the day has become washing the dishes, or folding laundry. Or updating this blog.
putting gas in my car is the bane of my existence. It literally takes ten minutes, but I never want to spend that ten minutes stopping at a gas station. Think of all the steps! All the wasted time! I have to park my car, get out of my car, stand there while it takes forever to pump, and then get back in my car and go on with my day. I cannot count the number of times I've come close to not making it to my destination because for three days in a row I've told myself I'll get gas on the way home, or tomorrow on the way to school.
Every little thing starts to take so much energy from us, and we stop being able to balance things well. All of a sudden I realized that I'm almost a month late on my car insurance, which I only pay once every six months. So technically I was uninsured for awhile there. Because putting a check in an envelope and then getting that envelope stamped and into a mail box?! Who has time for that? Laundry piles up on my floor. The dirty laundry manages to get into the hamper. Sometimes it even makes it into the wash machine and dryer. But then it lives in a basket on my floor for a couple weeks. I'm convinced if I just stare at it long enough it will fold itself, but it never does. And it always seems easier for me to just pull clothes out of that basket than put them away just to pull them back out again when I want to wear them. Jackets, piled up on the floor. It's a mess. And my room/car are just metaphors for my life at this point.
I remember in high school, the law of entropy (which states that as you expend energy you increase the entropy/disorder of a system) being explained like this: it's like your room. You have it all neat and organized. But then as you spend energy in other things, you don't have the energy to keep your room neat. So you throw things on the floor instead of hanging them up. And disorder ensues. The more tired you get, the more energy you've spent, the more disordered things become." I have sense learned that that is not really an accurate portrayal of entropy, but that is still how I think about it. And it is so true. As I use energy trying to study, I don't have enough to keep my life in order. I only have enough energy for the one thing.
I need to make a dentist appointment. Right now is the perfect time to do it. I have free time as I study. I can't do it while I'm in rotations. But I don't even have the energy to pick up the phone and call my dentist to set up the appointment! Because I could be doing something else in that precious thirty seconds it will take to get a dental appointment. That and I really just don't want to go to the dentist...
Or take for example the fact that when I was at Denver Health doing a rotation, I and a couple other medical students stopped paying for parking. We didn't do it because we were poor medical students who couldn't afford it. Each of us were willing to pay the parking, even if it is crap for us to have to pay for parking. All of us stopped paying for parking because we didn't want to take the time to park our car, walk down to the machine, give it two dollars, get a ticket, and walk BACK to our car to put the ticket in the window just to walk BACK to where the machine was because it is right by the entrance to the hospital. That takes like a whole ten minutes! So when I got a parking ticket, totally thought it was worth it, and would do the same thing again. In fact, I was trying to think of ways to continue getting out of paying for parking, like leaving the ticket in my door so that it looked like they'd already given me a ticket that day and would just continue on. But I felt like that would explode in my face.
And what did I do with that ticket? I waited until two days before it was due to pay it. There was a problem with the ticket and I needed to talk to someone about it, but I just could not make the time to pick up the phone and call about it. And I ended up flying downtown and running into the office as they were locking the doors (holding them open for another medical student in the same boat) to pay the damned thing...
Studying in medical school is a lot like a mother's work...it is never done. There is always something more to learn, more time you could spend doing practice questions,more time you could spend re-writing your notes, memorizing facts, making flash cards. And so everything else gets put on hold. And everything seems like a huge deal. What?! Send a payment in the mail?! I can barely find the time to pay my online bills! Clean my room?! Are you kidding me? I can't even put my clothes away. Everything goes on the backburner. Even eating. I once had a snickers bar for dinner because I couldn't put in the effort to feed myself. And this was when I lived at home and there was always food in the fridge. Today I ate half cold ravioli because I couldn't be bothered to put it back in the fridge.
However, since all medical students are partially OCD, and if we aren't, we become that way while in school, we cannot last this way. So we do things in big spurts. I start by doing my laundry, then decide to clean my whole room, then while I'm at it, might as well clean the bathroom, and the kitchen, and do my dishes, and take out the garbage. And go get a car wash. and before I know it, the entire day is gone, and I haven't studied at all because I was cleaning up. And sure, I feel better (because often when I clean my room my life seems like less of a mess) that I have a clean space, and I can start afresh tomorrow. But when tomorrow comes, guaranteed I am going to have a freak out about how I didn't study today, how I wasted the whole day cleaning and paying bills and all the other life things I have to do.
And that is why your medical school friends can't go out to dinner. Because if it were just a choice between you and studying, you would win. But if we go out to dinner with you, that's a whole evening of studying we couldn't get done, so we have to do it later. Which means we can't go to the gas station, or the grocery store, because we have to study.
Medical student's worst waste of time? Sitting in traffic. Because you can't even pretend to study then. There is NOTHING you can do but sit there and think about how you should be studying.
So I'm sorry, I can only have one fun per week. This may not be your week. Next week may not look good either. And while you think it is totally ridiculous for me to make plans to hang out with you in a month and a half, it makes total sense to me. I will work my entire schedule for that week around our one activity. But Ican only have that one activity that week. It's a lot of pressure. So go easy on us, dear non-medical student friends. A lot of work goes into this...
No comments:
Post a Comment