Rite Aid, Robbins and recklessness

August 12, 2008 at 6:29 am | Posted in pharmacy | Leave a comment

DB talks today about getting through M2 (or T2, as we called it at Tulane). He does not have fond memories of that year. He also dislikes teaching that year.

I’m trying to think back on my own second year. It’s kind of a blurry juxtaposition of sunny days and torrential rain, Rite Aid on weekends and Robbins Pathology during the week. I lived on iced tea at CC’s Coffee House during the day, and Diet Coke in the Dean’s conference room at night.

The Dean’s conference room was the unofficial study headquarters for all the neurosurgery gunners in my class. The library had sucky hours, and at that point there wasn’t a 24 hour coffee house, so one of the Vice Deans had given a classmate of mine the key, in order for us to have a quiet, safe place to study when everything was closed.

My classmate practically camped out there for most of the year. But I liked to people-watch during study breaks, so CC’s worked well for me. Plus, it was where a lot of my classmates studied, and this guy I liked would occasionally come there to get coffee. And you almost always had to share a table with someone you didn’t know, so it at least gave me the illusion of a social life, and the potential to meet someone interesting outside of medicine. The only bad thing about it was that it closed at 11pm. So sometime around 8 or 9pm, I would pack up and head to the conference room at school.

I had the good fortune of studying with a group of people whose strengths complemented my weaknesses. My classmate with the key was very detail-oriented, and was excellent at drilling down to the thing that didn’t make sense. He would often ask questions that our professors couldn’t answer, and the responses he got from them were often helpful in figuring out what would NOT be on the test. But he would often get bogged down trying to understand some piece of minutiae that didn’t really matter. I had another classmate who had a knack for making complicated things simple, yet accurate enough to be practical as conceptual tool. Another classmate was good at keeping us going when we were all sick of the topic at hand. He also always knew the political backstory of everything that went on in the school administration.

As for me, I was good at identifying the information that was clinically relevant, or fundamental to understanding clinically relevant material, and therefore likely to be on the test. I think that’s really the only reason people let me be a notetaker for the class: in my notes I used boldface fairly sparingly, but we never were tested over something I hadn’t boldfaced. It was kind of freakish, actually. I never thought much of it, until one time I was sick as a dog and didn’t have time to go back through and bold anything before turning in my noteset, and most of the class bombed that part of the test.

Of course, the gunner in me felt cheated. How much better would my grades have been in relation to the class if I hadn’t been doing that the whole time? But it also felt good to know that my study guidance actually made a difference. So in the end it was a wash.

That was also the year I got serenaded in public by a guy I liked. It was incredibly sweet, and horribly embarrassing, and utterly reckless of him, all at the same time. No matter what comes of it, you have to admire a guy who would put himself out there like that. (Unless of course, it’s part of some pattern of stalkerish, manipulative behavior, which this wasn’t.) Unfortunately, I am not that reckless.

But on the whole it was a fairly good year. It was actually the best year of my entire med school experience. It shouldn’t have been, and wouldn’t have been were it not for Katrina. But it was. There were some low points, but in retrospect they were not so low in relation to the disaster ahead.