Electron Microscopes and Mountain Bikes

Rode the bike to school for the first time today. It's the old Trek mountain bike with no kickstand, as was impractically fashionable 11 years ago. Since my brain is thoroughly embalmed with medicine now, I couldn't help but come up with the nerdy analogy number 247: driving a car somewhere and riding a bike to the same place is a lot like looking at cells with a light microscope or an electron microscope. One sees much more detail in his surroundings when riding a slow moving bike rather than when driving a faster moving car. With an electron microscope, one sees far more detail than with a light microscope. Not perfect, but, hey, it's 2:00am here.

Photos above illustrate the point. The color (light) micrograph shows oodles and oodles of pink cells spotted with dark nuclei in the rat liver. (ROS, I know) The purple-blue spots are nuclei. The black-and-white (electron) micrograph shows the detail of a single nucleus in the said rat liver.

Why? Because 2 delightful hours of histology await me in the morning, and I just spent 2 equally delightful hours studying it.

A Swerve into the Memory Lane, Pt. 3: A Month that was a Year

Like during some bizarre dinner party, the most miserable course was served first. Medicine and Society came with 200 pages of notes that seemed to have been the ramblings of a madman: outlines that began and went nowhere or stretched across pages and pages eventually fell over themselves, definitions that threw in so much extraneous information that nothing made sense in the end, etc. The dry subject of medical statistics was something I actually hoped to learn properly, since I never took a formal statistics course. But it wasn't meant to be. The stress, the disbelief that I'm actually in med school, and the lousy lecturing made for an uneven beginning. But two weeks and two tests later it was all over, and things began in earnest with a "gradual onset" of proper coursework.

In the meantime, the hunt was on for textbooks. The second year class decided to dispense advice on the subject, hoping to save us $$ on what seemed to be a Christmas wishlist that each prof had for their course. So the books deemed critical were grabbed up as soon as they appeared for sale on the distribution list. The young whipper snappers were always there first, hence I settled on Amazon. And then there are the notes. Ah yes, the notes. Unlike anywhere else, apparently, medical schools have either note-taking services or pre-printed notes available (as is in our case). So in lectures, one just marks up the notes in a high-contrast pen. Not bad.

As the classes hit full throttle, it became clear that the volume of the material will be overwhelming. The nightly study sessions begun; so did the weekend drives back home. Living the seeming double life, I have a chance to pause each weekend, and think about what the past five days were about. A month on, and it started to look like a year has passed, which leads me to propose Dr. Detroit's Law of Medical School: medical school month = 1 year perceived. As I write this nearly two months into the process, the law is holding. 2 months, albeit very interesting, seem like 2 years.

A Swerve into the Memory Lane, Pt. 2: Orientation

After taking care of the living arrangements, there came the nail-biting drama of the health form. Yes, HIPAA rules will be violated, but the story must be told. It's actually a mundane tale of immunization records going missing during the doctor's office's transition to a new computer system. The only way to verify my shots was through blood titers, which, when all was said and done, needed to be done 3 times (each time for a different set of immunizations). In a way, the experience provided me with a chance to stop worrying about being poked with needles--after all, medical school will be full of that stuff.

The school began the second week of August. First three days were orientation. Anxiety drove the agenda for me: restless night, early wakeup, and arrival way ahead of time in hope of avoiding a crowd of unknown faces on the first day. There were only a few people, so the atmosphere was comfortable from the start. As the group of ~140 students began to coalesce, the first day took shape. Like the two days that would follow, it was an extravaganza of lectures, presentations, pep talks, speeches, and sales pitches packed into the restless morning hours. Applause was generously dispensed. Afternoons and evenings were for socializing, all under the benevolent watch of the second year class who organized the picnics and the outings. Everything with food had a sponsor, and the Grand Island park picnic was no exception. It was the US Army that was there to plug their offering: free med school in exchange for 4 years of service (military residency, which pays well and is quite good from what I hear from third parties). Tough sale in times of war, especially when you're marketing to a pretty smart bunch of people. The Humvee that blasted "whatever it is that appeals to the 18-25 demographic" out of the speaker box in the rear seemed to be the loneliest place in that park.

As the orientation wound down, there was the palpable sense of impatience. Everyone just wanted to get started. The morning of day 4 ushered in the Medicine and Society course, and so it began.

A Swerve into the Memory Lane, Pt. 1: "I Accept!"

This is the first part of the short promenade down the very recent memory lane to bring the blog up to date.

The whole medical school to-do begins with what one would think is a simple thing: a phone call. But this is med school admissions, and nothing is simple. The offer to attend medical school is given in person, over the phone. Someone has to be at that phone--no messages will be left on voice mails or answering machines. So everyone provides a zillion phone numbers where they or their friends/relatives can be reached. As long as a live person answers, the offer is in play. If it isn't you, a message is left with the person who answered telling you that you've got an X number of hours to call the office of admissions. If it is you, better not pass out (there will be plenty of time for that in the gross anatomy or phlebotomy labs) before you utter "I accept" to the person at the other end of the line.

In my case, the first phone number on the list of around 10 I provided was reached. It was very late in the process, and I essentially had given up. Bought a car, made plans for the rest of the summer, and started counting the gray hairs showing up in my beard. I was at work when I was thinking about that skinny rejection letter landing in the mailbox, when the phone rang. With slightly more than three weeks to go before the orientation started (ie. end of the line), I finally got the offer, which I promptly accepted.

The rest of the pre-orientation time was spent looking for a place to live in Buffalo, filling out various forms, and tying up all the loose ends. I worked till the last week of July, and then said goodbye to my coworkers, my boss, and the last 7 1/2 years of my professional life. Time for bigger and better things.

Back to School!

Well, so the medical school thing worked out in the end. I set this site up to do a bit of metric system blogging before my MCAT results came back. Obviously, there wasn't too much time to blog, as it was just too difficult to pull myself away from chewing the fingernails (quite the hygienic preoccupation for a future M.D., eh?) . Everything hinged on that score, considering that I wasn't applying to many schools since I wanted to stay local to spare the family a big move. And the score came back. And it was good. But to make it all so much more fun, the application process ended up being A) late, and B) practically down to the last minute. A snafu with my transcripts restarted the application process, which put it past all of the schools' deadlines. Thankfully, it all worked out, and an interview and a waitlist later, I was accepted to UB SMBS (University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences).

Thus begins the making of Dr. Detroit. Stay tuned for thoughts, comments, and inane remarks about medical school from a perspective of a nontraditional student. After 9 years of life in the cubicle, I'm going back to school.