First Impressions

My name is Derrick Antoniak, and this is my blog about starting medical school.

I planned on writing about the latter half of orientation week in detail, until I experienced it, and it wasn't worth writing about. I will mention a couple of things. The so-called 'white coat' ceremony was not at all as glorious as I thought it would be, but something cool happened afterwards. I realized that people actually wanted to be in my shoes that day. There was a group of pre-meds interviewing, and on their tour of the building they passed us in the hall with looks of envy. My cousin's little 4-year-old thought it was cool to play with the toy doctor set my grandma bought as a joke, and he enjoyed it that much more when I donned the white coat and pretended to listen to his heart. So, for a brief moment, I felt as if I had accomplished something.

And then I came back to the real world. In this new real world I may not have much time to write blogs, so the ones I do write will be thrown together in a few minutes like the one you are reading. I'm two days in, and here is my experience so far:

At 8 on Monday we had to report to the gross lab for the back and scapula dissection. After about 30 minutes of introduction to the lab, we uncovered our cadaver and began dissecting. We have a larger male cadaver, so flipping him over, our first ever task of med school, was a disaster. Our group of four could barely do it, and in the process, the cloth meant to cover his face until the actual face dissection just fell off, and we got an unexpected early look at the man who donated his body so we could learn. We dissected for three hours, and when it was time to go to lecture, we had come nowhere close to finishing the day's dissection. Changing out of the scrubs for lecture is complicated by the fact that there are about 80 lockers in the locker room's one aisle, nearly all of which are occupied by students who have the same exact schedule. We literally changed clothes shoulder to shoulder with one another with a line of students extending out the door waiting to get in. Immediately after lecture we went back to the lab, back to the scrubs, dissected for another two hours to finish that day's work. From the time we left lab at 2:30 to the time I went to bed at midnight, I could not get the smell of embalming fluid off my hands no matter how hard or long I scrubbed with every soap dispenser I came across.

The material is not too hard, but there is a lot of it already. It wasn't the hardest day of school I've ever faced, but I have to do it every day, so jumping right into a mid-semester study routine was obviously necessary on day 1. I did manage to get away long enough to attend Lee Terry's forum on energy and go to the gym with Joanna.

I am not stressed about passing. I am stressed because I found out that the top 6 in the class get a Regent's Scholarship, which I believe pays full tuition, and I feel like I'm capable and in need of that, so I'm really going to go for it.