I can't believe it's been so long since I posted! I sold my house about 3 weeks ago and I'm moving to the new house next week!!! It all happened so quickly, when it finally happened, that my head is spinning.

The kids just got out of school at the end of May. We're moving south of Houston to be much closer to the med center. No more 1 1/2 hour commute in rush hour! Now it will be a more manageable 20-30 minutes.

I'm really intimidated though. We bought this enromous house that we hope we will live in for many years. Big enough for 3 teenagers to live in comfortably! Good heavens, I can't believe I'm thinking about this... Truly though, I hope to be able to stay in Houston for my residency. I'm tired of all the moving and changing we've done over the last 13 years of our marriage. This will be our 6th move and 4th house!

I can't believe medical school starts in less than 2 months. I'm starting to get that "What the heck am I doing???" feeling. I must be out of my mind! And yet, I can't deny, I'm so happy I'm going to be a doctor! :goodvibes:

Heaven help me make the right choices for the kids and be a good student and mother and wife. I'm going to need all the help I can get.

Well, we're in our new house now. It's been 5 days and I have now cleared enough boxes to be able to move around comfortably. I still have a bunch of boxes in the study and dining room, but those can wait another day or two.

I found out today that one of the local daycares offers a 10% discount to folks at my med school! What luck! This makes the cost about the same as hiring a sitter to work 20 hrs a week. Since I only need the after school program, I'm pleased. The daycare also transports kids to their gymnastics/cheer/karate type classes in the afternoon. A handy thing for busy parents.

I've had lots of reservations about employing someone to take care of the kids in my home. I have this lingering concern about their safety, the sitter's reliability, and our privacy. The daycare option gives me time to find someone I feel I can really trust and who will be truly reliable. ( I can just picture getting a call from my kids after school saying the babysitter didn't show up!!!! :boggled:

Orientation starts on Monday! :yikes:

At the moment, my biggest concern is actually the family. I mean, I know I should be afraid of Biochem and Micro and Genetics, my first block of classes. Instead, though, I'm feeling like throwing up because I don't know what my day to day life is going to be like. How will I get everyone ready and off to school at 7am? How long will I be on campus everyday? When will I study? What will I do about dinner when I'm the only parent in the house during the workweek?

I've worked and I've gone to school while having 3 kids, but it hasn't been fulltime and it hasn't been nearly as demanding as med school. I'm so nervous about botching everything up.

Typical mommy stuff.

I know I'm pretty hard on myself, and demanding of myself. But then, I would never have made it this far without that drive and determination.

So I'll post after orientation and try to let everyone know what it's like.

Wish me luck!

well, orientation wasn't so bad. My mom was here for the week to take care of the kids. We had an overnight at a retreat and a couple of late evening events. I met a ton of students and discovered I really like the 10 other students in my cohort. I even discovered that one of the students in my cohort lives in my subdivision!!! And she's expecting her 1st child near the end of the semester. She's really great and I feel so much more comfortable knowing I'm not the only over 30 woman around. (heehee)

Oh, the cohort is actually called a Preclinical Resource Network, or PRN. It includes 11-12 1st year students plus a handful of upperclassmen, and 2 faculty members. Every 1st yr student is randomly assigned to a PRN group. The upperclassmen provide advice and support. It's really a great resource and I'm glad the school does it.

My first classes are on Monday. I'm a bit nervous, but mostly excited to be getting under way. My kids are doing okay, although I wish I could have kept my mom around. (she went home today. ) So the kids start their summer daycamp (at a daycare) this Monday. They will go to this center before and after school everyday. I'm still looking for a babysitter to replace the daycare, though. I'm worried that the long day 7am-5 or 6pm will be too much for them. We shall see. For the time being I know exactly where they will be and what's going on.

I'll try to keep posting as classes get underway. Let y'all know what the early days are like!

just a quick word to say that we hit the ground running. 3 lectures, 2 on cell bio and 1 for anatomy. I think they covered just about everything I know about cell bio in those 2 lectures today. I'd better get cracking with the books!

Our curriculum starts with 6 weeks of basic sciences, the physiology, biochem, micro, genetics stuff that is considered the "core" of the medical learning. After these 6 weeks we launch into the organ based system learning.

One of the nicest things about attending class today was that, thanks to our extensive orientation, I was greeted by lots of friendly faces and felt right at home with my peers. I had been so concerned about fitting in as a nontrad mom, and that concern is just completely gone now.

I love my school!

of course, this was only the 1st day... :laughing:

Warning: Gross Anatomy Lab specifics!

Today was our first day of Gross Anatomy. Although I have read about some schools having special discussions about death and even performing small ceremonies for their cadavers, our school did nothing really to prepare us for this event. It's not that I've never seen a dead person before. I saw a couple of patients in the ICU after they had passed away.

I'll be very honest here. It was the deeply personal and invasive nature of what we were doing that troubled me. It just feels wrong to be cutting up this person. And she is a person to me. Her hands remind me of my great grandmother's hands. She was elderly, with liver spots on the back of her hands and osteoperosis (sp). Her finger nails still have old chipped red nail polish on them.

The first thing we noticed after seeing that our cadaver was an elderly woman was that she had a large metal device screwed into her wrist and dark purplish discoloration around the entire lower forearm. It's a stabilizer for a fracture, she had broken her wrist pretty badly it seems. She had also had recent hip surgery. The surgical tape was still laying across the incision site. Further perusal revealed a previous knee surgery and once we began the dissection we saw the metal ties in her sternum that indicate a likely open-heart surgery. (?)

This is so much more information than anyone else has about their cadavers. We suspect she died within a week or so of the fall that resulted in the broken wrist and hip surgery. The other groups have no clues about the death of their cadavers.

I just feel so awful for this poor woman. The pain she must have been in.

Perhaps my life experiences do me a disfavor in this. I have too much empathy.

I didn't think about these things too much during lab, but they have bothered me ever since. I wound up crying on the phone to my husband about it.

The worst part is, I don't feel like I learned anything today that I couldn't have gotten from the book. The pictures in Rohen's Atlas pretty much showed, in better detail actually, the muscles I was supposed to see today. I feel bad that I did this thing to someone's body and didn't walk away from it with some sort of revelation to make it seem worthwhile.

No one ever said I would feel like this. I wonder if I'm abberant for taking it so personally. I wonder if it means I will have trouble separating myself emotionally from my patients.

OTOH, it didn't stop me from doing what I needed to do today. I did my fair share of dissecting and discussing. I just got blindsided by the emotional aspect afterwards.

My apologies to those who are accumstommed to reading my upbeat blogs.


As for the rest of med school, week 1, it's been dizzying. The first week has focused largely on Cell Biology. Many of my peers have had significant coursework in this topic, some have majored in it. I, on the other hand, have had the bare minimum of Biology. I feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do! I've been reading my syllabus ahead of class and started writing out answers to all the objective questions. The info is beginning to gel. :crossfingers:

Tomorrow is more lecture, Micro Lab and then the weekend!

Just a quick follow-up.

Microlab was insane. we weren't told what material to know for the lab. The TA started calling on people to answer questions about material we had covered in class the day before! :goodvibes:

Our White Coat ceremony was yesterday. I am now officially the proud owner of a short, white, polyester student doctor coat.

actually, I feel very silly when I put it on. Kinda like the scrubs I wear for anatomy lab, it feels pretentious, like I'm playacting. This was something that was discussed during our ceremony. Several (6 or 7)2nd & 3rd year students spoke at our ceremony. They told funny stories about their experiences wearing the coat, as well as poignant ones about some of the patients they have met since they began school.

While I am no where near being a doctor yet, and hardly deserve the respect that seems to just come from being in med school, I am so very proud to have begun my journey into this profession.

My husband, my kids, my in laws, my brother in law, and a very good friend all came to the ceremony. We all went out for sushi afterwards. It was a wonderful feeling to be surrounded by so many people who care for and support me.

My friend asked me today if I feel different. He said I look different. I told him that having the coat didn't change a thing for me. What has changed for me is that for the first time in my life I feel like I'm in the right place at the right time. For many years I've had my wonderful husband and children, but I've always felt I was lacking something. Now I truly feel like I have it all and I'm so very grateful to be in this position. I feel like this path to becoming a physician is the key piece that has been missing in my life.

So no matter how difficult anatomy lab is, or how much reading I need to do, or how early I have to get everyone out of the house in the morning, I feel it's a gift. It truly is.

will I feel that way in 3-4 months? Maybe not, but I suspect that I will.

I can't believe it's been a months since my last post. I guess my time got a little short.


And look, I'm typing away and the phone rings 5 times. well, it's all good. I'm hiring a babysitter for my kids in the afternoon. The "lord of the flies" aspect of afterschool care at the daycare is not working out for my kiddos.

I'll try to sit down and right this evening. I did, afterall, finish my first block of exams today!!!!

Finally, time to type and compose my thoughts. (perhaps in that order!)

Our final exam for the Core Concepts block has 2 parts, a multiple choice/short answer portion on Tues. and an anatomy/histology practical on Wed.

I felt really good about the Tuesday exam. I was pretty well prepared and although I knew I had missed several questions, there were 120 MC questions! Room for error. i was able to answer all the short ans. questions without too much trouble. Since this portion of the midterm gave me a lot of grief, I was very pleased.

Unfortunately on Wed I discovere I was nowhere near enough prepared for the lab practicals. In Anantomy, I focused my studying on ID'ing muscles, knowing insertions & origins, and actions. I was also reasonably sure of the innervations. Well, the exam was about 80% nerves and vessels!!!
:banghead: Apparently I had traded improved scores on the MC exam with poorer performance on the Anatomy/Histo portion. I was so angry with myself, and with the professors for not letting us know how differently the practicals would be structured from the midterm.

I've never worked so hard just to hope to pass an exam. While I might have done well on the first day of the exam, my practical exams get figured into the overall grade. shoot!

Well, not one to take defeat easily, I've decided to give it a better effort this block. More focus and more selfishness with my study time.

To that end, I'm hiring a babysitter. (did I mention that already?) The afterschool daycare is leaving my kids tired and stressed. The day is just too long and then they have to come home and do their homework. This takes us an additional 30-60 minutes. Apparently homework is for parents too, My hope is that the sitter can help the kids finish their homework, get snacks and generally allow them to relax in the afternoon. I will be making myself stay at the school until closer to 5:30pm, to get more studying done. Right now I've been leaving at 3:30 so I could get home, pick up the kids and do homework&dinner. I need a wife! :laughing:
(hubby still traveling all week)

One thing I've learned is that prereading, attending class, and then rereading/highlighting/ making charts right after the material is covered is really important. There is just so much material that you can't keep the information from monday's lecture in your head by wednesday afternoon! I used to be one of those students who could preread, take good notes, and then reread my notes and that would be all the studying I did. (except in Phy & Orgo, where I did copious HW!) That's not the case for me in med school.

Ouch, what a steep learning curve!

So I was in a horrible mood about the exam yesterday morning. Then I went to observe at the TCH Genetics Clinic (I loved the genetics lectures!!). One of the professors allowed me to follow him and a couple of the Genetics Fellows around to see patients. It was fantastic. I loved it. Talking to the patients and families, getting to know their stories, looking for all the clues to their disease and then putting the pieces together. Absolutely fascinating. My prof also invited me to attend their afternoon conference where all the docs and fellows discussed all the patients seen in clinic that week.

I'm completely reenergized. I remember why I'm here and that my preclinical courses, while important, are only a part of the picture.

Too bad I don't have enough time to go to clinic everyweek!

Next block is CRR, cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal. cool.