Scattered thoughts

I had lunch with a friend today, who has moved on to her intern year, and we talked about the sense of disorientation we sometimes have that we're actually doing this. Studying to be (or practicing as) doctors, that is. For her, it's the power to order tests and make diagnoses and prescribe, and the thrill of having her own patients. I sometimes wake up and wonder what I'm doing here, how I ended up in my small green bedroom in Albany, New York, going to med school. My friend said that for the first few months, she would forget that her patients were not standardized patients (paid actors pretending to be patients as part of medical school training); I had a similar thought with a stage IV cancer patient who came to speak to our class earlier this week. On the one hand, kudos to our standardized patients for being so believable; on the other hand, why is it that we're forgetting that real people come to us with problems? Their lives revolve around them, and we are there to help -- their lives do not revolve around us.

I suspect it's because we're so busy all the time, with hardly a moment to stop and think. We lose track of where we are and what we're doing and why. Real patients pull us out of ourselves too quickly for us to adjust; it is hard to give another person your full attention when you are stressed.

The solution, for her, was to come back from two weeks of vacation to emails from her real patients awaiting their doctor's response. Real patients, real problems without pause.

Meanwhile, baking bread. Is it real or an olfactory hallucination?