Medicine is crazy

Medicine, and everyone in it, or associated with it, is crazy.

I have been a med student for 4 weeks. A good proportion of my lecturers and tutors is crazy. The course is crazy, the workload is crazy. The other students are crazy. The immune system is crazy. Everyone, and every thing, is crazy. Which can only mean one thing - that I'm crazy, and everyone else is normal.

1. The teaching staff is crazy. Many of them fit into stereotypes: eg- the hard-core pathologist, the confusing ethicist, the nurse who says, as a joke, "next time, bring chocolates". But then, there's the pharmacist who went through the mathematics of pharmacokinesis in one hour. And the other pharmacist who told us that pharmacists are obsessive-compulsive-anal-retentives. And the PA hospital orientation lecture, taking place at 8am, just to tell us that there is a library there and that we need to be nice to the staff and patients. crazy. (At this point I must say, my PBL tutor is lovely.)
2. The students are crazy. They somehow seem to find it okay. No one feels like it's hard or overwhelming. Everyone is having a ball. Perhaps they are just not admitting it? Or is it just me? Next Friday they are having a "sports day", where med students dress up in scrubs and drink and get red dye over each other. Those crazy med students drink like fishes. How can they drink so much when there is so much work to do? Someone is crazy, and I prefer to think it's them.
3. The immune system is crazy, in a good, interesting, but crazy way.

The reason why I'm complaining so much on blogger is, I've realised, because I have no one else to do it to. The other med students are so on top of it all, when I ask them how they are finding it, they say "good, good", even if they don't have a science background. When I talk to my non-med friends about it, they just say to me: "Sida, you're smart, you'll be alright" or something along those lines. I know they say it because they don't know what else to say. But I don't feel smart right now, and I don't feel like I'll be alright, and when they say that, I feel like I'm going to crash and burn even more. I guess what I need is validation, someone to say: "You're not nuts, Sida. It's ok to feel like you're going to drown." (Oh boy, I've applied the communication skills lecture to myself... now I KNOW I'm going nuts.)

*sigh* So there we go, another complaining blog entry.

Um, I did have fun at microbiology last week. We were doing a gram-stain (which is supposed to go: purple mixture (forgot name) - water wash- iodine - water wash - alcohol - safranin). We put on the purple thing first, then the safranin, then realised the alcohol comes before the safranin, so we washed the safranin off, then alcohol, then safranin again. Then we (my lab partner and I) looked at the iodine and thought: where does this come in? When we realised, we washed our slide with alcohol again, and then put iodine on, and then safranin. The gram stain is supposed to come out purple or pink, depending on the bacteria on the slide... my partner and I were dreaming of how we might have invented a new staining method and be rewarded with a nobel prize, but when we put it under the microscope, it was just a slush of brown. When the tutor asked us how we were going, the response was unanimous - "Fine, fine, thanks."

My microbiology lab partner is a cool canadian dude with a cool accent and a neuroscience major. But he's bloddy smart. Everyone's so bloddy smart.

Oh, it's Chinese New year's eve. Happy new year, everyone who reads this. Living away from China, one doesn't get in as much spirit as one should.