The Marathon of Medicine
Part 1: Anatomy
by Cassie Boggs
Cassie Boggs, a fourth-year medical student, shares her personal perspective on medical school. Her column will appear periodically throughout the academic year.
Looking back on the first years of medical school, I see a blur of pictures punctuated by images that flicker into focus like the images on my microscope. Three years ago I walked into a classroom capable of seating 180 people and began the single most expensive investment of my life. In addition to the monetary cost of going to school, I forsook time for all those things I hold dear – family, friends, theatre, a love life – so that I may one day have the honor of walking into a room and asking a perfect stranger to take off his clothes without getting arrested.
However, I have to admit that the education I have received is priceless despite what my loan statements say.
The first day of anatomy is forever seared into my mind. While the lecture is long forgotten, the smell of the lab will haunt me forever. That first day we discovered that human skin is much tougher than it looks, fat tissue sticks to everything, human muscle tissue tears with very little force, and cutting though the spinal column of a cadaver is remarkably similar to cutting through a wooden post.
Unlike many of my peers, anatomy was my least favorite first-year subject. We spent countless tedious hours in the lab searching though cadavers in a never-ending attempt to commit to memory every nook and cranny of the human body – weekends, late nights, 24-hour-long study sessions – leaving only to eat in the hallway and to go to the bathroom.
Anatomy was the first class in my life that I truly worried about failing. I seemed to have a mental block against memorizing the body’s innervations and vasculature. I was often so frustrated that I would go home and draft a letter of resignation from medical school – letters that were never turned in. Classmates helped me survive.
There were six weeks in that first year in which we had at least one test a week. Before medical school, having that number of tests would not have been a problem for me, but now the volume of information we were required to learn made me feel like I was trying to drink from a fully opened fire hydrant that was never shut off.
Halfway through our “six weeks of hell,” I left the lab and had a little breakdown. Crying with exhaustion, I rolled myself into a ball and asked myself why I was in medical school. All my friends from college had jobs now. Several were getting married. And here I was, alone, weeping in a public bathroom at three in the morning.
I still remembered the passion that had driven me toward a life in medicine, but I couldn’t feel it sitting in a classroom. Only when I stood on my balcony at night could I feel it, looking over parking lots and buildings toward the soft blue glow of the MCG hospital sign. It had become a talisman for my wavering passion for medicine and my drive to help those who could not help themselves.
Back in the bathroom, a classmate gave me a quick pep talk. Two cups of coffee later, I returned to the lab, where another classmate helped by repeatedly quizzing me on the anatomy of the lower extremity. I kept going.
I managed to pass anatomy that semester, and swore that I would never again cut open another cadaver. Fate, however, has a twisted sense of humor.
As I begin my final year of medical school, I have decided to be a forensic pathologist. Once I complete my training, I will do autopsies every day. Despite my struggles with first-year anatomy, it seems I have a proclivity for autopsy.
Next time: Part 2 – Surgery