Day 265 - And with all that whinging...
Test scores didn't even go up today. Trust me, I checked. Repeatedly.

I also boycotted a lecture today. The reason for my protest? It would have been the 9th, (yes NINTH) time that I would have sat through mitosis and meiosis. Ok, so we're studying genetics and that whole cell division thing is a bit of a central theme, but really. I will eat my left shoe if a single student in that lecture hadn't seen everything presented twice before.

And now, an imperative. If you have the means, contact Brian Lobel to bring his one-man performance of the play BALL, a traumedy to your med school or undergrad pre-med program. His one-hour show about his experience with battling testicular cancer at the age of 20 ranks right up there with meeting Patch Adams for me. He's brave, honest, and above all - willing to laugh at the absurdities (realizing that one should not get too comfy on the leather chair in the sperm bank donation room) and atrocities (being told after two months that he was no longer in remission) of cancer.

He rails at the idea of Lance Armstrong, and celebrity diseases. He showed everyone that there was a place for a gawky 20-something with a big nose and no athletic ability or enduring wisdom in the world of survivors with book deals and segments on Oprah.

Above all, he humanizes a very dehumizing disease - something I didn't realize I needed to understand until I left the auditorium.

It's ironic that they teach us about some of the worst diseases in the spring of our first year here at Wayne. The things that happen when structures in the brain begin to degenerate, how the mutation of the minute section of a chromosome can make breathing after your 8th birthday seem harder than climbing Mt. Everest.

But you know what? Even with these horrible diseases, where I have to memorize just how an Alzheimer's patient will lose their most cherished memories, I want to study more than I have in the last few months. I'd rather have my heartstrings pulled by patient and family stories than be indifferent to the material - these are things that have to be learned on more than just an academic level.

We listened to lecture about deep brain stimulation this morning; which nucleus is targeted, why it works. We didn't learn about it until this afternoon. Not until we saw a Parkinson's patient shuffle awkwardly across the stage, and attempt to mumble his introduction into the microphone, and then the transformation as his DBS unit was turned on. We'll remember him standing tall, grinning widely and saying "It's a Beautiful Day in Downtown Detroit!", and the auditorium thundering with applause. That is the difference between the memorizing the anatomy of the subthalamic nucleus, and learning how to be a Doctor.