Well today was an interesting day for me. I woke up at 2am to review for my gastrointestinal final exam starting at 3am my time. About 20 minutes before it started I got a text from one of my old college buddies in vegas. He said our good buddy a former roomate had just passed away from a heart attack. The kid was 34 man. His only medical problems was chronic alcoholism and diabetes. But he cought the Rona and it killed him. He was the only person I knew who had covid besides a few members mentioning it on this site.
Now the bummer was rather than process everything I tried my best to stay focused on my exam, with the intent of processing it after. Then I found myslf activly hallucinating and the voices were telling me that I needed to process it now because he is coming to check on me. But I brushed it off and kept cramming for my exam. Then one of the exam questions was about a patient that met his health criteria who had acquired covid and I had to respond with developing a treatment regiment. That hit me pretty hard. But I detached myself, kept pressing, and blew threw the exam. I was the first in my class to finish. My classmates got mad at me too because we were all on video conference during the exam and I asked a question to the teacher about one of the questions and I was like on question 67 and they were still on question 32. So I finished up and texted my teacher asking for my grade. Doc wouldnt give me my exact grade but said I got above a 80. She sucks like that. We had a clinical focused exam final last week and I needed to perform a history assessment and clinical skills exam on a patient, much like when you go to the doctors they ask questions and you perform an exam, come up with a diagnosis and order labs and imagings. I had my dad as my patient and my mom recording with the teacher on facetime and I walked out of the room to search for my stethascope and my teacher told my mom, you son is really really smart but I dont want to tell him how well hes doing because I dont want it to go to his head, but you guys did a great job raising him. My mom later told me this after my exam that day. Which really made me excited even tho I told hem she was just gassing them up. But I nailed that exam, and because she didnt tell me my exact score on todays exam Im starting to believe what she said was true, which gave me some much needed confidence to deal with what I had to deal with today. It reminded me that as a doctor what Im signing up for is that there are going to be days when you just have to detach your emotion completly from reality and just focus on completing your tasks at hand. Fortunatly living with this disease has tought me how to battle my own thoughts and the only thing that really works is staying busy, active, driven and concentrated on something 24/7. So I guess today Im thankful for being crazy, for being me.
Stay positive guys, if you can learn to love yourself you can learn to love others again. Life is precious, we’ve only got one shot, so we got to always shoot for the moon. I couldnt save my buddy, but I learned how to save someone else.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.