It's Hard To Get Into Med School

I’m shocked, aren’t you? It’d be more amusing except that really I am, kind of. I thought that all you needed were good grades (really good, like 4.0 good) and a decent score on your MCAT (the SAT’s of med school). It turns out that this is not so. You also need a good amount of physician shadowing, 500+ hours of volunteer work (yes over five hundred. Yikes!) in a clinical setting and “well rounded extra-curricular activities”.

So basically I have to get a 4.0 in a “well rounded” (not just sciences) degree, ace my MCAT, convince several doctors to let me follow them around for a while, offer myself up for ten hours a week of indentured servitude for a year, and join, ugh, clubs.

All I have to say, is that they must really want to make sure that you really want to be a doctor. And that you handle pressure well. As far as I can tell, the schedule imposed by the volunteer work plus school and school related activities (classes, homework, clubs, and work study) AND the care and feeding of my spouse and four children will leave me with approximately six hours a week of free time to do things like, you know, read a novel or poop. Did I mention that medical school and residency are supposed to be much worse than this? I think that they have about this same schedule only without sleeping during the week.

I’m glad I found the Flylady system which works uber awesome for me. It’s the only way I have a prayer of keeping up with school, getting my homework done and keeping my house from being condemned. I strongly suggest that everyone check it out. Just be sure to take some of the over-the-top sappy messages with a grain of salt. I, for one, can’t help but snicker at terms like, “weekly home blessing hour” (that’s when you do things like change your sheets) and quotes like, “Nothing says I love you like a clean toilet to throw up in!” You should definitely check it out, just don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

In unrelated news, my brother got married yesterday in a beautiful ceremony that just made me wish harder for one of my own. Fortunately my divorce (from a man I separated from nearly a decade ago) should be final by the end of September which means that I can finally marry the wonderful man that I cohabitate with, although I still don’t get a gorgeous ceremony or a pretty dress. Such is life I suppose.

I’ll post pictures of the ceremony regardless, because, well, I’m pretty proud of myself for finally having the courage to get divorced. It took me a long time. Heck, starting school, getting divorced, VBACing my fourth baby. This year seems to be all about courage for me. It’s certainly filled with new experiences.

Well, I should probably run along and put an end to the Wrestle Mania going on in my living room. Be sure to tune in… well, tomorrow to read about the awesome volunteer job I nailed over at our local hospital.

A Lazy Saturday

Lazy days are sweet. You know those days, where you never once get in the car (or sometimes even out of your pajamas). Where you get the dishes done early and get to play some board games (or video games) with the kids. I must have read seven board books today and I loved every moment.

I sometimes feel as if I don’t get enough of those days anymore. Not that I’m complaining, really, but, contrary to the popular belief that being a stay at home mom makes you feel trapped and lonely, I miss the times when I could go three or four days without ever leaving the house. What can I say? My kids are good company.

We did go to the grocery store today, something I was hoping to avoid. There’s nothing like a refrigerator decked out in nothing but condiments and moldy cheese to provide a bit of motivation for an outing. It was good though. Not one of those four hour long, everyone’s cranky, exhausted and homicidal by the end of it, marathon shopping trips. I actually hadn’t known until today that a family of six could get into and out of Wal Mart in under two hours.

I wonder how many of these lazy days I’ll have when I start school. Won’t it only be worse when I’m in med school or, god forbid, residency? Maybe that’s what “they” meant when they said you can’t parent children and become a doctor without neglecting them somehow. I worry about it. I worry that they’re going to miss me, that they’re going to miss out, on video games with mom, on bedtime stories, on home cooked food for almost every meal. These are all things I’ve always taken pride in providing, as a stay at home mom and wanna be June Cleaver. It’s kind of hard, I guess to reset my priorities from just being the “perfect” mom, wife and housekeeper to being pretty good at those things and getting strait A’s too.

To be honest, I don’t think they’ll end up mistreated or ignored, but I do think I’m really going to miss those lazy days.

Bigger Better And Exhausted

…or at least seriously worn out. I’m sure it’ll only get worse once I start college next month. College. Pre-med. At twenty five years old. With four children under the age of ten. What the heck am I thinking?

I always wanted to be a doctor. Seriously, always. When I was five years old I had a toy stethoscope and actually looked forward to going in for my shots. Because there were doctors there. But, well, like they say “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”. I got pregnant just after my sixteenth birthday. Tragic, huh? Well I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not like I didn’t know how babies were made. But of course, having a baby in my mid-teens meant that I couldn’t possibly ever make it through med school. Right?

I thought so. I have to say, I spent the last seven and a half years since my son was born, embarrassingly convinced that, while having a baby before you were old enough to vote didn’t mean your life was over, it did put some of the bigger dreams a bit too far out of reach. Besides, I never really wanted to be a doctor anyways.

I’m sure I could make a novel length drama out of the years between then and now but memoirs are quickly going out of style, so what would be the point? A wonderful husband, a pretty satisfying life, and three more beautiful babies later, a blazingly obvious question finally occurred to me. “Why not?” My husband was convinced we could make it work and, once I was willing to be persuaded, convinced me too. So I applied to the college here in my hometown and was flabbergasted to receive a letter of acceptance despite the fact that, as I already knew, all you needed to get in were student loans and a pulse.

The ball had started rolling. I picked my major, a B.S. in biology, took my COMPASS test (a test for those of us who took the “get pregnant and drop out” career track to make sure that we can read) and met with an advisor to actually pick out classes. Like a real college student and everything!

Trust me, I’m excited. Elated. Terrified. Because you can’t go through medical school while still being a parent to your children. That’s what I’ve always been told. Because you can’t manage homework, and a family, and a household. Something’s got to give. I’m sure of it.

That’s why I’m glad there are blogs. I found some wonderful blogs written by doctors and nurses and even med students and residents. They’re all doing it. They’re all managing it just fine (or at least with a minimum of tears and anxiety). If they can do it, then maybe there’s more than a glimmer of hope that I can too.