Ah the sweet bliss that is break. Translation: opportunity to sleep. This is important. I had no idea what sleep deprivation really felt like. An all-nighter here, a few hours of sleep there - no big deal. In medical school we don't sleep, we take naps. My naps were getting shorter and shorter with the impending doom that is physiology. Last night (morning?) around 2:00AM I thought I felt a bug in my ear (literally). Then I felt something crawling in my shirt. I thought I saw a bug on the wall. I became quite paranoid - hating bugs and all. I removed my shirt to see if there was in fact a bug in there. Negative. Then it all rushed back at me in the silence of the night - I was hallucinating. I took a deep breath, inspected my garments and the walls, and realized there were no bugs. Problem averted. However, that ain't good. It's a very tenuous balance - do I get some sleep, or do I learn a few more tidbits in hopes of a few more points? Unfortunately, our tests are small and every point counts. So, usually we choose bugs in our clothes over sleep.
So why don't we all run away screaming? Because it's awesome. This week we learned how to perform an abdominal exam. I felt the aorta with my hands! I could feel my partner's kidney! I could hear what the bowels were doing. I could hear the clear pulses of a healthy person. It's amazing what goes on inside. It's amazing how beautiful is the human body. We worry about a little flesh here or a small this or that - missing what is to me, much more exquisite. Sometimes people don't understand how I can mean sincerely that everyone is beautiful. That sounds like cheap poetry, but it's true. The older individual that was my "simulated patient" - the body just looked and sounded like wisdom - its sounds are like, "Yes, I've been there and I've done that." It's physical history; living and breathing knowledge and experience. To have the opportunity to listen to and touch that person is quite a gift and one that requires an immense amount of trust. Trust that is bestowed upon me. That's worth some bugs in my shirt!
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