r/medicalschool

to be clear, i know i should have stayed. i know i should have just sucked it up. but i couldnt.

was (understandably) yelled at in front of everyone

i broke sterile field accidentally for the second possibly third time on my surgery rotation. like a fucking idiot.

im not normally stupid. but there is something about going off of <3-4 hours/sleep a night (upstairs neighbors super noisy all night, multiple noise complaints never helped).

even though i knew i deserved the yelling, i sat off to the corner just crying. couldnt touch my face to wipe away tears cause sterility. tried to go to the darkest corner possible.

once the surgery had been completed (last surgery of the day), just suturing left (which a student was doing), i asked to leave. surgeon (who hadnt seen the yelling) seemed surprised. they let me go ? maybe out of shock at my entitlement?

i feel like in med school people are always asking to stay even when they are asked to leave

I’m fine during the actual rotation but by the time I get home, eat and shower I’m looking at UWorld like it personally offended me. I can usually get through the first 10-15 questions fine then I start rereading stems and realizing I’ve been staring at the same question for way too long. The annoying part is I know I need to keep doing questions for the shelf but I also don’t want every evening to turn into 3 more hours of school. How many questions are you guys realistically getting through on rotation days?

US MD school on the east coast. My school has 3 student run free clinics, and I helped manage one of them. Ours is once a month, advised by a PhD, and has close to zero funding. We drive out into the country to serve a population that is indeed medically underserved.

But I don't feel like we serve them. We have no labs, no pharmacy, limited follow up, and are only there monthly. Services are constantly being cancelled and we recently had to move locations (which the PhD did not tell the med school about and now we're in a compliance crisis.)

Also, it is run by FIRST YEARS. Interviews, physical exams, follow-up, workflow, etc. are all managed by us first years. I have poured my fucking heart into this clinic but realize I am severely underqualified to do this. We have attendings we present to but they're not very involved and don't do much for the patients other than Rx stuff to Walmart or tell them to go to the ER if it's bad enough. In my research I have found some free clinics are able to provide reasonable, sustainable care for people who cannot be connected to the major healthcare system, or work to plug them into the real healthcare system. This one just seems like a resume-building token clinic for the PhD and medical students.

Anyone else experiencing this or is ours just particularly bad? I feel like we need to be shut down. No one else seems to care if what we're doing is true service. It's been the most frustrating part of med school so far.

4th year med student here struggling w mental health and motivation. currently on an extremely relaxed radiology rotation where the expectations for me are slim to none. my EM app has been submitted for sometime now and i’ve gotten 4 interviews so far. all in all i have nothing really
to complain about. i’m barely in the hospital for 1-2 hours a week and i have so much free time i can do honestly anything I want.
yet- im filled with so much anxiety and im in a horrible funk. i don’t want to get out of bed ever, i sleep 13-14 hours a day, cancel plans w friends bc they don’t seem fun anymore and am barely keeping up w normal life chores. it’s so weird how i would’ve paid for time like this a few weeks ago and now i feel my mental health getting worse and worse. i keep feeling like it makes no sense- i should
be enjoying this time before residency and yet ive found my days filled w endless amounts of dread.

posting this to see if any other fourth years feel this way. i hope the rest of the year doesn’t pan out the same

I’m currently a 4th year med student, always wanted to go into a surgical subspecialty. I’m also a high myope so I was always at a risk for a detachment and then it just happened. Got surgery, it healed well but now I have another detachment; I’m afraid it’s going to be recurrent and I will have minimal to zero vision in one eye.

Should I still be looking into pursuing surgery or is it just a colossal waste considering the poor vision. Would I be better off doing a less intensive specialty like IM/FM? Would having poor vision make me a less competent doctor?

I’m at a loss here, would appreciate any and all advice!!

My school has an LIC curriculum so I’ve been with these attendings for nearly 10 months, 11 months by the end of the block. They have all been phenomenal. I was thinking of getting some thoughtful gifts as we have similar interests, like a badge reel for my peds attending, some earrings for my psych attending, and maybe a baby shower gift for my OBGYN attending as she is currently on maternity leave. I wouldn’t spend more than 20 dollars on this(that’s stretching it), might pick up some donuts for the staff, and write a kind thank you letter. I’m not interested in any of these specialties, just had a good time and appreciated the extra effort they put into my professional development. I’ll also preface that I don’t intend the gift to affect my final evaluation. They all have also bought me coffee or lunch at some point so I feel obliged to return the favor.

Is this too much? I tend to overdo things like this, but at one of my other rotations an NP student bought the attending a bottle of liquor at the end of her rotation so I don’t know how to gauge this.