The Foxhole

If there is one thing that I have learned from my first year of medical school (aside from the fact that boring teachers make for boring science and I still prefer a cold weather climate) it is that monotony can kill you. If we are being honest here, what I really mean to say is that the more time you spend with the same people, the more those same people make you want to walk into oncoming traffic. Medical school is an interesting phenomenon, on multiple fronts, but, when trying to describe the feelings it both creates and exhumes from the depths of one’s psyche, most people get caught up in the academic aspect of it all. While it is true that medical school brings with it a stress level that I cannot even begin to put into words—one that makes such mundane things as grocery shopping and shaving seem like privileges that require a certain time and effort that one must earn—and an air of urgency that can make a person go postal, all of these issues would be nothing without the social element of it all. The academic requirements and their accompanying consequences only exacerbate the real issues, the day-to-day humdrum, that grates on your patience and makes you resent the people who matter the most.
My father, despite our differences, has said some wise things in his time. Before I left for medical school, I expressed the fact that I was feeling uneasy about the kinds of people I would meet, the friends that I would hopefully make. While I have never really had a difficult time making new friends, I, nevertheless have always found the initial flirting with boys and girls alike, the ritual display of one’s colored feathers, to be exhausting and almost beneath me. The idea of laying everything I have out on the table and offering it to the highest bidder gives me serious social anxiety; I like to stick to what I know, and medical school, or really, medical students, seemed to be the breed of people who would just browse but not buy all that is Danielle – social window-shopping if you will. My father, having gone through his own version of medical school (dental school- not the same but still not so different), tried to assuage my fears by telling me that it doesn’t matter who my classmates are, what kind of weird eating habits, fashion tastes, or hobbies they posses, these people are going to become my family…for better or for worse. Getting a little more descriptive, my Dad argued that these people will become my war buddies, the people next to me in the foxhole, who are trying to dodge the very same bullets, who carry you when you get hit. He told me that we would all become united in a unique shared experience, one that no one else would ever truly understand or relate to unless he or she had been there him or herself.
At the time, his advice sounded a little too poetic for my taste, and I was wholly consumed by my still flourishing disdain for moving to a beach-town (I live in a city with palm trees- gross), so I dismissed him and his prose.
And now I am eating my words. I could not think of a better metaphor if I tried. Medical school IS war—a war against sleep, against leisure, against the ability to say no to chocolate and fried foods—and these people, the ones who, sometimes, make me regret waking up in the morning, are the people who drag you when you can’t carry yourself, who smile for you when the realities of being a medical student won’t let you do it yourself.
We all come from different planet,; from frat boys to the Kiddush club, yet we all find ourselves thrown into the same hodgepodge of personalities. At times, this makes for a motley crew, one that moves to the beats of 62 different drummers. And aren’t drummers, afterall, just artists, elitists who are stubbornly convinced they his or her own beat is the truest? Hells yes. We make out with each other’s crushes because we are too bored and lonely to say no, we make stupidly expensive impulse buys at Zara because we think we need to outdo everyone at the Thanksgiving banquet, since it is our one and only chance to show everyone that we are actually attractive people, and we snap at each other under pressure, in the most passive aggressive of ways, because one of us took the other’s usual spot in the study room. We known every little detail about each other’s personal lives because we make it our business to find out, out of pure boredom and slight jealousy. There are no atheists in our foxhole…because, if there were, we would know about it.
But they are also beautiful. Despite our differences, we all seem to blend into this indestructible meshwork of know-it-all, Type A personality prototypes. While that sounds like it would create a community of cut-throat, gunners who are more than willing to step on everyone around them just to get the grade, life in med school, at least in my experience, is the exact opposite. We stay up until the wee hours of the morning teaching our friends the intricate details of the brain’s functions because he or she has left it all until the night before the exam because he or she was too preoccupied with family or relationship drama to prepare beforehand. We make 70 page long review sheets for our finals only because organization of the material makes us feel like we have a handle on it and email it to the rest of the class (or is that just something I do?). We go with each other to the doctor, we come over in the middle of the night and make brownies when one of us gets dumped, we call one another at the butt crack of dawn to make sure we are all awake for our exams. We carry each other when we feel like we can’t go on, we smile for each other when we feel like doing it ourselves will shatter our faces.
High school was a joke. I saw the same people every single day for 4 years: winter, spring, summer, and fall. College was great: I loved my friends but I also loved my vacations from them and my college town. Med school is impossible: but I can’t wait to go back. Does that make me crazy…or lucky?