First Day of School... Again.

It's been about nine years since I was nervous for my first day of school. I am always excited, but this time it's not because I hope my elementary school sweetheart will share the same classroom as me, or because I'm entering a new school and am worried about making friends. On Monday I won't have to worry about friends. I will instantly have 160 new friends, all filled with the same eagerness, curiosity, and dread that I have right now. I'm nervous because it's hard to comprehend how much information I am going to have to process over the next weeks, months, and years, and it's even harder to imagine that I'm only a few weeks away from cutting into a dead person. Now that's apprehension. I will understand and know the physical human body more intimately than most people would ever dream of, carefully unearthing every nerve, muscle, bone, and organ. So if learning medicine is like taking a drink of water out of a blasting fire hydrant, then I'm eager, curious, and scared shitless.

The next four or five years of my life will be a roller coaster, this I know for sure. Over the past few weeks I have been riding in the front car, slowly tick-tick-ticking up the incline before the ride really begins. I've been taking in the beauty of the journey, smelling the roses one last time before the metaphorical wind (anatomy book?) is pressed to my face. I will have one more week of orientation to survey this landscape, and then it's a free fall to the bottom, surely throwing me on quite a few loops on the way. I have been trying to learn as much as I can about the road ahead of me, and it seems everyone is more than willing to give advice. I've been told to jump into research the minute I get on campus, exercise every day to keep myself sane, don't worry about what specialty I want to do until the last minute, buy a cat, and even that I still have time to drop med school and get an MBA instead.

These perspectives have come from many people and places. They've come from doctors, from Africa, from friends, and even from Washington. I had the opportunity to sit with some of my mother's friends on Capitol Hill: health policy experts in the Congressional Research Service (a group that I now fondly refer to as, "Congress' Peanut Gallery" - the CPG). They say that every day the debate drags on, this health insurance reform bill will likely get smaller and smaller, soon to only become "token" reform. They say as long as we don't care about how big our deficit is, health care will probably never be fixed. A year or two ago I heard Dr. Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at UNC, state on NPR that there are two types experts who view health care reform: pessimists, and really bad pessimists. He was in the latter camp. If Obama can't get it done, now I see why. And it's in this time of confusion and uncertain change that I begin my journey.

But this negativity will pass, and in a few days I will be invigorated once again. I won't have time to worry about a decade from now, only whether I can name, locate, and describe all 206 bones in the adult body (thank you WikiAnswers). We will be 160 youthful and naive souls ready to make a difference saving lives in one way or another. As so we will begin a grassroots movement, leading the next generation of doctors into a platinum era (I believe the "golden age" of medicine has already come and past unfortunately). And if Washington won't give us real change, then we will! Yes We Can! ARRRRGH!

Or something like that. In the meantime I have to figure out what I'm going to be wearing on my first day.