I want to get off.

I think it finally hit me that in two months from next week I will be taking the Boards. And I just sort of had a panic attack sitting in ZSR (ugrad library). There is so much stuff I don’t know the way I should like Pharm and Pop-epi and renal and embryology and even more terrifying is the stuff I don’t even know I don’t know.

And it was a beautiful day as I sat here and listened to lectures about sex hormones and panicked. All I wanted to do was get in my car and drive away into the sunshine and rejoin life. I know I haven’t really left life. But I feel like I have. I feel like I am stuck in some time loop of repeating moments of inadequacy, frustration, shallow relationships (because I never have time I should to devote to them) and the feeling of gulit for all the things I don’t have time for and the time I wasting dreaming about what I would if I wasn’t in medical school. I live viacariously via the world of internet blogging, Facebook and You Tube and have developed an unusal interest in the 2008 Election Primaries because they are continualy covered live via the internet, my window to the world.

And I am ashamed of all of this. People are dying, children are starving, my parents and the federal government and several generous scholarships are shelling out money like no tomorrow investing in my medical education. Yet I just don’t care anymore. My apathy is growing by the hour. I am tired and frankly I would just rather be any where else. Someone told me I was closer to quitting medical school a year ago. Maybe, I was, maybe I repressed it but I have to be honest, today with the sun shining and the fact I can’t even get excited about sex hormones, with the crap that is gong down in the orphanage and a recently supplemented bank account. Its just too easy.

When I went home over Christmas. I cleaned out of my bookshelves in my bedroom at home. I found some of my old journals from high school and even before. I read them for a while. Although I never said I want to be a doctor, I talked perpetually about how upset I was about the crappy care all the Kniest Kids were getting that I knew. The wheels were in motion. But I also talked about loving my classes, idolizing my teachers and loving being back home in VA, getting my first poems published, my first kiss (ha!), lots and lots of theater, writing all the church plays and dreaming. My life was not perfect and heaven knows I don’t want to go back to high school. Its the fact I was whole. I don’t feel whole any more. I feel like someone else is living my life for me.

Its not the boards. I will pass them if I try. Its the fact that somehow in all the deciding between grad school types and majors and life plans, I left behind or put on hold or cut out entirely things I really loved. Maybe its growing up. But part of me can’t help but continue to wonder if med school is the best way for me to really be the person I am meant to be. Just because I can do something doesn’t always mean its the right something to do.

I know there have been a whole series of these my life sucks I want to drop out of med school posts. But seriously I have never stopped wondering about medical school since the day I submitted my AMCAS application. sigh.