This has been the most exciting and the most difficult year yet. If you look at my Facebook, you'll see the pictures from camping trips, days at the beach, parties at Cardiff house and smiling faces as we received white coats and Bibles from our school, but what you won't see are the countless hours of reading textbooks, practicing taking blood pressures, puzzling over how to distinguish heart sounds, reviewing power points and flash cards for the millionth time, the exhaustion of test week and much more. It's a ton of work (as it should be since we'll be making life or death decisions in a few years), but God has blessed me with a great church, amazing friends, and a supportive family who have all contributed to keeping me sane through all of this.
This year was mostly spent in the classroom with some shadowing the first and last weeks of the year. We looked mostly at how the body normally works by studying anatomy, embryology, genetics, biochem, physiology, neurology, physical diagnosis, behavioral science, cell structure and function, plus some other classes. I got to see how things run in the emergency department, internal medicine and neurology. Next year will be more book work focused on how things go wrong and how to treat everything. We'll also face huge tests (Step 1 essentially determines what type of specialty we can get into) and incredible amounts of stress...yeah :/ Third year at Loma Linda will be spent working in the different departments to give us an idea of what we want to specialize in, then fourth year we'll apply for residencies which vary in length depending on the field we want to go into (So I'm looking at 3-4 more years after Loma Linda to become a full fledged doctor). There's a lot more to it than that but for those of you who aren't super familiar with the process I hope that helps give you a glimpse of the next several years for me.
These next two months are the last long break I'll have from here on out, and I'm excited to leave tomorrow for Guatemala. A couple of classmates and I are going to language school in Queztaltenango. I'll have the chance to be tutored in medical Spanish, work in their clinics, live with a host family, improve my conversational Spanish, learn more about their culture and travel a little. I've been looking forward to it for months now!! It's not with a missions organization and I'm going with people I already know, so it will be different than my previous times in Central America. We'll have some internet access so keep looking here for updates and more details :)
