"Down Shifting" by MSIH first year blogger Ayal Levi

Exams have come to an end. After what seems like an eternal hamster-wheel of screen/books/coffee/notes, it is time to get off the treadmill. Stretch our legs, work the kinks out of our backs, and adjust our eyes to the sunshine awaiting us outside. It was a little weird explaining to a friend back home over Skype why I still have my distinctly Middle Canada skin tone while living in the desert. After ranting about actinic keratosis and potential skin issues that arise from sun exposure, I realized he had a point.

It is easy to get on the gerbil-drum and start pumping our intellectual muscles as hard as we can. Days run into weeks, weeks run into months and suddenly one might find themselves outside of the university gym trying to get in, having forgotten the strange hours they keep on Sunday (Forgetting that it was actually Sunday, to be honest, for a third time). A symptom of studying enough that everyday begins to follow a similar pattern, the days becoming less and less viscous running into one another.

Everybody always says to “take time for yourself” in medical school. Mostly people who haven’t had the distinct pleasure of trying to remember if Burkitt’s Lymphoma has an 8:14 translocation, or is it a 9:22 translocation, or is that leukemia? But which leukemia? Wait, I thought this was Pathology, didn’t we already write the Genetics exam? You get my point.

But maybe, those muggles have a point. The tendency to simply push the envelope of studying is strong within all medical students. It has to be, otherwise getting through what is an Amazonian-like density of material would not be possible. Pushing off the weariness and getting into the material is part of being a medical student.

Yet, that same fatigue seeps into the thought process and plays tricks on our reasoning. Makes easy questions hard, makes small things seem big, and can make even the most astute amongst us second-guess themselves.

Of all the lessons learned over the past two exam periods, this is one of the more crucial ones. That sometimes the way to beat off the fatigue is not just another cup of coffee (or three), but to get up and do something else. Hit refresh on the browser. Unplug for a brief 30 minutes or half a day. Use a life-line and call a friend. Whatever allows for a recharge.

Focus and intellectual energy are a finite resource for most of us. We have all experienced that skittish intellectual fluttering that makes the act of focusing more like a cat chasing a laser pointer than the pointy end of a samurai sword. We all have a chance to sharpen that sword now with Passover Break. A chance to rest and reflect and hopefully even enjoy ourselves a little bit.

We will all be back in the thick of it here within less than two weeks. In the meantime, we will be out there trying to get some sun and have a little bit of fun. Maybe we can carry a bit of that into this next chapter, in between the lessons and the learning.


After all,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"A World Outside of MSIH" by rising second year student Chelsea Powell

Image
You may have heard that all medical students do is study.   It certainly seems that way at times.   There are, however, opportunities to fit in some other experiences. Here are a few of the things I have done this year:      I’ve always liked to run, and the endless desert trails in Beer Sheva provide great places to train.   In November my roommate and I decided it would be great fun to run the Tel Aviv Half Marathon , scheduled for February.   What seemed like such a good idea when we registered in November, however, became a source of stress as the February date approached, because we realized that the race fell on the day before a pharmacology quiz.   Fortunately, we were able to come up with a creative solution to our loss of study time.   While other runners wrote split times on their arms, our arms sported names of the drugs we needed to memorize.   I suspect we were the only runners in the race who quizzed each other about COX ...
Read more

"Loving the Alien" by MSIH first year blogger Flear Vaknin

Image
In recent years, the practice of referring to someone as an ‘alien’ has been contested by articles in the New York Times (“Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien ’ ”), Salon (“Stop Calling People Aliens”), and Immigration Impact, to name a few sources.  One of the definitions of the term, from the Oxford English Dictionary includes “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful,” so it is not surprising that many are calling for the abolishment of this term when referencing people. But then there is the pregnant alien of Bialik street in Beer Sheva: cartoonish, endearing, and a little odd, but more inviting than off-putting. Before seeing her for myself, I heard others refer to this pregnant alien and believed her to be a sculpture that was merely reminiscent of what was being described (something more abstract perhaps). When I happened upon her on a walk, I was thrilled to find out that, first, I am living in a city with a sense of humor, and that maybe this is the sort of place where being ...
Read more

"Think" by MSIH first year blogger Ayal Levi

Image
This little statue is called "The Thinking Man."  My (future) mother-in-law bought it in Uganda, then passed it over to me as a present, before I joined the rest of this inimitable group here in the Desert. Now, he sits on my desk, eyes half-shut, staring at me. He never stops staring, this “Thinking Man.”  He certainly is consistent; I’ll give him that. As we spend considerable hours together, trying to find our way through a waterfall of information, he has become a constant reminder to stop and think. To pause, shake my head, and work through the intricacies of acid-base metabolism, the autonomic nervous system drugs, and what feels like a black-hole of microbiology “Slow it down there sparky, and use your head.” Or something to that effect. A classmate of mine, a sort of philosopher-king, quoted me a short line from a letter Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas (complicated relationship). “Education is  the ability to play gracefully with ideas.”  What a grea...
Read more