Breathless

I’ve had a whirlwind 2 days of meeting a ton of new people, most of whose names completely escape me. I’ll have to get better at name retention. They also told us that by the end of the program (or maybe the year but I may be blocking that part out) we’ll know an additional 13,000 words than we do now. Yikes!! I don’t know how it will all fit in my head. Do let me know if it starts to swell, okay? There are a whopping 260+ people in my class, including the 40 dental students that take classes with us until 3rd year, so I figure that I’ve met about ¼ or so – maybe less. It’s a very diverse class and I definitely look around and think “wow, how did I end up here?” but I’m sure several of my classmates are also having the impostor syndrome. And I made a friend that’s my age who has already worked in health care and who lives 4 blocks away to boot – pretty convenient. I’m trying to make the most of being in the big city and I want to get to know non-island folk before I move to Vic where I will be with 23 other students from there on in. That will be great too though. I understand people go surfing on afternoons off! Some of the highlights so far: We had an amazing presentation by the doctors from the physician health program supplemented by a dentist and a doctor who told their personal stories about overcoming addiction problems during their training. Very moving & impactful. This morning, we had a harassment workshop that far exceeded everyone’s expectations. We had professional actors join our small groups (facilitated by a physician tutor) that used volunteers from our team to demonstrate a patient coming on to you & then threatening you and a very racist & sexist physician who was acting as our professor. It made for some interesting conversations and I definitely left the room with several more questions than I came in with. Today I went to Mark’s Work Wearhouse and bought scrubs for Anatomy lab on Friday. The top is pretty cute actually, green with little pink pigs all over it. Equally fun was getting the frequent scrub purchase stamp card from the cashier – buy 5 scrubs and get the 6th set free. I have no idea how often you buy these things but presumably not as often as a latte. I hope not! (she says as the money drains out of her line of credit) AND today I received my membership card in the mail from the Medical Association with the acronym “Dr.” in front of my name. Mind-boggling and exciting all at the same time. It certainly caught me off guard! We’ve had social events for the last 2 nights and I have to say that tonight I’m too knackered to go out for the big event tonight so I’m just having a quiet night at home. So many introductions in such a short period of time is pretty overwhelming. Tomorrow is our last day of official orientation and then real classes start on Friday (including a full afternoon dissection til 5pm like every Friday from now on). It looks like the only time we have available as “independent study time” is Monday afternoons. I heard an interview this morning on CBC with a little boy preparing to head into Grade 1 and it made me think about how so little changes as we get older and start “school” again for the first time. He is pretty anxious about math and figures that is going to be hard but knows that all he can do is his best. Good advice for us all.