Once I called home after receiving a poor grade on an anatomy test for which the class average had been high. My mother intuited the effect this claustrophobic arrangement had on us. I think it had something to do with the fact that for the first two years of medical school our entire class sat in the same lecture hall or lab all day, five days a week. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to us then that we could all become excellent doctors. “Tell me,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. He was now two years ahead of me in medical school and I frequently looked to him for reassurance. We’d met at Yale as English majors and he, like me, had completed his pre-medical requirements after college. In the middle of the night, a week before a physiology midterm during my first year, I became extremely anxious and woke my husband. Except that each of us felt especially inadequate. Now even the most hardworking among us could barely keep up. We’d all been top students in our high schools and colleges, able to learn all the material in any course. We spent considerable time in those days comparing ourselves unfavorably to one another. In fact, I thought you had it all together, so much more mature than I was, so married.”
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Sipping a glass of white wine, her other hand tucked tightly across the chest of her cocktail dress as if protecting herself from the pain of an old wound even as we laughed about it, she said, “I was always crying in that ladies’ room and I never saw you there. She told me this could not have been true. At our thirtieth reunion, I confided to a classmate who had studied biochemistry as an undergraduate that I’d spent much of our first year in medical school crying in frustration in the ladies’ room next to the lecture hall.
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But even they admitted that, try as they might, it was impossible to remember everything.
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Most of my classmates had majored in the sciences and were, unlike me, right out of college and living in the dorm across the street from the hospital, not in apartments with spouses and wedding-present china. Bones and muscles, chemical bonds and hormones, antibodies and enzymes, symptoms and diseases could all be reduced to acronyms and, at least for a few hours before a test, mastered, even when the concepts themselves remained opaque. As a medical student I loved mnemonics, those acronyms, often as hard to remember as the facts themselves, that served as temporary containers for the information served up daily in such large portions they seemed in danger of spilling out of our brains.