I study medicine because it’s interesting and i thought it might be good for my character. Prior to this, I was a wandering Social Studies teacher. Before that? It’s debatable.
I know I was a student of some kind. I can’t really remember anything beyond that. WAIT…I recall a winding country road… that’s about it. Seems to me, I was stuck in some kind of bad meta-program trying to work myself out: what Erik Erikson calls role confusion.
Needless to say the one constant in my life has been learning. “An educated person is an educable person” and I’ve seen all kinds of education- good, bad and ugly. Today I had one of the most captivating lectures ever! No lie. Coming off of a crap Monday, It couldn’t have been better timed.
Yesterday was bad. 2 hours of Pharmacology, watching an old man dictate hypothetical prescriptions in Latin- if this activity is not on the forbidden conduct list from the Geneva Conventions, it should be. The morning wasn’t much better- A bumbling professor with a penchant for suspenders and staring at the floor is blathering all around the topic of the convergence of retinal cells and writing things on a whiteboard with a dead marker. You suspect he is a genius but also think over the differential diagnosis of autism. Sad. no connection- no concept of audience. I was poo-ped after Monday
But today? Today was something nice. This Grad student came along and unloaded his research on us. He broke down some serious Immune System functions and disorders like a Cell Samurai Master. In a few well-chosen sentences and diagrams, Monoclonal B-cells were personified, MHC receptors were characterized, really complex s*it you always gawked at, and thought you’d never understand, were there unfolding before your eyes and revealing their purpose.
The processes by which your physiological systems operate, integrate, legislate and replicate are awesome! Just knowing that all those complexities are running you, governing you, enabling you right now…. helping you breathe as you read, storing the memory somewhere and moving on…
It makes you appreciate the fact that it all works, so that you can do whatever you want with it.
