Are you a Doctor?

"At first I thought you might be a nurse. But your questions and comments in class lead me to believe that you're more than that".

I was leaving my clinical healthcare course when one of my classmates ran me down to talk to me after class. He's quite an attractive young man of Middle Eastern decent who had previously applied to medical school and been rejected numerous times. He said he also had trouble getting above a 25 on the MCAT. So he's made the (VERY SMART) decision to NOT earn a PhD in any Science field like Chemistry or Pharmacology, and decided on an MS in Health Informatics instead.

You know, it always perplexes me how I end up in these conversations with people I barely know, but they always end the same, with me encouraging whomever I'm talking to, to not give up on becoming a Doctor if that's truly their dream. I'll admit that my own personal story probably plays a big role in why I feel the need ot encourage others, but I still find it kinda interesting.

The Physician/Lecturer for class that day was an ER Doc and his lecture was amazing (of course, I think that about ALL of the lectures in this class, LOL!!). And during his presentation, there was a slide by an artist named Jose Perez, which I used as the image for this post. The picture speaks a thousand words about the status of health care today as it relates to ER care.

Along these same lines, I have my ER rotation tomorrow evening and in a major city, this promises to be VERY interesting from a medical point of view.

Finally, I ended up not canceling my meeting with the PI in my old department although we did meet by Skype instead of in person. She was very nice and we've set up another formal meeting for a day next week. I figured that at some point, I've got to get used to "sucking things up" and getting on to handling the business at hand. And this seemed like as good a time to start as any.