Next week is fall break…which means that my second year of med school is one-fourth of the way over.  School is going way too fast, and it is a little scary.  In only ten short months, I will start seeing real patients, and it freaks me out.

As stressful as school is at times, I really wish I could just slow the clock down a little bit.  Everybody always comments about how long med school is, but really I don’t know if it is long enough.  I only have nine more months of classes!  Then that’s it.  Apparently I am supposed to know it all before then.

Okay, so I know I don’t have to know it all, but still.  Three years from now people are going to start calling me “doctor,” and their lives are going to be in my hands.  I just don’t know how I could possibly know enough by then to warrant that kind of responsibility.

One of my professors told a story this week about how he once got a resident fired because they performed some neurological tests on an unconscious patient before checking to see if the neck was stable.  Now I know that’s not okay, and even though that patient’s neck was stable, he could have really injured them if it hadn’t been.  But still…that seems like a really easy mistake to make.  What if I make a mistake like that?  I could kill somebody.

It terrifies me that I could literally kill somebody someday.  There is just so much to learn in medicine, and I don’t see how I can ever learn enough to make sure I never make mistakes.  So even though I still have at least six years of training left, it just doesn’t seem like it will be enough.  I guess all I can do is work my hardest and hope that I will be ready by then.