Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine - Caduceus Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

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But time moved on and things got worse. Our third semester was probably the most aggressive onslaught of facts we were forced to endure. With deepening debt, a full year of classroomflibrary life to go before the clinical work, and Boards Part I standing obstinately in between, there were plenty of sober expressions. And it was then, when the data load was heaviest, that we began to learn much more than lecture material. It was an exceptional classmate who One had cause to ask that first day at Stritoh, Where are all the nerds?', did not gain personal insight into emotional stress. There was a while there when it seemed that the only times when a fellow student was not suspending his own studying to pull our spirits up out of depression to reality over a cup of coffee, were the times when we were doing the same for someone else. Perhaps more significantly than in Microbiology or Pharma- cology, those Basic Science years prepared us for patient care by driving home the special importance of compassion--as they put us on both the giving and needing ends of it with our friends. Those first years which we spent so physically close together were also especially effective at nurturing broadmindedness on our part. With class members bringing to Loyola so widely various interests and approaches to life, we couldn't help but at least become aware of alternative attitudes we might never have experienced otherwise. Just when academic demands were such that we were most prone to surrounding ourselves with ourselves fbecoming oblivious to everything else in the world except getting through our own stack of notesl something happened to put a stop to it: Someone would get on the microphone and encourage us to help out with Hunger Week, Amnesty International, a financial aid Phone-a-thon, etc., or the muse would strike and we'd find another edition of Stritchfng the Truth in our mailboxes. It also amused us to learn 6 Opening how many different styles of studying could success- fully achieve the same result! Late-night philoso- phizing in the wet-labs, study breaks in the cafeteria, and the discussions which ensued around the issues raised in the Medical Ethics course all served to further intensify the degree to which we grew to know each other. As familiar as we became in those first two years, there were elements in our classmates which we could only become aware of through sharing the experiences of the floors. Clinical clerkships were unlike anything we had done together in Basic Science in that each rotation seemed to feature a discrete few classmates for four or six weeks for us to intensively get to know. Racing past each other in the morning trying to examine each of our patients before rounds, scouring up labs, chasing down charts, we grew to have some understanding of the comrad- erie soldiers once felt having lived in the trenches together. We cringed as the other student got crucified on attending rounds or at morning reportg we got crucified ourselves. Similarly, we felt proud of each other in the times when we would come July of 1982 marked yet one more in an un broken streak of back- to-back years spent going to school- the seven teen th grade, so to speak. . . through with the right answers, or when we'd pick up a finding on physical exam which everyone else had missed. True, these changing relationships were not always positive. There were times when other

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player. An expert at darts. A wife-mother-phle- botomist-med student. Marathon runners. Phar- macists. Pool sharks. Rock guitarists who helped pay tuition through regular engagements at clubs and Weddings. Undergraduate majors of all kinds. All of us sat together, day after day, and wrote down facts Camong them, one might recall, was A plexus is an intricately interwoven, complex network of lymphatics, nerves, or vessels. . . J. These facts bore very little inherent signifi- cance at first. Patients were only those people we saw getting in and out of taxis while we were down buying Hi-lighters in the gift shop. They didn't seem to matter much when our greatest responsi- bility was to memorize the location of the lateral geniculate body or count ATP's formed in the Pentose Phosphate Shunt. But the facts kept coming, and we kept writing them down. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. We kept monotony in check, however, with plenty of out-of-class socializing, and even a good bit of humor in school: Coop notes routinely interjected a good dose of personal philosophy or an appropriate comic. Costume-clad Histology profs on test-day near Halloween who left plates Would there be oppressive loads of data? Inhuman hours? Suspension of the joys of youth in favor of an indefinite period of self-Hagella tion ? of Reese 'S Pieces at rest stops during the practical exam helped relieve some of the pressure. And it was difficult to take Monday morning too seriously when it began with a fellow classmate using the lecturer's microphone to ask if anyone had found his pants which he'd lost during the party on Saturday. Opening 5

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It was an exceptional classmate who did not gain personal insight into emotional stress. students on the service could kiss up to the attendings beyond human belief, stealing answers to questions directed to someone else, showing the others up at every opportunity. There were times when, out of the corner of your eye, you'd notice how another student examined the patient in the bed adjacent to your own patientg or when you'd come on service picking up a patient who had been followed by another student. In times like these, the respect we held for one another either increased or diminished, but in either case, we were seeing- and showing-our true colors. However, when that train-wreck admission comes to you at 4:15 on Friday when another student is on call, and that student takes the case for you-a certain bond is formed which can never be completely broken. It was during the clerkships that those empty facts we'd spent so much time memorizing in the first two years took on their true significance. Cystic Fibrosis was no longer a two-and-a-half- page coop with a few sentences marked yellow somewhere in your pathology notebook. It was the murderer of the child you had grown so attached to in Pediatrics. And who among us did not shudder when the reality of lymphoma was driven home? Among the most important learning we ac- complished on the floors were the endless lessons we'd been taught about ourselves. We were forced to come in intimate touch with our own weaknesses and limitations, as we were reminded of them daily and forced to pay for them. We learned-after all we spewed about ourselves in those med school applications-how we really feel about sick people. We developed a strong sense of pride in looking back over our many venerable accomplishments. In doing so, we learned also that our limitations could be improved, some even eliminated. Failures at first, we developed by sink or swim method, skills in efficiency, time-management, decision-making, triage, and simple self-defense. Even the coldest and most distant class member did not get through this alone. We were there for each other when things were rough, during marital turmoil, deaths of family, roommate problems, unsuccessful pregnancy, depression. We shared the excitement of engagements, marriages, the birth of a child, Match Day. We experienced each other in almost any imaginable circumstance! We felt each other fail. We watched each other succeed. We saw each other in boxer shorts and three-piece suits, in scrubs post-call and in bars post-boards, there was St. Lucia, white-water rafting, AMSA trips to Colorado, endless dinners at each other's homes. In short, we learned a hell of a lot more in medical school than appears in National Medical Board Exams. And perhaps the most special things we grew to know were ourselves, and each other. We came together as a group of medical students for the first time in Anatomy class where we were introduced not only to such things as the brachial plexus, but to each other. After four years in which our experiences have woven us into an intimate network of complex relationships, we leave together as a group of physicians. At graduation, we become doctors for the first time. A plexus is an intricately interwoven, complex network. . . But it was during those four years together that we began to become doctors. lt is to the memory of this beginning, now at an end, that we dedicate this Plexus 1986. Opening 7