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

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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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This is not the end. or, is it even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. . .U Winston Churchill by Joseph Hildner We all had expectations. Plenty of them. It would have been impossible to arrive at medical school without at least some amount of wonder- ing what we were in for, imagining what it would be like-what We would be like. Were the horror stories true? Would there be oppressive loads of data? Inhuman hours? Suspension of the joys of youth in favor of an indefinite period of self- flagellation? We took comfort in Loyola's com- paratively low attrition rate, in recollection of interview day: That tour guide didn't seem so miserable. The more we were able to convince ourselves that we might not become buried in books, however, the more likely it appeared that we would indeed become buried in debt. We heard that when these years of hard work were over, rather than finally taking control of our own lives, we would instead be told by a computer where to go next: a place where the hours were longer, the work even harder. We read about the projected glut of physicians, the increasing threat of lawsuit. But then, almost mercifully, it happened. We actually became medical students. And thus began the steady series of realizations that 4 Opening this was not like anything we had ever imagined. Many of us had taken a taste of the real world between college graduation and entering Loyola-Stritch. But for most of us, July of 1982 marked yet one more in an unbroken streak of back-to-back years spent going to school--the seventeenth grade, so to speak. But as with each previous change to a new school, many things seemed very different. Certainly, one of the most notable differences between college and medical school was the simple matter of classmates. After having spent four years among a pack of neurotic, competitive, slobbering pre-med students clam- mering over each other in hopes of finishing on the top of' the heap, one had cause to ask that first day at Stritch, Where are all the nerds? One might have expected from that heap of pre-meds, that the ones we would actually meet in medical school would be the pre-meddest of alll Instead, as we funnelled into that first Anatomy class, we discovered fascinating and delightful diversity. From Rhode Island to California, from Washington State to Florida, they came: A girl with her hair dyed pink in the seat ahead . A mountainous defensive tackle who played varsity football on National T.V. to the left. A born-again Christian on the right. A harp-

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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