Medical School is sooo right for me

I've been working on this midterm for an elective I'm taking, its mostly an undergraduate class, but it's been incredibly interesting and informative as the class brings in surgeons who have worked on international health projects across the world. I have to write a paper on an international health organization and analyze the org....

This little experience makes me really appreciate medical school. Every day in medical school, I am building a base of knowledge that allows me to understand the inner workings of the human body, a language that allows me to detect and diagnose disease and illness. Medical school has given me a different window into the human body, a language, dictionary, and encyclopedia for understanding. I love it. I stay up late reading about the adrenal cortex. I'm excited for the next NEJM publication, reading about the newest update on asthma management. My bed time reading is often "The Patient History", so I can better know the right questions to ask patients to rule out and rule in diagnoses, to discern a differential and a cause of their illness. Sure sometimes I feel overwhelmed, wiped out, because it's exhausting, I never know enough, I'm never encyclopedic enough, I still have so far to go. But I absolutely love it. I don't have any problems motivating myself to study, usually I have to motivate myself to take a complete break...

But there is never a break from medicine, when I go to the grocery store I see the women with a cane, hobbling down the isle, and I wonder to myself if she has osteoporosis, or maybe a hip replacement due to a recent fall. I see a young boy with a cough and runny nose and catch myself saying "take care of that viral infection", under my breath. I see a gaunt elderly man smoking as I walk home, and I wonder how many pack-years he's smoked, if he's ever tried to quit, whether or not he has emphysema, trying to picture his lungs, or what is left of the millions of alveoli exposed to daily toxin...

So yes, medical school is beyond my wildest dreams. I don't have to do response papers, or analyze an organization or falsely motivate myself to care about term papers or midterms like the years of undergrad. I get to study the human body, I get to investigate, problem solve, and learn to my hearts content.

One of my mentors once told me, "A doctor studies disease. A good doctor studies people. A great doctor studies life."  I'm still at the disease point, but I'm sure my love affair with medicine will continue in ways I can't even begin to imagine.

Bottom line, do I really have to write this 3 page, single spaced, 12pt font, 1 inch margins, response paper critiquing the WHO GIEESC? Because I'd much rather be learning about the physiology of the parathyroids right about now...