20 Ways to Know You’re a Medical Student

It’s October. I can’t believe how quickly time flies. But it’s also Monday, which means it’s time for another Medical Monday Bloghop! For those of you who found me on the bloghop, welcome! To those of you interested in listing your own blog or exploring other medical blogs, hop on over to From a Doctor’s Wife or Your Doctor’s Wife to join in the fun!

In the spirit of Medical Mondays and exploring medical blogs, I thought it fitting to compile a list (likely the first of many installations) of ways to know you’re a medical student. Without further ado, you know you’re a medical student when…

1. You celebrate the one day a week when you get to “sleep in” until 6:30 AM.

2. You’ve turned down invitations to go out on the weekend with your “real people with real job” friends, but party on Monday after your anatomy exam.

3. You struggle to smalltalk with your friends of friends but have no trouble asking a total stranger about their bowel habits.

4. You automatically tell your young adult male friend that his chronic lower back pain must be ankylosing spondylitis.

5. You find out you were right.

6. People have switched tables at a coffee shop after overhearing your discussion with a classmate about the concept of using Vitamin C and parsley to terminate a pregnancy.

7. You anxiously await your “Golden Weekend,” which you spend sleeping, exercising, and doing the dishes and laundry that have piled up in the last week.

8. You wake up with a crick in your neck and immediately convince yourself it’s the beginnings of nuchal rigidity because you clearly have meningitis.

9. You willingly volunteer to let a classmate attempt his first ever IV placement on you solely because you want to do it on him afterward.

Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! ME ME ME!

10. Roast beef will never look the same after anatomy. Neither will cheese.

11. You’ve spent the entirety of a very awkward manicure discussing your experiences dissecting a dead body with the Asian man who can’t seem to understand how you tolerated the experience.

12. You carry Tupperware in your bag, “just in case” you come across any free food.

13. You spend hours counseling your patients on the importance of a healthy diet, and then scurry off to purchase your chicken fingers and french fries in the few minutes between AM and PM clinic.

14. You pay a ridiculously high tuition to have the opportunity to wake up at all hours of the morning and spend 14 hour days on your feet getting yelled at and puked on.

15. Strangers on the bus have used your Netter’s flashcards to start conversations with you.

16. You have a pager. And it’s not even a text pager. Welcome to the 90’s.

17. You’ve nearly been bitten by an overdramatic “psychotic” classmate during a demonstration on using four point restraints.

18. You get ridiculously excited when you realize that you can eat all of the hospital vanilla ice cream cups you want.

19. You’re super pumped when you receive a 71% on your exam. P = MD!

Thanks for the tip, Amazon, I think I will.

20. You pull your first all-nighter. The result? You deliver 4 babies. Win.

Happy Monday, everyone!