This blog gets a very respectful bit of traffic and I’ve decided that I would like to start publishing your real-life medical school and residency stories for all to see. Up to this point, I’ve been writing about my personal stories and rants, but it’s time to branch out.

If you’ve been overworked, abused in any way, or simply disrespected I want to hear about it. Something really pissing you off about your program or medical school? Send me an email and I’ll publish it to this site. You may include as little or as much information as you would like. Personal names will never be published. If you feel comfortable revealing your training institution, let me know by listing it in the email. Remember guys, if “Blah Blah School of Medicine” is repeatedly treating students like crap and is mentioned multiple times in this blog, the search engines will pick up on that. This blog ranks very high, particularly at MSN.com.

Help the cause by revealing your horror stories. Again, your identity will never be revealed. You can send your stories to medschoolhell (at) yahoo.com.

Use the contact page instead.

Graduation is quickly approaching and I listen as my classmates are “dreading” entering their intern year. I can’t really blame them – I’d be ready to gouge my eyeballs out with rusty spoons if I knew I had a year of rounding with some internal medicine or surgery team on the horizon. Perhaps they see something at the end of the tunnel that never materialized for me. I see a lifetime of call, long hours, and dirty patients – that’s about it.

For me, the decision to not enter a residency was the best decision I ever made. Not once do I ever look back and have envy for any of my classmates who are off to programs all over the country to be overworked and underpaid. I am happy that I will never:

write another SOAP note;
be “pimped” by another attending;
have to give another presentation on some crap topic I care nothing about;
be inside the hospital prior to 5am, and not be a patient;
step foot inside an OR unless I’m the patient;
wear a face mask;
have to wonder if I get lunch today;
have to wonder what time I’ll get to sleep tonight;
have to come home late at night after my wife is already asleep;
“scrub in”;
touch another patient;
listen to another patient bitch and complain;
do another H&P;
make copies for residents;
look up labs;
bring in journal articles;
have to attend “rounds”;
do another prostate exam;
do another pelvic exam;
have to look at the vagina of a dirty, overweight, and smelly female;
have to ask a post-op patient if they’ve “had a bowel movement” or “passed gas”;
have to count the number of patients scheduled for clinic and then hope 80% don’t show;
record urine output;
note quality of stools;
change wound dressings;
culture wounds;
drain abscesses and then collect drainage for culture;
dread getting out of the bed;
look forward to one to two days off per month;

be unhappy.