Blind Man's Marathon on amazon.com
What does it feel like to be a medical student during the third year--the first "true" year of medical school, when eager-eyed but utterly ignorant apprentice physicians are released from the library and unleashed on unsuspecting patients? How does one respond to the moniker "turd" when being quizzed in the middle of surgery? How does one manage to appear even remotely competent after dropping a ten-pound ovarian tumor on the operating room floor? Blind Man's Marathon seeks to answer these questions and much more, providing readers with the texture of this crucial period for a nascent physician.
He explains to readers the differences between thinking like a medical student and thinking like a doctor, the stresses of "pimping," the anxieties over grades, and the intestinal fortitude required to show up to work each day when one never has any idea what one is doing.
This is a snapshot of not-quite-doctors running amok trying to figure out if they learned anything at all during their first two years of school. It describes the comedy of nearly daily humiliation that students take for granted as they try to run the marathon of the third year with blinders on, unable to appreciate the twists and turns in the road until they have veered off the path and fallen flat on their faces.