Back when I was disillusioned with grad school, I thought about taking the MCATs and applying to med school, because hey, at least I can see the point of med school. And there’s a very defined job at the end of med school. And just maybe, that job is really interesting because you get to talk with people, be an expert at something, and all in all, have a good time.

Sometimes I still think about med school, thinking how much better it would be than where I am now. Last night, the boy asked me to help him prep for a case study for his Pathology class, just look up some information, answer some questions, and go over it with him because he had tons of other stuff to do.

At first, I thought cool! Yeah!  Totally!  I’d heard bits and pieces of the case studies he preps for before, and they all sound really interesting.  For example, a 50 year old male comes in with severe coughing, what’s wrong with him?  And then the case leads you through test results, x-rays, observations, and you figure out what the best courses of action are. That type of stuff.  So I thought, awesome, I’ll totally look up information for this case for him.  In the end, I realized that I didn’t really want to know that much about liver function tests or liver enzymes or hepatitis C. Maybe it’s because it was 2am when I was doing this, but I got bored rather quickly, and it wasn’t long before I dreaded having told him I’d help him.

So in the end, I would have probably hated med school too if I had gone ahead and switched paths. I suppose we always do want what we don’t/can’t have.