Failure. In Western society, we teach children lots about why its important to win, how to win, and the benefits of winning. However, we don’t often teach anything about failure. I started medical school in 2021 at 49 years old. This was something that I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember and virtually everything that I’ve done, from my military career up until now, was geared to not only get into medical school but to successfully finish medical school. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, things have not gone how I’d hoped.
Midway through my first unit, I had a medical emergency and had to take a leave of absence for close to a year. I came back to school at 51 and essentially started over with unit 1. I successfully passed the unit and started unit 2 and promptly went on to contract COVID. I missed a significant amount of school in unit 2 and 3 and subsequently failed the anatomy exams in both units. Going into unit 4, I knew that I had to pass everything in the unit, to have the opportunity to remediate the two failed units (along with passing everything in unit 5) and advance to my second year of medical school. Unfortunately, I failed the anatomy exam in unit 4 and I was informed today, two weeks into unit 5, that I cannot continue with my class. I can either start over as a year one medical student again, at 51 years old, or I can walk away from this dream…
Right now, I’m in a bad, dark place and I don’t know what I am going to do. I can try to rationalize things by blaming things on my first medical leave of absence and on having COVID but at the end of the day, I failed, and I must live with that. The problem is that I don’t know how to do that. Medical schools damn sure don’t do anything to help build you up and the competitive nature of school doesn’t lend itself to being able to confide in your classmates (One of my classmates had to send a reminder this week, in. our class GroupMe, asking people to be sensitive to the fact that some did not pass the unit and that jokes shouldn’t be made at their expense…) In many ways, you feel very much alone when you have failed as a medical student. #medicalstudent #failure
