I am a third year medical student from a British university, writing about the experiences I have on my first clinical year. I have no particular blog-writing credentials and I certainly don’t consider myself and my life as being of any interest whatsoever to anyone other than myself. However, my medical school are always banging on about the importance of “reflective writing” and so this seems like a golden opportunity to say what I really think…

Medical schools constantly go on at you about MTAS: “sign up for a society, it looks great on your MTAS application”, “run for student president, it’s worth 10 MTAS points”, “don’t steal body parts from the prosection displays – it makes MTAS cry” (okay, maybe not the last one) – but how many of those juicy MTAS points do you get for discovering a completely new medical condition?!

This is the question I am currently pondering after a number of my third year colleagues were struck down by bouts of what I have decided to call “Second Monday Syndrome”. I myself suffered a particularly acute attack, which laid me low for most of the morning. I will attempt to define it for you. It felt a little bit like when I was 6 years old and I didn’t want to go into school because I had been bullied the day before by “bigger boys” (actually girls in the year below, I seem to recall) because my mother had insisted on sending me in wearing a pair of those god-awful mittens-on-a-string – the ones attached by a length of wool running inside the sleeves of your Paddington Bear-style duffel coat, so that you don’t lose one of them. Or you lose both of them, which actually turned out to be the eventual solution to my problem.

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