Gerry started delivering the lecture transcripts and course materials the following week, just in time for the Summer Session at Hendricks to begin. Given the books I’d already absorbed over the past eight months, I breezed through the first-year course material in two days. The second-year courses were mostly new to me and I paced myself, making sure that I understood all the material by taking on-line tests for each course. That took me through the end of the week and I spent the weekend working on my clinical skills at Clara’s clinic. For those that agreed to sign a waiver, Clara was letting me sit in on her consults and procedures. One of the courses that ran right through the first two years of medical school was called Clinical and Community medicine and working with Clara helped me fulfill this requirement and to put real world application to my theoretical knowledge.

Years three and four of medical school focused on clinical rotations within different specialties, such as gynecology, family medicine, pediatrics and surgery. While there were still course lectures, the bulk of the time the students were apprenticing under doctors and residents at the Galt University Hospital. I learned a lot by shadowing the students at the hospital in R1 over the next week and got a feel for each of the specialties.

One of the unexpected holes in my education that I quickly found was that the books and lectures didn’t teach you how to operate all the different machines that the hospital used to diagnose and treat patients. I tried watching the nurses and the residents handle the machines, but they only used certain features and ignored others. If I wanted to know the true capabilities of the machines, I’d need to read the manuals. A flurry of images were soon on their way to Gerry with a request for the printing of those manuals.

Having taken the week to review the specialties, I chose surgery and family medicine as my first two rotations, with plans to devote half of every day to each. However, instead of following the students as they did their assigned tasks, I followed the residents and the doctors, watching them talk to patients, gather information, order tests and make their diagnoses. I especially enjoyed joining them on their morning rounds and comparing my diagnoses to those of the residents. Even though I had a ton of theoretical knowledge, it took weeks before I started getting some of my diagnoses to match theirs. Years of experience, seeing thousands of patients and learning firsthand the likelihood of certain diseases, trumped my few weeks of book learning. In a sense, I knew too much and had too many possible causes for any given set of symptoms. It took awhile before I understood which options were most likely and learned the slight differences that would signal one diagnosis over another. I suppose that’s why rotations and residency programs were so vital to becoming an effective doctor.

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Another reason that I had so many options to choose from in my diagnoses was that I wasn’t using my scanning abilities on the patients until we were moving on to the next patient. If I was ever in a situation that required me to work with other doctors, I had to be able to back up my diagnoses without the benefit of my scanning ability. Using my scanning ability led me to the correct diagnoses in seconds, as my field highlighted the abnormal areas of the body where the trouble was occurring. For instance, if a patient like Harry were to come in complaining of fatigue, I could scan him and see immediately that clogged arteries were the cause. Saying so, however, would get me challenged by every other doctor as I had no rational way of knowing that. Working without scanning taught me what tests I needed to run to convince other doctors of my diagnosis.

While my abilities gave me a nice advantage when it came to family medicine and rounds, it took me to a completely different level when it came to surgeries. Not only was I able to see everything up close from my R1 vantage point, but by wrapping the surgeons in a field, I was able to soak up their techniques by watching them perform a single surgery. I still needed to practice those techniques in order to master them, but just that put me light years ahead of the medical students that I followed.

I made it a point to go to as many surgeries as I could and each night I would go and practice the techniques that I’d learned on one of the bodies in the cadaver lab. At first, working on dead bodies in the middle of the night was very creepy and I got nauseous easily. Cutting into bodies wasn’t like slicing an orange and stitching it up. It took a few weeks for me to adjust my mindset and my gag reflex.

Eventually though, it all became second nature and I mastered the techniques that I’d watched. At least on a dead body, with no blood flow and no consequences for a mistake. Being able to see the inside of the body before cutting in or intubating was very helpful and I was always able to get to the exact depth I was aiming for. Still, at some point in the future, I’d need to start working with live patients. I didn’t know how I’d be able to do that, given that I was the only one that knew about my training. In the meantime, I would continue to learn new techniques and take on more specialties.