Struggling to find a balance

What an appropriate title to this post during this block: homeostasis. Our bodies use homeostasis to regulate everything: acid-base, CO2 vs O2, high blood pressure low blood volume, drug action vs excretion. Similarly, I have been trying to achieve that right balance between learning to become a doctor and having fun while I can. Lately, I worry that my balance has been a bit skewed. On the one hand, I look back at all the sacrifices I made in college to get to medical school: staying up late, deciding not to go out with friends on a weekend, choosing to not go abroad to Spain for a semester. Were these worth it? Hind site is always 20/20 and yet I find myself regretting all the fun I passed up in college. Now I can see that nothing that I learned in college was really that important, at least compared to the pace that I work at now.

So taking that perspective, I am struggling to decide how to manage my time appropriately. I want to have a good balance in life so that I can still do well in school but have fun. Lately, I've been having a lot of fun. Is this too much fun? Maybe it's just attributable to the end of the year and summer plans, but gosh I have been having a hard time buckling down and doing motivated work. Instead, I have been going grocery shopping for fun, planting herbs, making big dinners, sleeping in, going out. I worry that I may be losing grip on what's really important: I'm here to become a doctor. All of this fun won't be worth it if I don't get to become a doctor. I guess I'm worried that I am losing site of what a privilege it is to be in medicine. I want to make sure that I give it the attention that it deserves.

That said, I can't study all the time. And if you don't pick and choose your battles, you will lose them all, in medicine. Take for example our cardiology unit. It would have been absolutely worthless if I had stayed up late every night in a frantic attempt to memorize every anti-arrhythmic agent. First, I won't understand the clinical application so it will be meaningless to me. Second, I will be taking away from other things that I have to be learning that week, whether it is the Frank Starling mechanism for contractility or pharmacokinetics. It's important for me to not freak out and try to learn everything everyday. It's important for me to have breaks so that I really learn things, instead of just frantically skim.

I guess the only conclusion that I can take from this entry is that there still is a lot more for me to learn about homeostasis.