Med school tales part 1

Meanwhile, back at the ranchero................we join again our rank hero.....

Life got very busy recently with the rapid onset of many admissions, so it hasn't been very easy to communicate even on Tuesdays. But over our long weekend in Green Bay, that great city of the North, I got to thinking about how I got into medical school, by a very strange and circuitous route which very few people know. It might make a good story for some even though I am not much of a storyteller.

Flash back to the Vietnam era. With the urging of my girlfriend at Shimer, we both applied to various medical schools but she requested that, Shimer being such a small school, that I not compete with her for the "easy" -to- get -into med schools, i.e. the Illinois schools, her theory being that they would only take one of us. It may not have ocurred to me that I would not be accepted so I applied to out-of-state schools and even Canadian schools, thinking that surely I would get into one of them. I was aware that the competition was stiff because acceptance into medical school would defer being draft eligible for up to six years or more. But only for males of course. Perhaps I was not appreciative of how many people were applying, many of them for exactly the same reasons that I was applying. When I was turned down by all the schools, I was summoned to Chicago for my armed services physical and passed with flying colors, being declared 1-A. Therefore I did what many Americans were doing, and enrolled at the autonomous University of Guadalajara , a very easy school indeed to which to gain admission. The only problem was that I had to move to Mexico!

Not a good thing for a true romantic!! To say that this changed my life would be an understatement. It in fact changed all my relationships and it certainly did not feel good at the time. But as a test, it excelled. I would not have gained any fluency in Spanish without this experience, for one thing. This alone changed the character of my future medical practice to a profound degree. But there is much more than this. I will have to serialize this experience in order to do it justice. More later.